How the Kushners Gifted Me a Story

Wildfires have been approaching Tirana for days. Thick black smoke burns my throat and distorts the view of the nearby mountains. I was told that the protests start at 7:00 in Skanderbeg Square but found it nearly empty. A couple of old guys laughing, a kid on a scooter whips by. I wonder if I misunderstood the directions.

Then the square fills slowly: twenty people become two hundred, and before I notice, a couple thousand. I laugh to myself, thinking “nothing in Albania starts on time, not the ferries, not the buses, not even the revolution.”

Organizers with bullhorns arrive. One hands me a sign: a castle in flames, and Prime Minister Edi Rama sunbathing in a beach chair. Tonight is the 75th consecutive night of what people call the Flamingo Revolution, named for the movement created to protect the migratory birds of the Vjosa-Narta wetlands. The protests started the day Rama announced Albania’s largest island was being sold to the Kushners.

Around eight o’clock the crowd mobilizes and marches down Tirana’s main boulevard toward the Prime Minister’s Office, doubling again, swallowing the street, stopping traffic dead. A stage waits for an opera singer and guest speakers. So many people wearing inflatable flamingo hats you’d think I wandered into a Jimmy Buffet concert. What surprises me is how polite it is. People listen, applaud between speeches, like a lecture, not a riot. Popular chants are “Rama, jep dorëheqjen” (Rama, resign) and “Shqipëria nuk është me shitje!” (Albania is not for sale). The protest runs several emotional hours and ends with the same chant every night: “Nesër më shumë!” Tomorrow, more!

It’s 95 degrees and I am sweating through my clothes, dumbfounded that this is a daily event. You may be wondering what I’m doing here. Somedays I ask myself that same question.

A month earlier, I was half-listening to a news broadcast as I was packing for this vacation. What I thought I heard was that the Kushners were buying a bomb shelter in Albania. I filed it next to the rest of the rich — Zuckerberg’s Hawaii bunker, Kim Kardashian, Sam Altman. What do these people know that I don’t?

Two days later the Pink Flamingo protests started, and I realized what I’d heard wasn’t about bunkers — it was a real estate deal that was blowing up. My itinerary already had Croatia. So I added Albania. If the Kushners were going to hand me a story this good, the least I could do was show up to collect it.

The Blueprint

I started doing my homework, and discovered something interesting the American coverage kept skipping: this isn’t a new idea. Jared didn’t invent the sovereign-island-to-billionaire pipeline. It started in Montenegro almost twenty years ago.

In 2007, a Canadian mining billionaire named Peter Munk looked at a rotting Yugoslav naval base in Tivat and envisioned a marina. Porto Montenegro opened not long after: yachts, a five-star Regent hotel, condos stacked along a waterfront that used to be a military secret. His investment partners included Oleg Deripaska, the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch, and Lord Jacob Rothschild.

That convinced me to add Montenegro as another stop. I had to see the Regent, where a room runs about $1,300 a night. I did not stay there - the price is a bit rich for a man writing a satire column. So I did what any self-respecting freeloader does: I parked myself at the marina bar, drank two Negronis very slowly, and admired boats I will never own. It’s simultaneously beautiful and strange, watching people casually step off hundred-foot yachts next to a fort that used to shell people. Nobody there was thinking about submarines. Nobody there was thinking about anything, really, except their next drink.

Jacob Rothschild died in 2024. His son Nathaniel inherited the title — and, as I’d learn later, the superyacht Ivanka says she was swimming near when she “discovered” Sazan. Small world. Suspiciously small, sometimes.

Communism for $ale

My next stop was Durrës, Albania. Within five minutes I saw the first one: a squat concrete mushroom half-buried in sand. Then another and another. The bunkers fascinated me; locals no longer notice them. In Tirana, I did the full tour - Bunk’Art, the hillside shelter Enver Hoxha built for the elite, and its downtown sister site that catalogues the secret police. The guide walks you through the paranoia chronologically. Hoxha broke with the Soviets for being too soft, then with China, until Albania had no allies left. He built roughly 170,000 of these things — one for every eleven citizens — against an invasion that never came.

The irony is hard to miss. Albania has turned its dictator’s paranoia into a ticketed tourist attraction. Up and down this Adriatic coast the pattern repeats under different flags: Azerbaijan’s state oil company on a dead Yugoslav base, Egyptian money on another, Singapore’s Aman Resorts on Tito’s emptied fishing village, a Four Seasons rising on the site of Tito’s old holiday resort in Croatia. Communism spent decades terrified of capitalism. Now capitalism is buying the leftovers at a discount, one abandoned base at a time.

