Donald Trump is increasingly turning to his son-in-law on complex foreign policy issues amid growing criticism that the man he actually charged with those responsibilities isn’t up to the task.
Jared Kushner, who is married to the president’s daughter Ivanka, served as a senior adviser during Trump’s first stint in the White House. Kushner, 44, holds no official role in the second MAGA administration, having publicly stated he’d prefer to focus instead on his considerable business interests.
Trump has, meanwhile, officially charged Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—a real estate mogul with no prior government work experience, who’s also a golfing buddy of the president—with spearheading negotiations on complex conflicts such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Current and former MAGA insiders told the Associated Press on Sunday that, despite lacking a formal role at present, Trump has leaned more on Kushner’s expertise, as Witkoff, 68, is perceived to struggle closing deals with foreign actors.
Those shortcomings are particularly pronounced with respect to Witkoff’s responsibility for overseeing negotiations to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Trump promised to resolve that conflict on “Day One” of his second presidency. It is now day 335, with no end to hostilities in sight.
“I don’t see that the Witkoff approach is going to work,” Ian Kelly—who served during the first Trump administration as ambassador to the Republic of Georgia, a former Soviet state that was similarly invaded by Russia in 2008 and which remains partially occupied by Kremlin forces—told the AP Sunday.
Kelly was also quick to pour cold water on the notion that Kushner’s experience would necessarily afford him an additional edge in those talks.
“They seem to have this idea that the magic key is money: investment and development,” Kelly said of both Kushner and Witkoff’s wider approach to diplomacy. “But [the Russians] don’t care about that, they are not real estate guys except in the sense that they want the land, period.”
Critics have repeatedly raised both Kushner’s and Witkoff’s sizable personal business interests as potential conflicts of interest in their ongoing work for the second Trump administration.
Most recently, Kushner came under fire this week for reportedly pitching plans to build a high-tech paradise worth an estimated $112.1 billion on what remains of the Gaza Strip. The pair’s PowerPoint plan follows two years of a bloody war, for which Kushner and Witkoff helped negotiate a ceasefire earlier this year.
Under the terms of the proposals, the project would receive approximately $60 billion in grants from the Trump White House.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
