In an interview published 10 February 2025 by Internationale Politik Quarterly, Heusgen — then still MSC chairman — was asked whether Trump’s re-election was a sea change. He said yes: “we did wake up in a new world,” with “the experience of his first administration,” and that Trump was “now even more pointed than he was eight years ago.”
He then gave his own account of a February 2017 meeting: “I was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s foreign policy advisor at the time. My first meeting with Trump’s advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in February 2017 has guided me in my assessment of President Trump and his politics since then.” He says he told Kushner about the Berlin Airlift, Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush, and that “transatlantic relations with a strong military basis in Germany is the foundation of my country.” He quotes Kushner’s reply as: they were “businessmen in the new administration. And in business, one day you’re a friend and the next day, you’re an opponent.”
Those are Heusgen’s words in 2025 about a 2017 conversation. This site does not have a contemporaneous Kushner transcript. It does not invent a Kushner denial or confirmation. The Fact is that Heusgen published this account over his name.