Trump had loyal and competent people surrounding him at WH … but those who were loyal were mostly incompetent and those who were competent were mostly not loyal to Trump but to othere agendas …
Navarro, a Wall Street swampster was no doubt competent and seems to have been loyal more than most, Jared Kosher was one of the incompetents with dubious loyalties …
Take credit for what worked. Shift the blame for what didn’t. Run to Daddy-in-law whenever the big, bad chief of staff got in his way. That was Jared Kushner’s modus operandi during the long four years I had to serve alongside the man most responsible for the loss of the Trump White House.
Kushner came to the D.C. swamp on the coattails of his wife as nothing more than a young and rich, run-of-the-mill liberal New York Democrat with a worldview totally orthogonal to the president he was supposed to serve. Yet, within the West Wing, Kushner considered himself to be the ultimate “Trump whisperer.”
In private, Jared would boast about how he had brought the president back from whatever he considered the brink to be that day—whether it was securing the southern border, leaving NAFTA, or slapping tariffs on China. Never mind that he was derailing, deterring, and delaying Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda in real-time and at great political and economic costs.
Jared’s “neuter the boss” role quickly became a source of friction between us. He believed that I, more than anyone inside the West Wing, could “rile up” the president to take actions that were, in fact, totally consistent with Trump’s central campaign promises. But as this particular Wall Street transactionalist liked to say (and it always made me cringe): “That was the campaign. This is reality.”
In the cold light of a January West Wing day, there was simply no other explanation than nepotism to account for how this decidedly unqualified Clown Prince wound up sitting as a modern-day Rasputin at the right hand of Trump.
Here’s a tongue-in-cheek sample day in the life of Kushner:
At daybreak, back channel his Chinese Communist Party handlers on the latest in trade negotiations and thereby weaken the bargaining position of United State Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer.
Midmorning, help Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman evade any responsibility for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and thereby send Secretary of State Mike Pompeo into yet another paroxysm of rage.
At noon, ping Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu on the latest in Mideast peace talks and thereby keep National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien like a mushroom in the dark heaped in Jared’s excrement (which doesn’t stink—or so we were told).
Midafternoon, he meets with his staff to discuss the latest developments in mismanaging the pandemic and to see what else they can screw up. At sunset, he calls the vice president’s Chief of Staff Marc Short to see what data they can manipulate and make it look like the pandemic is getting better. Afterward, he drops into the Oval Office for the fifth time that day to see the Boss and tell him how great his polls look.
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