Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was asked point-blank why he should be trusted to negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine, given his dire track record.
During a Sunday press conference in Ukraine, Kushner, who is married to the president’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, was asked by NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel why people should have “any confidence” in his or Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff’s diplomatic abilities.
As Engel noted, the pair was involved in negotiations to rebuild Gaza following the war between Israel and Hamas, but Gaza remains a “wasteland.”
“Iran, you were involved in those negotiations. The war is still going on. You’ve been involved in several rounds of negotiations in this [Russia-Ukraine] conflict. It’s only getting more intense,” Engel added. “So you’re relaunching negotiations now. What’s the likelihood they will succeed when other negotiations you’ve been involved in have not?”
In a response lasting nearly five minutes, Kushner defended the work he and Witkoff have done as they attempt to secure multiple peace deals and diplomatic agreements at the same time, with little success.
“These are some of the hardest problem sets in the world, you know, and I think that you have to try and you have to bring to it,” Kushner said. “Obviously, Steve and I bring different approaches to these things, but we work very well together as partners. But we’re not bringing our approaches. We’re really representing President Trump, and we’re doing it the way that he wants to see these things done.”
Kushner added that Gaza has not worked for “a very, very long time” and described it as “basically built by NGOs and terrorists, and it’s been a dystopian place for a long time.”
“These things take time,” Kushner said. “These are some of the hardest conflicts. And so, the tone of your question was a little bit like, ‘why haven’t you done every single impossible thing possible?’ We are very honored to be able to have the opportunity to work on these under President Trump’s leadership, and we’re very committed to giving it everything we can.”
Kushner has no official government role in Trump’s second administration, but is one of the president’s most trusted foreign advisers.
He has been working alongside Witkoff, a former real estate mogul with no prior experience in diplomacy, to lead the U.S. delegation in negotiations with Iran to end the war, as well as trying to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Ukraine for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion for talks, after meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday.
During the Sunday press conference alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Kushner insisted that he and Witkoff are “doing everything we can” to succeed in their roles under Trump.
“We have been doing everything we can to try and find a way out of a mess that was created before President Trump’s time, which has had a huge toll, and so we’re going to do our best to try and make progress,” Kushner said.
