Jared Kushner reveals in a memoir that he had thyroid cancer during his time as a top White House adviser to father-in-law former President Donald Trump.
His secret health battles, which included having surgery to remove a tumor from his throat, were reported Monday by the New York Times, citing a chapter in Kushner’s forthcoming Breaking History: A White House Memoir, which hits shelves Aug. 23.
“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. ‘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 writes of October 2019 amid trade negotiations with China.
Kushner, now 41, said he had “a substantial part of [his] thyroid” removed by a doctor. “The biopsy results arrived a few days later, revealing that the nodule indeed was cancerous. Thank God we caught it early,” Kushner writes. “Before surgery, the doctors had warned me that the procedure could alter my voice, and it could take weeks or months to return to normal. Luckily, the impact was minimal.”
Thyroid cancer causes swelling or a lump in the neck area and is the 12th most common form of cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Kushner also writes in the book that he told very few people in the White House about his diagnosis, not even Trump. He did write that the then president found out about his surgery regardless.
“The day before the surgery, Trump called me into the Oval Office and motioned for his team to close the door. ‘Are you nervous about the surgery?’ he asked,” Kushner writes.
“’How do you know about it?’” Kushner says he responded.
“I’m the president. 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,” Trump replied, according to Kushner.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Kushner helped negotiate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and the Abraham Accords between several Middle Eastern nations while working as an adviser in the Trump administration.
He is married to Ivanka Trump, daughter of the former president and also a former White House adviser, and they have three children together.
