Andrea Bernstein interleaves the family histories of the Trumps and the Kushners — two New York real estate dynasties who married into each other, and whose patterns of political access and self-dealing she traces back to their immigrant-generation founders.
Her account shows how both families treated politics and regulation less as constraints than as inputs to manage: relationships with local officials, tax abatements, favorable zoning, and — eventually — a direct line into the federal government itself.
She's particularly sharp on Jared Kushner, tracing his path from a family real estate business shadowed by his father's fraud conviction to an unpaid but sweeping White House advisory role, and the private equity firm (Affinity Partners) he later built substantially on Gulf sovereign-wealth money.
The book supplies the deep background for names that recur constantly in this tracker's exhibits — Kushner, the Trump family businesses, the Gulf funds — as a single continuous story rather than a series of disconnected deals.