Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, promised in an op-ed published on the news website he owns that The Donald isn’t “anti-Semitic” or a “racist” after he tweeted Saturday an image of Hillary Clinton over a Star of David.
A response from Kushner, who is Jewish and has been described as a man central to the campaign behind the scenes, had been largely missing from the campaign. It was particularly notable after Dana Schwartz, who is employed at the newspaper Kushner owns, the New York Observer, wrote in an open letter to her employer to respond to the situation.
“My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite,” Kushner wrote and said he disagreed with Schwartz. “It’s that simple, really. Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic and he’s not a racist.”
He went on to say that Trump was “careless in retweeting imagery that can be interpreted as offensive.”
Trump, facing heavy criticism over the tweet, later deleted it and replaced the Star of David with a circle. In Kushner’s clunky editorial, he described how his family worked to survive against Nazis, and argued that Trump was a “tolerant” person who has “embraced” his Judaism.
“If even the slightest infraction against what the speech police have deemed correct speech is instantly shouted down with taunts of “racist” then what is left to condemn the actual racists?” he wrote. “What do we call the people who won’t hire minorities or beat others up for their religion?”
Kushner said that it was an “insane standard” to hold Trump to.
“If my father in law’s fast-moving team was careless in choosing an image to retweet, well part of the reason it’s so shocking is that it’s the actual candidate communicating with the American public rather than the armies of handlers who poll-test ordinary candidates’ every move,” Kushner wrote.
Kushner reportedly helped Trump write his speech at the AIPAC conference. It was the first speech Trump read from a teleprompter on the trail, except for when he went off-script to declare that his daughter, Ivanka who is married to Kushner, would have a “beautiful, Jewish baby.”
Read Kushner’s full editorial.
