Months before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump supported a “coup d’état” to oust his son-in-law Jared Kushner from his role on the Trump campaign and replace him with Steve Bannon, according to an upcoming book by former Trump adviser Peter Navarro.
Navarro added that Trump did not want to be the one to tell Kushner, as he feared “family troubles if [he] himself had to deliver the bad news to … the father of his grandchildren.”
The book, Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back, claims Trump instead enlisted Republican donor and Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus to tell Kushner that he was to be replaced by Bannon, who served as the chief executive on Trump’s successful 2016 campaign.
Kushner allegedly told Marcus that he refused to step down.
“And that was that. And the rest is a catastrophic strategic failure history,” Navarro concluded referring to Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden that November.
Navarro and Kushner have a history of being on opposite sides of the Trump camp. Navarro publicly criticized Trump’s son-in-law in an interview with Newsmax after Kushner wrote a book revealing that he had undergone treatments for thyroid cancer while in the White House, saying the admission “came out of nowhere” and was just being used to receive “sympathy to try to sell his book.”
Navarro will appear in court in November on a contempt of Congress charge. He has refused to cooperate with the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack and faces up to two years in prison if convicted.
