So It Looks Like Jared Kushner WON'T Be Saving Us After All
Democrats used to be able to delude themselves into thinking that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, or “Brangelina” as they are confusingly known, would have a moderating effect on the President. We told ourselves that they were different from the usual ghouls and hate-mongers Donald Trump surrounded himself with, your vampiric Steve Bannons and Roger Stones and Rudy Giuliani and various other terrible white men in the President’s circle.
They were young and continental and well-educated, and almost distressingly well-groomed, from a generation too culturally sensitive, or at least self-aware, to brag about grabbing women by their genitalia or gushing about how easy and fun it is to burst into dressing rooms when you own a teen beauty pageant. Before her father became an enduring source of humiliation for our nation and humanity as a whole, Ivanka enjoyed popularity across the political spectrum.
Ivanka’s brand, which she carefully nurtured, sold a sort of feminism lite, female empowerment devoid of ideology and edge, as commercial and calculating as the “Girl Power” promoted by the Spice Girls. Though Ivanka is the President’s daughter and Jared his Son-in-Law, it seemed like they were going to assume a parental role in the White House, that Ivanka was going to mother her tantrum-throwing man-baby of a father. They would be the adults in the room preaching compromise and caution to a President whose default setting is “half cocked and overflowing with incoherent rage.”
Donald Trump clearly favors Ivanka over her brothers Eric and Donald Jr. to a comic and disturbing extent. She is her father’s chosen one. Surely, she would be able to talk sense to him when he was in his habitual rages.
It seems safe now to assume that, like every other facet of Donald Trump’s presidency and administration, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have been an appalling disappointment bordering on a disaster.
This was made achingly apparent in a recent interview Kushner conducted with Axios that exposed the vacant, amoral emptiness at his core. Looking like a cross between a mannequin that gained sentience, and is none too happy about it, and an evil Max Fischer, the dead-eyed Kushner answered questions by not answering them, petulantly refusing to take responsibility for his deep complicity in so many of Trump’s unforgivable transgressions, particularly a super-close, nakedly mercenary and transactional relationship with a Saudi Arabian dictatorship with an unfortunate history of murdering American journalists when it suits their purposes.
Kushner’s appalling performance made it impossible to hold onto the adorable fantasy that this fair-haired prep school boy and his ostensibly impressive wife would save democracy from the heathens and vulgarians in Trump’s circle and also Trump himself.
In the end, it turns out that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are exactly like everyone around the President: greedy, cynical opportunists with no ideals, no ethics and no politics beyond those of power, personal advancement and ruthless, heartless, amoral self-interest.
Trump corrupts everyone and everything he touches but it helps the process considerably if he’s working with people like his daughter and son-in-law, who just needed a push and a nod to become their worst, most Trumpian selves.
Sad. Shame.
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