Jared Kushner: belief

Transcript context

…I’d love to go back and talk to you about the Middle East, because there’s so many interesting components to this. Let’s talk about Saudi Arabia, and first let me ask you about MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince. So you’ve gotten to know him pretty well, you’ve become friends with him. What’s he like as a human being? Just on a basic human level, what’s he like? So for the listeners, Mohammed bin Salman is now the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. He has risen to that position over the last couple of years and he’s been a tremendous reformer for the country. He’s gone in and he’s really modernized the economy. He’s put a lot more investment into the country. He’s marginalized the religious police and he’s really done a good job to bring modernization, a lot of reform. So he is been a great reformer. What he’s like as a person is he’s very high energy. He’s got tremendous candor power, very, very smart, incredibly well-read. When he was younger, his father would give him a book a week and make him report on it on the weekend. He was trained as a leader and as a politician, really, by his father. He’s not western educated, so he grew up in the Saudi culture and he’s a real Saudi nationalist. He loves their history, loves their heritage, has a steep understanding of the tribal nature of the region. His father was actually known to be a tremendous politician, so when he was governor of Riyadh, people who I speak to today about him say that if they had a full election, he would’ve won in a landslide. They say every time somebody went to the hospital, he was the first person to call. Anytime there was a funeral, he was the first person to show up. He’s a very, very beloved leader. Mohammed bin Salman, he was a businessman before he got into Crown Prince. So he thinks really with a business mindset about how he runs the country, and he’s brought I think a different mindset and energy to the Middle East. One thing I’ll say that maybe that comes to mind here is that I remember early on talking with him about all the different initiatives he was taking on. He’s building a big city called Neo in the desert in a place where there really was nothing on the Red Sea, and a lot of people were criticizing the ambition of the plan. And I was sitting with him one night and I said, ‘Why are you taking on all these things? You’ve got a lot of different programs, but what most politicians do is they set lower expectations and then they exceed the expectations.” And he looked at me without hesitation. He says, “Jared, the way I look at it is that in five years from now, if I set five goals and I achieve five goals, I’ll achieve five things. If I set a hundred goals and I fail at 50 of them, then five years I’ll accomplish 50 things.” And so it’s a very different mindset as a leader. The way I got to work with him was Saudi Arabia was a big topic in the campaign. President Trump was basically saying during the campaign that they’ve got to pay for their fair share, they haven’t been a great partner in the region. He’s very critical of Saudi. And then during the transition, I was asked by several friends to meet with a representative of Saudi Arabia. I said, “I don’t want to meet with them.” tner in the region. He’s very critical of Saudi. And then during the transition, I was asked by several friends to meet with a representative of Saudi Arabia. I said, “I don’t want to meet with them.” But I came over and I met and they said, “Well, we want to make changes.” And I said, “Well, you have to make changes to how you treat women.” Then women couldn’t drive, they had guardianship laws. So you got to start working with Israel, you have to be paying more of your fair share and you have to be stopping the Wahhabism that’s being spread. Again, I had no knowledge these were just kind of the traditional talking points about Saudi Arabia. So the guy I was with basically said, this guy Fahad Toonsi, who’s a very respected minister there, he says, “Jared,” he says, “You don’t know much about Saudi Arabia, do you?” I said, “No, no, no, I don’t. It’s just really what I’ve kind of been told or what I read.” And he says, “Okay, let me do this. We want to be great allies with America. We’ve traditionally been great allies with America. Can I come back to you with a proposal on ways that we can make progress on all of the different areas where we have joint interests?” Keep in mind at that point in time, the Middle East was a mess, and probably the single biggest issue we had after ISIS was the ideological battle. If you remember in 2016, there was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, you had the San Bernardino shooting and people were being radicalized online with the extremism, and then there was a lot of crimes that were happening because of that. It was a big topic in the campaign, and so that when I was thinking about talking different generals and what capabilities the US had to really combat the extremism and the ideological battle, what we realized was that Saudi Arabia as the custodian of the two holiest sites in Islam, the Mecca Medina, that that would be the best partner to work with if they were willing to. But for years, they really hadn’t been willing to kind of lean into this fight. So I said, “Sure, give a proposal.” So they come back, give a proposal, and they said, “Look, if you make President Trump’s first trip to Saudi Arabia, we will do all these different things. We’ll increase our military spending and cooperation, we’ll counter all the terror financing.” Unbelievable layer. So I took the proposal, I went to the National, then it was General Flynn. I said, “If Saudi Arabia did these things, would this be considered a big…” “Unbelievable, but it’ll never happen.” I said, “Well, they’re telling me they want to do these things. Again, having no foreign policy experience, I’m just saying I’ve got somebody telling me they want to do it and that’s kind of where we started.” Again, to office I don’t think much more about it.…

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