by Rick Wilson
[CALL WAITING TONE]
HANNITY: Is that you or me?
TRUMP: You. Who is it?
HANNITY: Michael Cohen.
TRUMP: Again? Are you gonna take it?
HANNITY: Nah. He thinks you’re mad at him.
TRUMP: I told him I’d pardon him. I just didn’t say when.
HANNITY: I’m surprised he didn’t flip for Mueller and testify.
TRUMP: He’s loyal. Like-a-dog loyal.
HANNITY: He’s loyal, but fifteen years is a long stretch for a guy like Michael.
[CALL WAITING TONE]
HANNITY: Jesus, this guy is persistent.
TRUMP: God, I know, right? Hey, Sean . . . how did Cohen smuggle a cell phone into a Federal prison?
HANNITY: You don’t want to know. You really, really don’t want to know, but it starts with stretching your . . .
[SIGNAL LOST]
11
* * *
THE TRUMP FAMILY SYNDICATE
TRUMP’S DYNASTIC ASPIRATIONS WERE CLEAR from the moment his White House started to take shape. Far more inclined to view themselves as a royal family than any other presidential clan in history, including the Kennedy lot, Trump pushed to have his family embedded in the core of government. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner would take central roles in his court.
In the minds of his fanatics, the Trumps are a royal family, with everything but titles of nobility, and I have to imagine he thought at least once about having White House Counsel Don McGahn look hard at Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution. Last time I checked, Clause 8, which bars titles of nobility, doesn’t have a Trump exception, but honestly, we’re so far past normal that nothing is out of the range of the possible.
A popular meme in the early going of the Trump era was a projected Trump presidency timeline: Donald 2016–2024, Ivanka 2024–2032, Donald Jr. 2032–2040, Eric 2040–2048, and Barron 2048–2056.
I know what you’re thinking: this kind of idea is errant silliness, a mere trifle some Trump fanboy dreamed up. Perhaps, but it speaks to a larger point about the fanaticism and intensity of his followers. Even the Kennedy clan at least pretended their raw ambition was at some level about public service. The argument that these gimcrack royals represent the future of American politics would be laughable if it wasn’t 2018. Sure, the whole thing seems absurd, but this is the kind of ludicrous idea that gets stuck in the heads of people who believe Donald Trump was a titan of business based on reality television, and the intensity of loyalty to Trump has become something decoupled from what was a small-d democratic through-line in our political culture since the founding of the Republic.
Let’s set aside the future of a country where Donald the Unready is succeeded by the Shoe Queen, Donald the Oily, Eric the Unready, and Boy King Barron. It would end with Habsburg jaw and misery. The current Trump family enterprise will almost certainly fall of its own weight, but in the meantime, the ethically dubious practices, incompetence, and moral and political failings of the Trump family disprove Donald Trump’s assertion that he has the best genes, believe me.
The degree to which this president has monetized the presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics. Unlike every president in modern history, Trump didn’t place his assets in a blind trust.
He’s used his position as president as a marketing tool for his hotels and country clubs in Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, and Doral, Florida. He’s made his downtown DC hotel a go-to place for foreign and domestic lobbyists to rent suites of rooms at ludicrously jacked-up prices and to rent ballrooms for events. It’s not just that it’s corrupt; it’s shabby and low corruption. If you’re going to sell your influence as president, it needs to have a “b,” not an “m,” in front of the -illions.
JARED AND IVANKA
Trump’s desire to have Ivanka close at hand in Washington is creepy but explicable. She’s the least slow-witted of his adult children, she looks the part of Trump Princess, and he likes her. A lot. Just ask any of his various porn star, model, actress, escort girlfriends; Trump’s pattern of using the worst pickup line of all time—“You remind me of my daughter Ivanka”—was a consistent theme in his pillow talk. After writing that sentence, I spent a few minutes watching puppy videos just to clear my mental palate.
