Jared Kushner signs book deal for memoir about time in Trump administration

Son-in-law of the former president will release the book by Broadside Books next year

Former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is penning a memoir. Reuters

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former US president Donald Trump and one of his top advisers during his administration, has a book deal.

Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced that Kushner's book will come out in early 2022.

Kushner has begun working on the memoir, currently untitled, and is expected to write about everything from the Middle East to criminal justice reform to the pandemic.

“His book will be the definitive, thorough recounting of the administration – and the truth about what happened behind closed doors,” Broadside announced on Tuesday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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Kushner was often at the centre of the Trump administration's policies – whether for his role in negotiating the Abraham Accords or his involvement in a criminal justice bill passed by Congress in 2018. He has also been the subject of numerous controversies, whether for his financial dealings and potential conflicts of interest or for the administration's widely criticised handling of Covid-19.

In April 2020, less than two months into the pandemic, Kushner labelled the White House response a “great success story", dismissed “the eternal lockdown crowd”, and also said: “I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again."

The signing of Kushner comes during a debate within the book industry over which Trump officials, notably Trump himself, can be taken on without starting a revolt at the publishing house.

Thousands of Simon & Schuster employees and authors signed an open letter earlier this year condemning the publisher's decision to sign former vice-president Mike Pence to a deal.

Former US vice president Mike Pence is also writing a memoir for Simon & Schuster. AFP

At a Simon & Schuster staff meeting in May, employees confronted chief executive Jonathan Karp, who responded that he felt the company had a mission to hear opposing sides of political debates.

He also said that he did not want to publish Trump, who issued his 2015 book Crippled America through the Simon & Schuster imprint Threshold Editions because he did not believe the former president would provide an honest account of his time in office.

Trump issued a statement last week that he was “writing like crazy” and had turned down two offers “from the most unlikely of publishers", a claim widely disputed within the industry.