(cymbal hissing)
(air whooshing)
- Jared Kushner,
senior advisor to the President,
wonderful to be with you again.
- Thank you, and great to be with you.
- 26 years since the last
Arab-Israel agreement,
President Trump fashions
himself as a deal-maker.
Why, in your eyes,
should we really be
paying attention to this?
- Well, like you just said,
this is the first peace agreement
that's been made in the Middle
East in the last 26 years,
and only the third peace agreement
in the last seven years with Israel.
President Trump came into office,
promising to bring a different
point of view to the region,
and the Middle East was a
very big topic for discussion
in the last campaign.
You had the Iran deal,
which was a disaster;
you had ISIS, which was roaming,
they had a caliphate the size of Ohio;
and you had a lot of
our traditional allies
feeling very alienated.
And so President Trump came in,
and again, you can't turn a
battleship around overnight,
but over three and half years,
he's done a lot of unconventional things.
We've been criticized
very much along the way,
but this big result shows
that the President's strategy
has been on the right path
that's now produced some results,
and I believe President
Trump's also set the stage
for many more good things
to come in the Middle East
and throughout the world.
- Saudi's in play, in
terms of normalization?
- I think everyone's in play.
I think that people are tired
of being stuck in the past,
and I think the younger generation
is less stuck in the old conflict
the way that the older generation is.
But people want,
they see Israel now as
a military superpower,
as an economic superpower,
as a technology superpower,
and they see huge opportunity
by working together.
And I think that a lot of
the other Gulf countries now
are seeing the deals that
are starting to be announced
out of Israel, between
Israeli and Emirati firms,
and I think that they're saying, "Wait,
we wanna be in on the action."
And so I do think
you're gonna have a lot of
people following fairly quickly,
because again, at our core,
we all just wanna live better lives,
we want our countries to do great,
we wanna succeed,
and this is just a really
positive development
for the region and for the world.
(white noise hisses)
- I want this deal to be a
great deal for the Palestinians.
It has to be.
After 70 years of little progress,
this could be the last
opportunity they will ever have.
- The top priority for
so many administrations
in the Middle East, including
yourself at the beginning,
was Israel, Palestine.
I wonder if you'd say,
is it fair to say
that the United States
is not an honest broker
between the Israelis and the Palestinians,
but is an honest broker between Israel
and, say, the Gulf allies?
- I think that you can
only be an honest broker
when you're telling the truth
and you're saying how you really feel.
I think the United States
is an effective broker,
and being effective, they're honest.
We've been honest with
everyone in the region
about how we feel,
and we need to form new alliances
and we need to get past past grievances,
we need to try things differently.
And the President's approach
was not one where he went out
and started lecturing people.
He went out and tried to figure out
what are our common interests,
what are our common challenges,
how do we bring people together,
and this is a great manifestation.
I will say that after the
President stopped in Saudi Arabia,
he went from there to Israel,
and then he went from Israel to Rome
where he met with the Pope,
and we call this agreement
the Abraham Accords,
which shows that the President's goal
has been to bring the three
Abrahamic faiths together
to try to figure out
how we can focus on shared opportunity.
We all come from the same place,
we're all human beings,
and we have to let some
of the past divisions
go by the wayside.
- If you're sitting as a
Palestinian in today's environment,
pretty much everything the last few years
has made it clear that
you have less optionality
than you used to, you're in
a more challenging position
vis-a-vis the Israelis,
vis-a-vis the Gulf Arabs,
vis-a-vis the Americans.
Do you think that this is moving them
more to a deal,
or do think that it's
just not that relevant,
it doesn't matter
what the Palestinians
are up to going forward?
- Well, what I'll tell you,
it's not moving them further
away from a deal, right?
So again, they have a perfect track record
of not making a deal in 25 years,
so what they don't have today
is a veto over what happens
in the rest of the region.
What they do have today
is a telephone, right?
So anytime they wanna
engage, they can engage.
What they also have today,
which they didn't have before,
is a very, very detailed outline
for what Israel's willing to do.
We had Israel, they agreed
to a two-state solution,
so now if the Palestinians
would like to have a state,
they have a framework through
which we can get them one.
If they'd like to deal
with the territorial issues
for the first time in
the negotiations ever,
there's been a map that's been put out
that Israel's agreed to publicly.
Again, when we met with
President Abbas the first time,
he said he wanted to make peace,
and he said, "If you can get
Israel to agree to a map,
the rest will be easy on.
That's the most critical item."
Well, we've done that.
And President Abbas and the Palestinians,
they rejected our plan
before they even saw what was in it.
They started rejecting
it before we put it out,
I think, thinking that it was
gonna be worse than it is.
We also put together, again,
our whole plan was about 180
pages filled with detail,
and again, not a single
detail's been criticized.
We put out a $50 billion plan
to revitalize their economy
and to help them live better lives,
which would double the GDP of their area.
It would create a million new jobs.
