Does Trump Get Itchy Twitter Fingers When Jared’s Observing Shabbat?

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By Daniel J. Solomon January 26, 2017

Does Jared Kushner’s Shabbat observance lead father-in-law Donald Trump to go off the rails? It’s an open question after this weekend, when the new leader picked a fight with the media as his top adviser and crisis manager unplugged for the day.

“He wasn’t rolling calls on Saturday when this happened,” an unnamed source told Vanity Fair. President Trump picked a fight with the White House press corps that day, falsely disputing its reports of a diminished crowd at his inauguration and insulting them in a speech to the Central Intelligence Agency.

A similar phenomenon was noted during the campaign, when the Huffington Post ran an article noting that Trump’s most off-color tweets tended to arrive on Saturdays. “It could be a big problem if the people who make our president not crazy aren’t available one day a week,” an anonymous friend of Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump told the site.

Then again, in true emergencies, Kushner might be available.

After the October release of a tape in which the president bragged about sexually assaulting women, Kushner apparently went to Trump Tower on Saturday, consulting with his father-in-law over how best to spin the situation.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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