American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power
“Anyone concerned about American democracy should read Andrea Bernstein’s devastating exposé of the Trump and Kushner families.” - Jane Mayer, The New Yorker staff writer and New York Times best-selling author of Dark Money
“Riveting! Andrea Bernstein deftly tracks the history of the Trump and Kushner families from their roots through their immigration to the United States and their progression up through the socioeconomic ranks. American Oligarchs is comprehensive, brilliantly written, filled with detail and suspense—it reads like a financial thriller.” - A. M. Homes, prize-winning author of Days of Awe and This Book Will Save Your Life
“By building American Oligarchs around the Kushner and Trump family narratives, Bernstein offers readers a fresh perspective on how that attitude evolved—and its implications for American democracy. The Trumps and the Kushners may have taken advantage of the system, Bernstein argues, but it was American society and its political leaders who failed to defend it.” - David Kocieniewski for Bloomberg
In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein tells the story of the Trump and Kushner families like never before. Building on her landmark reporting for the acclaimed podcast Trump, Inc. and The New Yorker, Bernstein brings to light new information about the families’ arrival as immigrants to America, their paths to success, and the business and personal lives of the president and his closest family members. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and more than one hundred thousand pages of documents, American Oligarchs details how the Trump and Kushner dynasties encouraged and profited from a system of corruption, dark money, and influence trading, and reveals the historical turning points and decisions?on taxation, regulation, white-collar crime, and campaign finance laws?that have brought us to where we are today. A new afterword examines how the two families’ transactional politics left America particularly vulnerable to the crises of 2020.