Jared Kushner

So, you know, I had this proposal.

I was told that all of these things were good.

Then we're trying to schedule this trip, and the National Security Council calls a meeting where we're in the Situation Room, and we have Homeland Security, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and everyone's saying, this is going to be a disaster.

They said, if we go to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis never keep their promises.

And our Secretary of State at the time was a gentleman named Rex Tillerson.

Mm-hmm.

Who'd been the CEO of Exxon.

So he dealt with all these people very extensively.

And he basically said, in my experience, the Saudis won't come through.

And Jared, you don't know what you're doing.

You're wasting your time.

And I basically was at a point where I said, look, guys...

But they're saying they want to do all these things.

Shouldn't we at least give them a chance to try to do it?

Why do we want to predetermine their direction by not giving them a chance to change?

Just because things in the past haven't gotten the way you want them to, that doesn't mean they can't go that way in the future.

So we fought the battle.

They basically deferred and let me go through with it.

But when I do the planning meetings for the trip, nobody would show up because they all thought it was going to be an absolute disaster.

And by the way, they probably weren't wrong to think that because I'd never planned a foreign trip before and I'd never done any foreign policy before.