‘You Have Cancer’: Jared Kushner Reveals in New Memoir He Was Treated For Thyroid Cancer While Serving in Trump White House

Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

Jared Kushner was reportedly treated for thyroid cancer while he was serving in the Trump White House.

Kushner was a senior adviser to his father-in-law president, Donald Trump. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported on Monday that Kushner was treated for cancer in October 2019, which is revealed “in an upcoming memoir set to be published” on Aug. 23. An excerpt of Breaking History: A White House Memoir was given to the Times.

“On the morning that I traveled to Texas to attend the opening of a Louis Vuitton factory, White House physician Sean Conley pulled me into the medical cabin on Air Force One,” wrote Kushner. “‘Your test results came back from Walter Reed,’ he said. ‘It looks like you have cancer. We need to schedule a surgery right away.’”

Kushner wrote that he asked Conley not to “tell anyone — especially my wife or my father-in-law.”

Haberman wrote:

Mr. Kushner wrote that the cancer was caught “early” but required removing a “substantial part of my thyroid” and that he was warned that there could be lingering damage to his voice.

His illness was one of the few pieces of information that did not leak out of one of the leakiest White Houses in modern memory.

Mr. Kushner wrote little in the book about why he did not make the information public, other than to say he worked to make sure a small circle was aware of it.

Kushner wrote that a doctor “concluded that I needed surgery to remove an unusual growth in my thyroid, and we scheduled the operation for the Friday before Thanksgiving. That way, I would miss the least amount of time in the office. My absence might even go unnoticed. That’s how I wanted it.”

Kushner labeled his cancer as “a personal problem and not for public consumption” and would only tell his wife, Ivanka Trump, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and a couple of his aides. He wrote that he didn’t tell the president about it, though his father-in-law eventually found out but apparently didn’t reveal it to others.

“The day before the surgery, Trump called me into the Oval Office and motioned for his team to close the door,” wrote Kushner. “‘Are you nervous about the surgery?’ he asked.”

“How do you know about it?” asked Kushner.

“I’m the president,” Trump replied, according to Kushner. “I know everything. I understand that you want to keep these things quiet. I like to keep things like this to myself as well. You’ll be just fine. Don’t worry about anything with work. We have everything covered here.”