I mean, it's not that big of economy,
it's five million people,
so it's not that hard to do,
but you need to have private capital
that's going to go in there,
and private capital's not willing to go in
if you don't have stable leadership,
you don't have rule of law,
you don't have security.
So we've put a lot on the table for them,
and again, President Trump
is not going to chase them,
but he really would like to make a deal.
He promised the Palestinian people
he would get them a fair offer.
He's gotten them a great
offer out of the gate,
and again, when they're
ready to have a deal,
a deal is more real today
than I believe it's ever been.
- No question, people have criticized it
in the sense that the percentage of land
that they'd be offered is
less than they would've been
in the Clinton era accords, for example.
But as you mention,
they no longer have a veto
over what's happening in the region,
like with the UAE.
I mean, the other piece of this is Iran.
The Trump administration, of course,
left the Obama era Iran deal,
which you've already
referred to as disastrous
on a couple of occasions.
The fact that the UAE and the Israelis
prioritize their concern about Iran
much more than they do
the Palestinian issue,
certainly puts more pressure
on the Iranians going forward.
If Trump were to win,
and we know that if Biden wins,
his interest would be to try to remake
something that looks
like the old Iranian deal
that he was a part of.
If Trump wins reelection,
what do you think the next steps are?
Do we see anything different
as a consequence of another four years
between the Trump administration
and the Iranian government?
- So what I would say
is that President Trump has worked so hard
over the last three and a half years
to change the balance of power,
to rebuild alliances that were broken,
to, I would say, realign the region.
And so that's taken a lot of work,
and the tectonic plates that
we've been able to shift,
and you see that in this peace deal,
lead me to believe that
this isn't the end.
This is actually the beginning
of a lot of new opportunity.
The Iranian deal, what
President Trump will do,
is he'll wait to make the right deal.
But what he's been able to do,
Iran used to export 2.6
million barrels of oil
when President Trump
got into office a day.
That's now down to almost zero.
So their foreign reserves are crumbling,
their economy is crumbling.
President Trump has nothing
against the Iranian people.
He wants them to thrive,
it's a fabulous culture,
a fabulous society,
but their leadership right now
is taking the money away from the people
and it's using what resources they had
in order to really fund
their proxy groups,
which are really destabilizing the region
all over the Middle East.
And so I think what we've done
is we've significantly weakened them,
and that's led to less
instability in Yemen,
less instability in Syria.
Even now you see in Lebanon
how much weakened Hezbollah is,
and that's because we've
stopped a lot of the funding
that Iran's had.
So giving Iran back the
ability to have resources
without a meaningful
change in their behavior,
I think would be a very destructive thing,
and all of the great
progress that we've made
over three and a half years
would be gone like that in a second.
- President Trump has said that China is,
his relationship with President Xi
is not as good as it was
a year ago, two years ago.
In fact, on almost every
area of US-China policy,
it seems to be heading towards
more confrontation right now.
(white noise hisses)
- My attitude toward China is not friendly
with what they did with
respect to the pandemic,
the plague that came in from China.
It just is a different feeling.
(white noise hisses)
- Would you say that we are
turning towards containment
as a policy towards a China
that is not behaving
the way we want them to?
- I'm not sure that you can
use a traditional framing
to describe where we're headed with China.
I think that we're right
now in unchartered waters.
Before the virus,
I think that we'd agree to a
relationship of coexistence,
where we were fighting to
protect American interests.
I think we made a great trade deal
that, again, it took
us many years to fight.
And keep in mind, even when the President
made the trade deal,
we still have $250 billion
of tariffs on China at 25%,
and then another 100 and,
I think, 17 billion at 10%,
so we still have not taken
off a lot of our tariffs,
we just haven't upped it,
and that really was showing China
that for the first time,
they didn't have a sucker
in the White House.
They were being dealt with appropriately,
we were dealing with their aggression.
And they said that they really
wanted to make some changes,
and the agreement laid out a
pathway for them to do that.
And so we were on that course,
and the virus that came over from China
obviously is a major setback.
We still are not satisfied to understand
exactly where it came
from, how it came about.
The World Health Organization,
the Chinese authorities,
they have not provided the
access that we've asked for.
I do think there's a lot
of decisions that were made
that we still have a
lotta questions about,
and hopefully those questions
will start to get answered soon,
but the relationship
between America and China
will not be the same
until we get to some kind
of satisfactory answer
on what happened with this virus,
and then we need to figure
out what happens next.
- Would you say that we
now have the pandemic
under control in our country?
- Look, it's a global pandemic, right?
And I think you're seeing
all over the world,
having it under control can
mean a lot of different things
to a lot of different countries.
Where we are now is we know a lot more
than we did five months ago,
and we know who's most at risk,
we know who has much less risk.
We continue to make
decisions based on the data.
Five months ago, there was a lot of fear
about the fatality rates that came,
and we realized that certain populations
have different impact than others,
and we also had a lot of
fear on the supply side.
So at that time, a lot of
things were being invented.
We had governors saying they
needed 40,000 ventilators.
