Donald Trump agreed to a plan to remove his son-in-law Jared Kushner from leading his re-election campaign in 2020, according to an upcoming book by former Trump aide Peter Navarro.
The plan, Navarro alleged, was to replace Kushner with Steve Bannon, who ran Trump's successful 2016 campaign and served for a chaotic period as his chief strategist in the White House.
However, the plan failed when the president refused to personally deliver the news to Kushner, the book says.
Navarro, a former White House trade advisor, makes the claims in his upcoming book "Taking Back Trump's America: Why We Lost the White House and How We'll Win It Back," a copy of which was obtained by The Guardian.
In The Guardian extract, Navarro described his role in the plot to oust Kushner, whom Navarro has made no secret of disliking.
Navarro said he set up a meeting between Trump and Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot and a major Republican donor, in which the president "readily agreed with Bernie that Jared had to be replaced with Steve".
The plan was also backed by Donald Trump Jr., The Guardian noted.
Bannon had been fired from his position as White House strategist in 2017 following months of reported power struggles with Kushner and other advisers.
Trump feared "family troubles if [he] himself had to deliver the bad news to … the father of his grandchildren,"and so he asked Marcus "be the messenger," per The Guardian extract.
But when Marcus tried to deliver the message, Kushner told him that "things were fine with the campaign, there was no way he was stepping down."
"And that was that. And the rest is a catastrophic strategic failure history," Navarro writes in the book.
Trump went on to lose the election to Joe Biden in 2020.
According to The Guardian, in the book Navarro asked "why a president who is supposed to be one of the greatest assessors of talent … would make such bad personnel choices across so many White House and cabinet-level positions."
Kushner served as senior adviser to his father-in-law, along with his wife Ivanka, throughout his term.
Navarro titled a section of his book "Both Nepotism and Excrement Roll Downhill," in an apparent dig towards Kushner, The Guardian report says.
The schism between Kushner on one side and Bannon and Navarro on the other is an example of the many feuds in Trump's inner circle.
Navarro has been accused of illegally defying the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, and is due to stand trial in November on charges of contempt of Congress.
