Even in politics, where loyalty runs deep, family bonds can be tested unexpectedly. When Donald Trump asked his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, to sign a statement declaring that he was not antisemitic, they refused.
According to Michael Wolff’s new book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, Trump struggled to show strong support for Israel after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. His campaign worried that media outlets like The Washington Post were about to highlight all the times Trump had said things that could sound antisemitic.
To handle this, Trump turned to Kushner, hoping he and Ivanka would vouch for him. But things didn’t go as planned.
“As Trump had continued to waffle, the Washington Post, the campaign understood, was working on a piece that would recycle all the language Trump had variously used over the years, which, on its face, might certainly sound antisemitic,” Wolff writes.
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Kushner kept avoiding making a public statement. The campaign then tried to get him to say at least that Trump was not antisemitic. But Kushner finally said, “No, Ivanka and I aren’t going to do that. We’re not going to go and put our names on something and get in the middle of things. That’s just not what we’re going to do this time.”
Ivanka and Jared were important in Trump’s first term as senior advisers. However, they stepped back after Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election led to the January 6 attack on Congress. They chose not to work in his second administration after he defeated Kamala Harris in 2024. However, Kushner has still been connected to Trump’s controversial ideas, including plans to redevelop Gaza after Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks.
This new story is part of Wolff’s fourth book about Trump. His earlier books, Fire and Fury, Siege, and Landslide, all painted a chaotic picture of Trump’s world. As expected, Trump’s team is not happy about his latest work.
Last November, Trump’s campaign officials, including chief of staff Susie Wiles, released a statement saying Wolff was a “disgraced author” who writes fiction. They claimed, “He is a known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations, and conclusions that never happened.”
On Friday, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, attacked Wolff even harder, calling him a “lying sack of shit” with a “peanut-sized brain.”
Wolff’s book also talks about Trump’s interactions with billionaire Elon Musk. Musk became a major campaign supporter, but Trump’s team didn’t know how to handle his involvement. Wolff writes that aides were confused by Musk’s behavior and saw him as an unpredictable force.
At a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in October, Musk showed up with very little security. While waiting, he got hungry, and someone gave him a bag of pretzel sticks. When someone suggested he meet Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, Musk declined, saying, “I’ve really no interest in speaking to a vice-president.”
Later, Musk got on stage unexpectedly and, according to Wolff, started “prancing and jumping” like Mick Jagger. His T-shirt rode up, exposing his stomach.
Trump, watching from backstage, reportedly asked, “What the fuck is wrong with this guy? And why doesn’t his shirt fit?”
The book also reveals that Trump had serious second thoughts about choosing JD Vance as his running mate. One of Trump’s biggest concerns was Vance’s name changes.
“Yeah. What the fuck is with that name-change stuff?” Trump reportedly said. “How many name changes has he had? That’s shifty, that’s very shifty. That’s my staff fucking up. They know what I think about people changing their names. I think it’s shifty. And they didn’t tell me.”
Vance was originally named James Donald Bowman. After his parents separated, he took his stepfather’s name and became James David Hamel. Later, he chose to go by Vance, the last name of his grandmother, whom he wrote about in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
