Jared Kushner Drops His Trump Hotel Plans After Massive Backlash

Jared Kushner, private equity firm manager and son-in-law to President Trump, has ended his efforts to redevelop a Serbian historical monument into a luxury hotel complex after weeks of protest and controversy. 

“Because meaningful projects should unite rather than divide, and out of respect for the people of Serbia and the City of Belgrade, we are withdrawing our application and stepping aside at this time,” a spokesman for Kushner’s private-equity firm, Affinity Partners, said in a statement on Monday. 

The land in question is the site of the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. The attack by NATO was part of an effort to end then-President Slobodan Milosevic’s violent ethnic cleansing of Albanians living in Kosovo, which resulted in the death of 13,000 people (mostly ethnic Albanians). NATO bombed bridges, military buildings, and government buildings. 

Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 528 civilians were killed in the bombings, and many Serbians view the ruins as a point of cultural and architectural pride today. 

In May, Kushner’s company and the Serbian government signed a deal for a 99-year lease of the land under the bombed-out buildings, promising “revitalization”—meaning a high-rise hotel, office space, and stores. It was set to be a $500 million project, with Kushner’s company building a separate memorial for the bombing elsewhere.  

“The economic progress in Serbia over the past decade has been impressive,” Kushner said then. “This development will further elevate Belgrade into the premier international destination it is becoming.”

The decision was met with widespread protest, coupled with indictment of three Serbian government officials—including Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković—for abuse of power and falsifying documents related to Kushner’s redevelopment. Serbians who were against the plans accused their government of shirking public opinion and the law to streamline the effort for Kushner in an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration. 

“You call it an investment, we call it high treason,” Serbian Assemblymember Marinika Tepić told Parliament.

CBS News just wouldn’t stop posting content of Bari Weiss’s weird photo op with Erika Kirk amid a weekend full of high-profile stories of bloodshed around the world.

Kirk, who now leads Turning Point USA, her late husband’s conservative youth organization, appeared on a CBS News Town Hall Saturday moderated by Weiss. Shortly before the town hall was set to air, another story broke: There was an active shooter at Brown University, CBS News posted on X.

Over the course of Saturday evening, CBS News’s X account posted 12 times about its town hall with Kirk, but only posted four updates about the deadly shooting in Rhode Island that killed two students and injured eight others.

By Sunday morning, there was a tab at the top of CBS News’s website providing readers with a quick way to access crucial information about the shooting at Brown University—but right in front of it was another tab leading them to more content from Kirk’s town hall.

That same day, a deadly mass shooting at a Jewish gathering at Bondi Beach in Australia claimed 15 lives. After CBS News posted about Kirk’s interview three times in a row, users on X began to notice that a major news company wasn’t actually, well, covering the news.

While the CBS News account posted on X 12 times about the shooting at Bondi Beach, it also continued to post about Kirk’s town hall six more times: the same number of times it provided updates on the investigation into the shooting at Brown University.

So, over the course of the weekend, CBS News managed to publish a whopping 18 posts about Kirk, 12 posts about the Bondi Beach shooting, and only 10 posts about Brown University.

By Monday morning, yet another major story had broken: the apparent murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. As of 3:30 Monday afternoon, CBS News posted about Reiner’s death 11 times. The network only posted once, however, about President Donald Trump’s heinous reaction, where he claimed that Reiner had caused his own death because his hatred of Trump angered those around him. CBS News’s X account wrote the president had merely “disparage[d] the political views” of the famous director. CBS News has continued to post about the Kirk town hall throughout the day, as well.

In her first memo to CBS News employees when she took over in October, Weiss had proclaimed that she planned to report “on the world as it actually is.” But it seems that her rather boring tendency to gravitate toward right-wing commentators to help us understand our world will always come first.

Donald Trump stood firm Monday on his disturbing comments about Rob Reiner hours after the famed Hollywood filmmaker’s murder.

Only a handful of loyal MAGA-ites (such as George Santos) have defended Trump’s claim earlier Monday that Reiner would not have been murdered if he had supported the MAGA movement. Instead, people across the nation have condemned Trump’s remarks, including Republican lawmakers and powerful Christians.

But the public backlash hasn’t bothered Trump one bit. Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, Trump emphasized that he was “not a fan of Rob Reiner at all.”

“He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned,” Trump said, referring to himself in the third person. “He said, he liked, he knew it was false. In fact it’s the exact opposite, that I was a friend of Russia, controlled by Russia. You know, it was the Russia hoax. He was one of the people behind it.”

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

“I think he hurt himself in career-wise. He became like a deranged person. Trump derangement syndrome,” Trump said. “So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape, or form. I thought he was very bad for our country.”

Reiner’s vast and varied trove of work made him a cinematic legend, with each film standing as a template of its respective genre. Reiner enthralled children and adults alike with The Princess Bride, created the blueprint for romantic comedies with When Harry Met Sally…, and practically invented the mockumentary with This Is Spinal Tap.

He was a longtime critic of the president’s agenda.

Stephen Miller made an odious threat on X Monday against “the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists” after the Department of Justice announced it had stopped a bombing plot in California.

“Following the issuance of NSPM-7 vast government resources have been unleashed to find and dismantle the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists clandestinely operating inside the United States,” Miller’s post read.

NSPM-7 refers to a memo issued by the Trump administration titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” in September that directs federal agencies to focus on domestic extremism. The document defines extremism in terms of common liberal and left-wing beliefs, such as anti-capitalism, as well as vague and subjective positions, for instance “extremism” on race, migration, and gender.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said on X that the DOJ foiled a New Year’s Eve bombing plot against targets in Orange County and Los Angeles. The plot was reportedly hatched by “The Turtle Island Liberation Front—a far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist group.” The group also planned to attack ICE agents and their vehicles, Bondi said.

This matches up with NSPM-7’s definition of domestic terrorism, and judging from Miller’s post, discovering and foiling the supposed plot is a product of that memo. Miller’s use of “fifth column” refers to a group of people within a country seeking to undermine it from within. It has been used by right-wing groups and governments to attack Muslims and other groups they deem subversive.

In Miller’s hands, the use of such language evokes racism and bigotry, especially considering his known efforts to use his position in the Trump administration to advance his anti-immigrant, xenophobic ideology. That, coupled with Trump and conservatives’ attacks on any dissenting views, suggests that the full force of the government can now be directed at anyone who disagrees with the people in power.

North Carolina’s Randolph County chose to dissolve its entire library board rather than allow a book about a trans child to sit on the shelves. 

Last week, the county Board of Commissioners voted 3–2 to dismiss every single member of the library board, just weeks after they declined to reshelve or remove a picture book titled Call Me Max, a story about a transgender boy who wants to be called by his chosen name in class. 

Tami Fitzgerald, head of North Carolina Values Coalition, a conservative group that focuses on religious freedom and drew media attention to the library board’s decision, argued that the book “teaches children that their parents may be wrong about their gender, and that their gender is actually whatever they feel it is.” 

“Planting this lie in a child’s mind at a young age can lead them down a harmful path of social and medical transitioning,” she told The Washington Post. 

Kyle Lukoff, a trans man and the book’s author, thinks this is just another attempt from Trump’s GOP to muzzle his community. 

“Policies can be helpful, but this is ultimately a question of power,” he said. “If there are people in power who simply believe trans people don’t belong in their communities or the world at large, they will simply twist those policies to try and make it a reality.”

Randolph County went overwhelmingly for President Trump in the last election. This draconian reaction to a book about gender identity is par for the course in the petty culture war his base has been waging.