The Deal Smells Like Low Tide

Ivanka’s debunked origin story for finding Sazan involves swimming off a friend’s boat and barefoot hiking to the top of the island. She’s now getting “back to her real estate roots” to “help realize its potential.” But the island wasn’t discovered. And the person whose boat she was swimming from was Nat Rothschild.

That last detail got Albanians connecting dots. Rothschild’s yacht was the same one that had hosted Peter Munk while he was shopping for islands in Montenegro. Barefoot hiking on the rocky island was easily discounted. So was Ivanka’s claim to real-estate expertise, given that she was handed an Executive Vice President title at the Trump Organization at 23.

But the statement that actually lit the fuse of the Flamingo Revolution is that Sazan is a private island. The implication that Albanians have been flocking to this public land for their sandy beaches for years could simply become private was too much.

Then came an even stranger development: prosecutors began investigating land near Zvërnec that was sold to a Kushner-linked company by a Miami businessman accused of laundering drug money and using forged deeds to establish ownership. The seller denies the allegations. The deeds underlying part of the Kushner resort project are now part of an active criminal investigation.

Despite the heinous smell around this project, it’s the Albanian lawmakers who are facing the heat. Albania passed a law in 2024 legalizing development of five-star hotels in protected areas that used to be off-limits, clearing the way for exactly this project.

Are Albanians angry at America over this? Every person I asked laughed. “Albania loves America!” one said, followed by a friendly, mildly distorted history lesson. “Albania only exists because of Woodrow Wilson,” said a woman perhaps old enough to remember. “George Bush kissed the ground when he landed here” — true, there’s a statue and a street named after him in Tirana. My favorite, delivered with total sincerity: “George Washington’s mother was from Kosovo.” Actually she wasn’t. That started as an April Fools’ joke on an Albanian news site years ago.

Nobody I spoke with brought up Jared Kushner by name unprompted. They’re furious at Rama. Kushner is barely a footnote in his own scandal, here on the ground where it’s actually happening. That’s not because people don’t know who he is. It’s because the person who has to deal with this, night after night, is Edi Rama. President Begaj, a mostly ceremonial figure, is the one facing an actual criminal referral over the decree that made it legal. Two Albanian officials are absorbing all the consequences. Jared is thousands of miles away, and by every account I can find, entirely fine.

Looking back, I almost had it right the first time. Zuckerberg and Kardashian are buying protection. Kushner’s version is just more refined. He doesn’t need the concrete. What I thought was a bomb shelter turned out to be a portfolio.

The Conflict of Interest

This leads me to the part of the story I actually can’t stop thinking about. Kushner’s real skill isn’t innovation. It’s not dealmaking. It’s never being the one left holding the risk.

He currently holds an official U.S. title, Special Envoy for Peace, negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program alongside fellow envoy Steve Witkoff. Geneva meetings, a stop on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, on-the-record readouts — it’s real diplomacy, not a ceremonial title. At the same time, he still runs Affinity Partners, the private investment fund he founded in 2021. Its largest backer, at roughly $2 billion, is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. That’s the same government whose interests are directly in play in the talks Kushner is running for the United States.

In April, Rep. Jamie Raskin opened a formal investigation into exactly that overlap, calling Kushner a “financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy.” His letter alleges something sharper than a general conflict of interest: that Saudi Arabia actually wants the Iran war to continue and escalate, not end, while ordinary Americans absorb the cost.

Albania isn’t even Kushner’s first rodeo. He had a Belgrade version of this deal too — a Trump Tower planned on the bombed ruins of Yugoslavia’s old military headquarters — that collapsed in December 2025 after Serbian officials were indicted over corruption tied to the project. That deal, at least, cost him something real: it died. Everywhere else, someone else bends the law, someone else forges the paper, someone else eats the political heat, the criminal referral, or the geopolitical blowback — and Kushner is back at the table, or the marina, either way, clean.

I watched thousands march through 95-degree heat for the seventy-fifth night in a row, chanting at a Prime Minister who didn’t come to the window. Nobody chanted Kushner’s name. Nobody needed to. He wasn’t the one who had to answer for it.