Like the rest of the Trump enterprise, Ivanka’s claim to fame was a reflection of Daddy’s celebrity. Her “business” was a clothing and accessory line with delusions of fashion grandeur manufactured by Asian sweatshop labor. Sold first at Nordstrom, then in midpriced stores in dying shopping malls, it seemed destined for QVC even before the election. She was a triumph of branding and bullshit, and in that regard was a perfect fruit dropping from the Trump tree. She was the smart, accomplished, polished Trump scion. For a hot minute in 2016 we even had a brief flurry of pieces on “the Ivanka Voter.”
The Ivanka Voter is not the stereotypical Trump voter. She doesn’t have a Trump sign in her yard, either because it would get egged or she doesn’t want to fight with the neighbors. She knows all about Ivanka’s clothing line and brand, and thinks she would be great in the White House, because she’s classy and sophisticated, polished and well-spoken, all the things her father is not. She’s very clear that there are things that Trump says that she doesn’t agree with. She does not think of herself as racist. She describes herself as “socially moderate.”1
It was one more triumph of branding, wishful thinking, and willful suspension of disgust. Whether Ivanka was a secret weapon for her odious father with suburban women is still a matter of deeper political analysis, but there was clearly an explicit message from Jared and Ivanka to their Manhattan friends: they would temper the infamously mercurial Trump.2 They would be the Don Whisperers, walking him back from that grunting, vulgarian populism that for their friends on the Upper West Side was so repellent to people who sent their kids to Dalton and attended the Met Ball.
It seemed like nothing but upsides for the ambitious couple. Jared would be the master of the universe; Ivanka would be a smoother, more palatable Trump, extending and expanding the brand, and the Trump empire while she was at it.
But the curse of her father struck Jared and Ivanka before they’d even crossed the Beltway.
In a different world, the adult daughter of a sane, human president would be in a position to make a difference in policy, politics, and the unseen but vital Washington social scene. Before you make a “This Town” joke, there’s a deep, generational truth here: outsiders don’t understand how to run the government and navigate the demimonde of connections, power brokers, insiders, smart guys, money men and women, and inside players of Washington.
You don’t have to like that this world exists; it does, and denying it’s real is like denying fish swim and birds fly. Sometimes it’s petty, absurd, and full of high school drama, only with security details and drivers, but it’s also the secret ad-hocracy outsiders glimpse and revile but simply don’t understand. A million pissy jokes about “Washington cocktail parties” never get old for the people who actually hold and attend Washington cocktail parties. (And no, drinking Jell-O shots at the Breitbart Embassy doesn’t count.)
It went without saying that Washington was cautious about the Trump family from the beginning, but there was an early, eager bubble of speculation that Jared and Ivanka were the keys to cracking the Establishment wide open. But even though Jared and Ivanka (I refuse to use the common portmanteau of their names) scanned differently than many of the “burn down DC” crowd in Trump’s orbit, they failed to make it in Washington.
If Ivanka had been under the wing of a Sally Quinn, Juleanna Glover, or Tammy Haddad, or, in another era, a Muffie Brandon or Evangeline Bruce, her introduction to Washington society would have been altogether smoother. Instead, the golden children of Trump got the receiving end of a NQOC whisper and were sent into the darkness. They could have
learned that the numinous cloud of Washington’s secret life wasn’t there just to keep people out; it was there to connect people within. Not understanding Washington was allowed; not trying to understand it was dumb.
Henry Kissinger had seen this play out before: “This fortress mentality, which was to have such a corrosive effect on the entire [Nixon] Administration, showed itself in many ways. The team was temperamentally unable, for instance, to exploit the opportunities of Washington’s social life for oiling the wheels of national politics. . . . There is no need to expend effort to crash this charmed circle; membership—or at least its availability—is nearly automatic; but so is the ultimate exclusion.”3
Instead, she and Jared went from the putative DC power couple of the Trump Dynasty to an afterthought. As Margaret Carlson put it, “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump came to Washington seeking power and glamour. They’ll leave with neither.”4 Her few forays into policy, including a family leave plan with a blockbuster price tag, had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.
Jared was another matter.