We had states saying
they didn't have enough
personal protective equipment
for the hospitals, masks,
ventilators, tests,
all these things.
We've dramatically surged supplies,
we've been working with all the governors.
Some governors have done
a better job than others,
and obviously when this is done,
people will look back on
the case fatality rates,
they'll look on the economy,
they'll look at all
the different criteria,
that they'll judge it, and
they'll say who did better,
but at this point in time,
we feel like we do have
all the resources we need,
both in terms of what we've
produced domestically,
what we've brought back from
overseas to manufacture.
And then, in addition to that,
we now have a lot of therapeutics.
We have Remdesivir,
we're working on something
with convalescent plasma,
monoclonal antibodies.
So what we're finding is that
if you get the disease today,
it's much less deadly
than if you would've
gotten it five months ago,
just because we know how
to treat it much better,
and that's a good thing.
And then we're very
advanced in the vaccine,
and obviously that's a critical priority,
because once we get to the vaccine,
and we can prove that
it's safe and effective,
that really allows us to start
the beginning of the end.
So we're not at the beginning,
we're not at the end.
We're somewhere in the middle,
but we're trying to use the data we have
to be much more strategic.
One great example is
we're doubling and tripling
down on the nursing homes.
I think about 50% of
the mortality right now
has come from nursing homes.
So we have to do everything we can
to prevent spread to nursing homes,
because you have a lot of
DNRs, do not resuscitate,
in the nursing home,
and once people get it,
it's harder, and it leads
to death much quicker.
So over the last month,
we've been redirecting all
of our point of care tests,
which are the fastest tests that we have,
to protect the nursing homes
to make sure that we can keep the virus
out of those nursing homes.
And that will enable us
to significantly decrease the mortality.
So we're doing our best
to work with the governors
to balance keeping
ourselves open as a country,
protecting the American way of life,
making sure we're not taking
away citizens' liberties.
We trust people to make
the right decisions,
we continue to put out
the right information.
We've tried very hard not to allow
people who wanna politicize the pandemic
to be successful in doing so,
and we're doing our best to preserve life,
to bring safety, and
obviously to save the economy.
But it's a global pandemic,
it's an unprecedented challenge,
and we've pulled off a
lot of amazing things
in order to put ourselves in the position
we're in right now
to hopefully get through
this as well as possible.
- We've seen a blue
states versus red states,
the cases first, of course,
were hitting the blue states
a hell of a lot harder,
then the red states after that.
You've said that you do not believe
that President Trump is in any way
politicizing the pandemic.
I'm asking you, Jared, do
you really believe that
in the middle of this election campaign?
- Look, there are certain
people who are attacking him
based on what he does or doesn't do.
I'll give you an example.
Now again, I really don't want to get into
the politics of the pandemic,
but you have certain senators
who will keep tweeting,
where's the President's testing plan?
Well, we submitted it,
we put out a testing
plan three months ago,
and then we submitted a plan to Congress,
yet they keep saying that
there's no testing plan.
You have some people saying
use the Defense Production Act,
use the Defense,
we've been using the
Defense Production Act.
You know, you had a certain politician
who may or may not be
running against the President
say these are the seven things I would do
if I was in control.
Well, we did all those seven things,
so they're putting out
a lot of misinformation,
which undermines public trust.
And quite frankly, I don't
think that that's very helpful
at this point in time.
What's most helpful is
being in a position,
where we can continue
to inform the public,
not scare the public, give public data,
and make sure that we are able to,
you know, you don't have
unlimited amount of resources,
no country does.
We have a lot more than other countries,
based on the great job
that the federal government
has done to resource it,
but obviously you have
a lot of politicians
who have played politics with it.
So again, we're just
focused on doing the job,
and my sense is people
will judge afterwards
whether we did the right
job or the wrong job.
I think we've done a lot more
right than we've done wrong,
and we've saved a lotta
lives because of that.
- Given what you just said,
do you feel comfortable
assuring the American people
that it will be safe for
them to vote in person
come Election Day?
- So I think that there's a
lot of precautions being taken.
Again, if it's safe to
go to the supermarket
to buy groceries,
there's a lot of things that you can do,
then it should be safe to go out and vote.
I do think that what's happening now
is you're seeing a lot of
people trying to push a system
that has not been proven, right?
So universal mail-in voting
is something that has not been done.
If you want to do it right,
it would probably take five to 10 years
to get it right,
and they're trying to push
this through in five months.
And so Dr. Fauci, the other day,
said that people should not be at risk
to go out and vote in person.
There are some accommodations.
If you wanna request an absentee ballot,
that's a tried and true method,
but universal mail-in push
ballot like they're trying to do,
where they send ballots to everybody,
I think that's a recipe
for a total disaster,
and will definitely take steps
to undermine people's
confidence in the democracy,
which is not what we need in this time.
- Thank you very much, Jared Kushner,
always good to be with you,
thanks for coming on the show.
- Thank you, Ian, all the best.
(upbeat jazz music)
