“For Father’s Day in 2020, what Donald Trump mostly wanted was to avoid his son-in-law. It was Jared Kushner who had talked the president into hiring Brad Parscale to run a campaign that was now, just months before the election, in freefall. And when most Americans rejected Trump’s unreasonably truculent response to the civil unrest that was sweeping the country, the president also blamed Kushner. The frustration and anguish that had accrued among Black Americans after decades of debasing systemic racism had been emphatically – finally – cracked open by the death of George Floyd, who’d been murdered by police a few weeks earlier. As protesters poured into the streets of the nation’s capital and major municipalities, Trump privately told advisers that he wished he’d been quicker to support police and more aggressive in his pushback against protesters.”

“Trump had staked nearly his entire campaign in 2016 around a law-and-order image, and now groaned that the criminal justice reform that Kushner had persuaded him to support made him look weak and – even worse – hadn’t earned him any goodwill among Black voters. ‘I’ve done all this stuff for the Blacks – it’s always Jared telling me to do this,’ Trump said to one confidante on Father’s Day. ‘And they all fucking hate me, and none of them are going to vote for me.’ The weekend after Father’s Day, Trump canceled a trip to Bedminster at the last minute – after Kushner had already left for the New Jersey golf club – and instead scheduled a round of political meetings at the White House without him. A month after the murder of Floyd, Trump was dumping on his son-in-law, and he was also abandoning the chance to improve his relationship with Black leaders and Black voters during a particularly tumultuous moment in U.S. race relations and the presidential campaign. The story of this month, from the murder of Floyd to Trump’s assertion that his outreach to Black voters wasn’t working, is one of missed opportunities and bungled messaging, even in the eyes of some of Trump’s closest advisers, who described their firsthand accounts with me during the past year” – Wall Street Journal White House reporter Michael Bender, previewing his book ‘Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost‘ at Politico.