Free Republic

Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian. The most peculiar part was the show-within-a-show:...

The White House announced on Jan. 16 the names of members appointed to the Gaza Board of Peace, which President Donald Trump created as part of phase two of a U.S.-backed plan to end the war in Gaza. Among the “founding executive board” members are U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, presidential special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The board also includes private equity executive Marc Rowan, World Bank President Ajay Banga, and U.S. national security adviser Robert Gabriel, according to a White House statement. The board, to be chaired by...

US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have presented a $112 billion reconstruction plan to Gulf officials to build a “high-tech metropolis” atop the remains of Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The 32-page PowerPoint presentation labeled "sensitive" and titled "Project Sunrise" was developed over 45 days and reportedly presented to officials from Qatar, UAE, Egypt, and Turkiye. The plan envisions turning the Gaza Strip into a "high-tech metropolis" over the next two decades with four phases of reconstruction beginning in southern Gaza. It also calls for turning Rafah into Gaza's new "administrative center," housing over 500,000...

Moved almost to tears, three of US President Donald Trump’s closest confidants stood together…on the stage at Hostages Square – a central Tel Aviv plaza that, since the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre, has become the beating heart of weekly demonstrations calling for the release of Israelis still held captive in Gaza and, increasingly, for an end to the war. It was Witkoff’s third visit to Hostages Square in less than a year, and that compares with not a single visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or most of his ministers. The hostages’ families have described many times their connection...

President Donald Trump has bestowed upon the nation of Qatar a remarkable security guarantee that could include coming to its defense militarily. In an executive order dated earlier this week, Trump declared that the United States will regard any attack on Qatar’s territory, sovereignty or critical infrastructure “as a threat to the peace and security of the United States” itself. And perhaps most crucially, the order suggests the US might come to Qatar’s defense militarily.

French President Emmanuel Macron said it was out of line for Charles Kushner, the U.S. ambassador to France and the father of President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, to publicly accuse him of taking insufficient action to combat antisemitism, and for him to link France's foreign policy positions to domestic incidents of violence against Jews in France. In a letter he published in the Wall Street Journal to Macron in August, Kushner wrote that he had "deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France and the lack of sufficient action by your government to confront it." "Public statements haranguing...

During a recent interview that aired on CSPAN, conservative commentator Ann Coulter applauded the early days of Donald Trump’s second presidency and contrasted it with his first term. According to the long-time conservative icon, Trump’s loss in 2020 may have been the inspiration for the improvements made since his first presidency. “I can’t believe how great Trump is,” Coulter declared. “If you’ve followed my work assiduously, you know I campaigned with Trump when he was running in 2016. He did ask for a copy of my book, ‘Adios America.’ A lot of the immigration stuff came from that. Huge fan....

Things got crazy for Ivanka Trump, the eldest daughter of President Donald Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, when the two tried taking a night out on the town in South Beach, Florida, on Sunday, May 4. What happened was a strange man rushed at the couple, leaving the Secret Service to intervene and clobber the potential attacker. The incident was caught on tape by RealClearPolitics’s Susan Crabtree. A correspondent for the outlet, she caught a video of the first daughter and her husband walking to their waiting car as a crowd formed around them, which is what precipitated the...

A Secret Service Agent violently pushed a man who appeared to get a little too close to Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner on Saturday night. The First Daughter and her husband were out in Miami on Saturday night attending and event at Carbone Beach. Bystanders surrounded the pair as they were leaving the event in South Beach. A suspicious man carrying a manila folder got too close to Ivanka and Jared so a bodyguard swiftly and forcefully pushed him away. The New York Post reported:

Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner encouraged the United States on Saturday evening to “tell Israel to finish the job,” in the aftermath of the news that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike. In a post on X, Kushner described September 27 as being “the most important day in the Middle East” since the Abraham Accords, an agreement bringing peace and diplomacy between two Arab states and Israel, under the Trump administration. Kushner added people calling for a ceasefire are “wrong,” noting that Israel “cannot afford now to not finish the...

