America’s “phantom” ambassador to France

The new U.S. ambassador to France does not speak or read French, does not attend official dinners nor hold cocktail or garden parties at his residence. In nine months, he has given just one interview to the French media.

Charles Kushner, 71, is a New York real estate mogul with a fortune estimated at seven billion U.S. dollars. He is also a convicted felon, having served 14 months in prison from 2005 to 2006 for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering.

He has no qualifications to hold one of the most important posts in the American diplomatic services – except his friendship with Donald Trump. His son Jared is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Before their marriage in 2009, she converted to Judaism. The couple have three children.

During Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021, Kushner served as a senior adviser. He was a generous donor to Trump before the 2016 election and again in 2023, including US$1 million, making him one of the largest donors to a Trump super Political Action Committee (PAC). In December 2020, Trump issued a full and unconditional pardon to him.

At the Senate hearing last year to confirm him, the Democrats asked him for his qualifications for the Paris job. He said that he knew nothing about diplomacy.

The embassy in Paris, in Avenue Gabriel, is the oldest diplomatic mission of the United States in the world. Its earliest ambassadors included Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers.

Since his arrival in July last year, Kushner has transformed it in his own image. He lives in a sumptuous residence in downtown Paris. Every day he goes to bed at 2100 and rises at 0500. Then, accompanied by bodyguards, he walks to a nearby hotel, where he swims laps in its large pool. He eats little.

A devout Orthodox Jew, he has ordered his cooking staff to prepare only kosher food. He follows the rules of the Sabbath meticulously – he walks barefoot, cuts off the electricity and does not use the telephone.

He is close to Chabad Lubavitch, an Orthodox organisation based in Brooklyn, New York, that is the biggest Jewish missionary organisation in the world. His parents were Polish and many of his family died in Nazi concentration camps.

Since he arrived, Kushner’s principal interest has been the Jewish population of France and their history. In that first month of July, he visited the Memorial of the Shoah, met the Israeli ambassador and went to the Grand Synagogue of Paris. He shares the views of the far right members of the Israeli government that there can never be a Palestinian state.

In nine months, he has visited only one of the 11 American cemeteries in France. Buried there are those who gave their lives to save France from Germany in the two World Wars.

In August 2025, he published an open letter to French President Emmanuel Macron in the Wall Street Journal accusing him of insufficient action against rising violence against Jews in France.

The Foreign Ministry was enraged, saying the allegations were “unacceptable” and citing the 1961 Vienna Convention that bans interference by ambassadors in internal affairs.

The French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot summoned Kushner for an explanation. He refused to go and sent a senior official in his place. “This was an apparent failure to grasp the basic requirements of the ambassadorial mission,” the ministry said. It restricted his access to government ministries.

Nor does Kushner have much time for his own compatriots. More than 150,000 Americans live in France, with five million visiting as tourists last year.

With London and Berlin, Paris is one of the three most important capitals in Europe, with dozens of U.S. businesses, banks, investment houses, thinktanks and educational institutions. All want and need good relations with the embassy.

There is one group of Americans Kushner wants to see -- chief executives of major firms. He wants them to attend the 2026 Select USA Investment Summit in National Harbor, Maryland on May 3-6. It aims to attract investment into the country.

Privately, the executives complain that Kushner is demanding that they contribute to pay for festivities in Paris to mark the 250th birthday of the U.S. on July 4.

His appointment, and that of similar people to other European capitals, shows Trump’s contempt for the role of ambassadors and the views and feelings of European governments and people.

No wonder one American reporter in Paris calls Kushner “the phantom of Avenue Gabriel”.