What are the Trump and Kushner families having common? Andrea Bernstein will be here to talk

about her new book, American Oleg Arks. Why don't we know more about the violent white

supremacist coup of 1898? David Zucchino will be here to discuss his new book, Wellington's

Lie. Plus, we'll talk about what we and the wider world are reading. This is the January

26th episode of the Book Review Podcast for the New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Andrea Bernstein joins us now. She is the co-host of the Trump Inc. Podcast from WNYC and

ProPublica and the author of a new book, American Oleg Arks, The Kushner's The Trumps, and

the Marriage of Money and Power. Andrea, thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having

me. All right. These are two families. I guess we kind of feel like we know them well.

First of all, let's start with, do we know them as well as we think we do? I don't think

so. I think for a couple of reasons. I think one is that during the 2016 campaign, there

was a large media consensus that Trump wasn't going to win and he tended not to get the

kind of long-term sustained inquiry into his business past. Because people just thought

why bother? People thought why bother?

People thought why bother? I mean, there's a number of reasons. People thought why bother.

It's very hard to sustain that kind of inquiry. Also, he gave people so much other material

to talk about all the time. All of those forces together meant that that was very difficult

to do. The Kushner family story has really not had much sustained inquiry in the form

of a book. One of the things that I wanted to do is to really go back and understand the

history of these two families, which are so interesting and are such American stories

and yet are so unexpected in their outcomes.

As a storyteller yourself here, this is like a lot to kind of bite off because you have

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