"Affinity’s Unusually High Fees Charged to Foreign Clients Amount to Tens of Millions in Profits Each Year; Wyden Seeks Records on Employees, Compensation, Communications with Foreign Government Entities; Letter also Raises Concerns with Investment Fund Disclosure Loophole" Washington, D.C. – Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today launched a new investigation of top Trump official Jared Kushner’s investment firm Affinity Partners, which reported that 99 percent of the billions of dollars it manages comes from foreign sources, primarily the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. In a new letter, Senator Wyden sought records...

Daughter of former US president Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner, who served as an advisor to Trump, landed early Thursday morning in Israel. Escorted by heavy security, they were met Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana. The couple are in Israel to express support and sympathy for the ongoing Israel-Hamas War and are expected to visit wounded IDF soldiers and the families of those kidnapped by Hamas.

I was expecting a lively exchange when Mike Gallagher invited me to debate the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Risen on his “No Interruptions” podcast last week. Instead, I was gobsmacked as the former New York Times reporter abruptly hung up the phone after some 15 minutes. [.....] Risen’s breaking point came when I questioned his reporting on Hunter's foreign business dealings. Before we get to that, Risen, who now reports for The Intercept, does deserve some backhanded praise: In the few minutes he spoke on Mike Gallagher’s podcast, Risen delivered a master class in concision, echoing most every major talking...

This week, the world will celebrate the three-year anniversary of President Donald J. Trump’s Abraham Accords. On September 15, 2020, President Trump ushered in a new era of peace and collaboration in the Middle East between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on the White House South Lawn.While intelligence community leaders said President Trump’s bold decision to keep his campaign promise and move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel, would cause war in the Middle East, just the opposite happened.Not shockingly, many of these individuals said the same when the framework...

Investor and economic analyst Steven Rattner recently said he found the deal to be highly unusual..."Jared Kushner spent much of his White House tenure cozying up to MBS & Saudi Arabia...Six months after leaving Washington, his private equity firm landed $2 billion in investments from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund." [Rattner worked for Obama and manages former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's private wealth]

With both the Biden Family Business scandal and Donald Trump indictments continuing to dominate the news cycles, daily, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said on Thursday that former President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, “crossed the line of ethics” by accepting a $2 billion investment in his investment firm from the Saudi Arabian government.During an interview on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” Comer acknowledged a recent argument made by 2024 GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie, who claimed that the Trump family, along with Kushner, “has been involved in grifting for quite some time.” Christie said:Look,...

Donald Trump says more than $4 million has been donated to his presidential campaign in the 24 hours since he was indicted. A quarter of the money came from new donors and contributions could be traced to all 50 states, according to a fundraising email sent out by Trump on Friday night. The donations comes as his son-in-law Jared Kushner insisted the indictment would 'only make him stronger.'

Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former top adviser Jared Kushner has shown no interest in helping the former president navigate a series of storms that threaten to sink his 2024 campaign, according to a new report Friday. Per New York magazine, since the 76-year-old Trump’s Nov. 22 dinner with anti-semitic rapper Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago became public, Kushner has ignored requests for “help … for public support, even looking for a response” from his father-in-law’s nascent election operation. Meanwhile, the report added, the 41-year-old Kushner has taken to handing out Trump’s phone number for supplicants to...

Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that if the House Republicans subpoena President Joe Biden’s son Hunter the Senate Democrats should investigate former President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Discussing Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), Heitkamp said, “I think – Joe’s got to decide whether he’s going to run again, right? So that’s the interesting thing there. He’s not going to become a Republican. He’s going to continue to do what he’s always done, which is speak his mind and, you know, drive deals, like the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really what...

Looks like Javanka have gotten a case of World Cup fever. Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner rubbed shoulders with Qatari Prime Minister Khalid bin Khalifa bin Abdulaziz Al Thani on Thursday as they soaked up the international soccer madness. The former first daughter joined her husband and their three children — Arabella, 11, Joseph, 9, and Theodore, 6 — at the Lusail Stadium to watch Brazil take down Serbia in the early stages of the World Cup tournament. Ivanka and Jared, who both served as senior advisors to former President Trump, were spotted mingling with politicians and Middle...