Peter Navarro Says Trump Wanted to Fire Jared Kushner and Replace Him With Bannon — But Feared Doing It Himself

Former White House adviser Peter Navarro claimed that Donald Trump wanted to have Jared Kushner taken off as head of his re-election campaign, but the former president didn’t have it in him to tell his son-in-law that.

The Guardian obtained a preview of Navarro’s upcoming book: Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back. In the memoir, Navarro writes that Trump was on board with a “coup d’état” to have Kushner removed from the job and replaced with Trump’s shortlived 2016 campaign manager, Steve Bannon.

Despite Trump’s support for this change in management, Navarro writes that it did not happen partially because Trump refused to tell Kushner himself.

“Fearing ‘family troubles if [he] himself had to deliver the bad news to…the father of his grandchildren,’ Trump asked Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, a major Republican donor and a central player in the coup, ‘to be the messenger’ to Kushner,” Navarro wrote, according to The Guardian. Marcus was also described as “grudgingly” accepting the assignment to break the news to Kushner.

What happened next — by the book’s telling — is that Kushner skipped Marcus’ first call, then told him “things were fine with the campaign, there was no way he was stepping down and, in effect, Bernie Marcus and his big moneybags could go pound sand.”

“And that was that,” Navarro said. “And the rest is a catastrophic strategic failure of history.”

Navarro’s book reportedly goes on with him singing Bannon’s praises while maintaining a very negative portrayal of Kushner, particularly in a section titled “Both Nepotism and Excrement Roll Downhill.” The news comes as Navarro has publicly established his dislike for Kushner by scoffing at his cancer diagnosis, trashing Kushner’s own book, and blaming him for Trump’s loss of a second term.