Looking more like a court eunuch than a crown prince, everything about Jared appears and sounds soft, feminine, bereft of ideas or edges. He looks as if he was grown in a laboratory to deliberately not give offense. It took months before he spoke aloud to reporters in front of cameras, and his whisper-soft delivery didn’t scream competence and strength, which was ironic since Trump had named Jared Minister with All the Portfolios.
It was screamingly obvious from day one that Jared Kushner needed three things in this life: a way to get out from underneath the monstrous debt load of his family’s white elephant property on 666 Fifth Avenue, some tangible accomplishment in his life to push him into a tier of Manhattan and national business prominence, and, finally, an exit strategy from the Trump orbit.
It was an early tell for Washington observers that the Trump White House was going to turn into a five-alarm shitshow when Jared’s portfolio went from being First Son-in-Law to, well, everything. Kushner was placed in charge of so many White House domains it was hard to imagine a platoon of world-class executives even making a dent in them.
Jared was going to fix the Middle East peace process, which has gone about as swimmingly as you might expect. The stalemate is as intractable as ever, and Jared’s tricky play to help the Saudis’ shenanigans with Qatar brought up endless questions about his side hustle of begging Middle Eastern petro-billionaires for bridge loans to save 666 Fifth Avenue.
He was given the thankless task of reviving diplomatic relations with Mexico (you know, the people paying for the Wall), all while his father-in-law continued to rave on an almost daily basis about the dire threats of Mexicans coming to the United States to work and threatening to end the North American Free Trade Agreement.
He was inexplicably given the China portfolio, which delighted the Chinese almost beyond words. Kushner started taking meetings with the Chinese ambassador to the United States without staff, intelligence briefers, or China specialists. A brutal New Yorker piece by Adam Entous and Evan Osnos captured one of the many problems with Jared that led to his downfall as a White House power player:
Kushner often excluded the government’s top China specialists from his meetings with Cui, a slight that rankled and unnerved the bureaucracy. “He went in utterly unflanked by anyone who could find Beijing on a map,” a former member of the National Security Council said. Some officials who were not invited to Kushner’s sessions or briefed on the outcomes resorted to scouring American intelligence reports to see how Chinese diplomats described their dealings with Kushner. Other U.S. officials spoke to Cui directly about the meetings. Kushner was “their lucky charm,” the former N.S.C. member said. “It was a dream come true. They couldn’t believe he was so compliant.”5
Of course, in one of the biggest domestic challenges facing America, Trump charged Jared with ending the opioid crisis. Luckily, no one’s getting black-market fentanyl, so that’s good. Oh. Wait.
And what veteran suffering from long treatment delays, PTSD, and injuries from our wars abroad didn’t feel a surge of optimism when Donald Trump put Jared, veteran of the Manhattan Real Estate Wars and the Battle of Turtle Bay, in charge of fixing the Veterans Administration?
He also ran the Office of American Innovation, charged with reinventing government and making it (to use Washington’s usual, trite cliché) run like a business. This office is rebooted every administration, and Jared was probably no more or less disastrous than any of its prior leaders. If Jared ever does decide to clean up government magically, one hopes he knows enough not to model the reformed U.S. government on a Trump business.
Ironically, Trump also tasked Jared with reforming the criminal justice system, an area where he should pay very, very close attention given his alleged use of his government office and requesting classified intelligence to help seek loans for his family business.6 Jared will not thrive in the Big House, and I’m guessing he’ll be traded for cigarettes the first day unless he shows some previously undetected skill with a shiv.
Whether it was Kushner taking on jobs and issues he lacked the knowledge, bandwidth, and competence to execute, or Trump simply picking a family member out of loyalty, Kushner’s role as an advisor to the president was marked by a chain of inept decisions that led the White House deeper and deeper into a mire of their own making.
Jared and Ivanka couldn’t win; the Washington political and social elites wanted to help them. They saw them as a pair of reasonable, centrist, New York sophisticates who could moderate and polish Donald Trump. The rest of the White House, Trump’s outside advisors, and the Trump-right media saw them as traitors to the cause almost from the start. Jared didn’t help his case by giving Trump one piece of bad advice after another.
