NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Andrea Bernstein, a host of the podcast Trump, Inc., about her new book American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money And Power.
Source > https://www.npr.org/2020/01/07/794320899
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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
A new book looks at the many untruths on which the Trump administration has been built. Author Andrea Bernstein spoke with our co-host Ailsa Chang.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: Andrea Bernstein looks at the generations of the Kushner and Trump families - how they built their real estate businesses in New Jersey and New York, the fabrications it took to stay on top and how all of that affects the U.S. presidency. . .
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Journalist Andrea Bernstein has worked with many other journalists to research and to acquire and to build a big archive of documents from many sources.
Her new book is the feature of this particular post.
Readers are invited and encourage to follow clues . .
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But they never faced any consequences. And each time they didn't face consequences, they continued to press the limits. They continued to cross lines. They continued to manipulate money and people in a way that would further their family business interests.
CHANG: I mean, ultimately, you are interested in the parallels and the intersections between these two family stories - the Trumps and the Kushners - because they're both in the executive branch now. And the case that you make throughout your book is that with the Trumps, they don't see much difference between the national interest and the family's interests. Is that why you're describing what we're seeing now as an oligarchy?
BERNSTEIN: That's right. There are two things you need for an oligarchy. You need to be able to control government officials, and you need to be able to control law enforcement. And in New York, private real estate developers have figured out how to do that particularly well, and the Trump family even more so than most families. . .
Donald Trump, when he became a real estate developer, worked particularly aggressive to develop his government ties. When he was running for president, he talked about this openly. He said, I contribute to people, and when I call them, they give to me. He understood a transactional relationship with government - that government was there to help along private businesses and to help his family's business interests. When you have wealthy people controlling government over democratic processes, you are approaching an oligarchy. And that is where we are now in America."
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BERNSTEIN: ". . . but I do think that I would not do what I do if I didn't have some fundamental sense of hope that telling the story would create a record that would, in some ways, be prophylactic against further bad consequences. . . And I thought a lot about that message . . . - you need to document what's happening; you need to tell the story.
And I became - to truly believe that telling the story is an act of hope.
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Follow along with this
BERNSTEIN: The Kushners arrived in America with $2 in their pocket. And Jared Kushner's grandfather was a carpenter, and he immediately went to work. And this was a time in America where the federal government was helping home builders in a variety of ways. So there were new loans, new mortgage structures for the federal government to help people buy homes.
There was the Federal Highway Act, which helped people get to all those new homes. And there were, of course, all these returning GIs that needed those homes, so it was a great time to be in real estate.
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