“Jared is the worst political adviser in the White House in modern history,” longtime Trump advisor and full-time lunatic Sam Nunberg said. “I’m only saying publicly what everyone says behind the scenes at Fox News, in conservative media, and the Senate and Congress.”
Imagine that. How could two cossetted, elite children of wealth who had lived their entire beautiful lives at Manhattan’s pinnacle misread the situation in Washington, DC, involving intelligence, the Justice Department, legal jeopardy, and Russian influence? Their judgment about absolutely everything was comically terrible from the very start.
Among the most controversial elements of Jared’s Lord of Misrule period at the White House was the firing of James Comey, the FBI director and bête noire of Donald Trump in the early days of the administration. By all accounts, it was Jared Kushner, the Metternich of Barneys, who came up with the genius plan of firing Comey. “Let’s just fire the beloved, longtime FBI director whom everyone in Washington views as an ethical stalwart and a man of pure integrity! What could go wrong, Mr. President?”
Comey’s firing was both the peak of Jared and Ivanka’s power and the most cataclysmically stupid political move they could have made. Their strategic vision stretched for about the next five minutes, and they had no idea how the Comey firing would reverberate through Washington, the Justice Department, and the FBI.
Jared also found himself in a constant state of embarrassment when he was forced to revise his government security and financial disclosure forms not once, not twice, but dozens of times. Nothing says “I’m clean as a whistle” like forgetting to disclose millions in assets and dozens of banking relationships. He was sued over it, naturally.7
When news broke that Jared, along with Don Jr., was a participant in the infamous Trump Tower meeting where Team Trump was offered the dirt on Hillary Clinton, Jared became a more visible target of Robert Mueller. Of course, the clown-car conspiracy of the Trump team left a deep electronic and paper trail when meeting with Russian lawyers, former intelligence officers, and fixers. This was in addition to Kushner’s meetings with Russian bankers (“Have I told you about this fabulous investment opportunity in my family’s building at 666 Fifth Avenue?”) and the Russian amb
assador and his connections to the Trump campaign’s Russia-juiced social media campaign and Cambridge Analytica.
If he wasn’t the president’s son-in-law, he’d never get even a Secret clearance, much less be read in to the President’s Daily Brief, the holiest of holies in the intelligence world. Hell, if he wasn’t the president’s son-in-law, he’d be happily back in the comforts of Manhattan, swimming in a sea of red ink and fellow travelers in the world of real estate.
Steve Bannon, a man who is as grizzled as Kushner is fastidious, had no compunction against burning Jared and Ivanka from the moment they walked into the White House. Bannon leaked story after story of Jared’s incompetent decision making and his role as resident globalist cuck shill. (Y’all, that’s Steve saying Jared is a J-e-w, if you didn’t guess.)
Bannon turned his flying monkey minions at Trumpbart against Kushner early, with headline after headline blasting Kushner in all the usual Breitbartian code words. Although Kushner survived Bannon, the damage was done.8 Headlines and stories called the couple “West Wing dems” and painting them as anathema to the Trump base on issues like immigration and gay rights. Bannon kept shoving the knife in, directing his writers to produce headlines like “Five Times Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Vacationed During a Crisis” and “Ivanka Trump Helped Push Steve Bannon Out of the White House” to their usual impact on the Trump-right echo chamber: panic, fury, and jacked-up outrage.
Perhaps Jared’s most persistent nemesis was the notorious loon Roger Stone. A fixture of the Trump universe since Jared was visiting his father in prison, Stone had drifted in and out of Trump’s orbit over the years and within a few weeks of Trump’s taking office was hammering Jared in public. On Infowars, Roger Stone and Alex Jones tore into Kushner with abandon not long after the Mueller probe was announced: “Jared Kushner, perhaps the one presidential aide who cannot be fired, is now in regular text message communications with Joe Scarborough. Many of the anti–Steve Bannon stories that you see, the themes that you see on Morning Joe, are being dictated by Kushner. And while Mr. Kushner’s plate is very full with Middle Eastern peace and the China visit, and so on, in this case I think he is dis-serving the president.”9
