Former President Donald Trump’s ascendancy was a rebuke of American dynasties as he buried Jeb Bush in the 2016 primary and then defeated 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election. But the former president seems keen to make his family a new one.
Despite never previously lived in Florida, Ivanka Trump was briefly touted as a potential primary competitor for Sen. Marco Rubio’s seat. Lara Trump, whose pre-2016 professional experience consisted of producing a tabloid TV show, is seriously considering running for a North Carolina Senate seat in 2022. And evidently, Trump’s inner circle endorses this.
Meadows: We will see the start of planning for the next administration and I can tell you, the people that are at the top of that list, all of them have Trump as their last name pic.twitter.com/69DMdyFSOO
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 26, 2021
But the grand irony is that in four years in the White House, the only Trump who was ever effective and useful in a position of government power was Jared Kushner — technically not a Trump at all.
Ah yes, that gawky Jersey boy whose billionaire daddy bought his way into Harvard University and whose billionaire daddy-in-law brought him into the White House defied every ruthless joke we made at his expense. Remember how much we laughed when Kushner said he could bring peace to the Middle East because he “read 25 books” about it? Remember how much we laughed when this silver spoon society boy said he’d get criminal justice reform done after former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie locked up his father for, among other things, extorting his sister?
Kushner proved us all wrong.
Ivanka Trump split her time between uselessly playing dress-up at the G-20, failing to get her father to log off Twitter, and trying to unseat Melania Trump as the de facto first lady. (Nice try, but no.) At her worst, she was actively harmful. Whether it was sobbing to daddy to bomb Syria because look at the children or browbeating Republicans into passing paid-leave bills that would be even more disastrous for women in the workplace than they would be for the national debt, Ivanka Trump proved herself every bit to be the Democrat she always was.
In contrast, Kushner didn’t love hamming it up with Sean Hannity or headlining Turning Point USA conferences like his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. or the rest, but while we were mocking him, he was getting things done. When the former president still wasn’t sold by the proposed First Step Act, Kushner played him like a fiddle, bringing in his favorite type of spokesperson to seal the deal: a hot woman, in the form of Kim Kardashian. (She’s just another example of a person everyone underestimated.)
Back in 2017, we had another round of guffaws after Henry Kissinger, a literal war criminal who has somehow retained his noblesse in neoliberal circles, dissed Kushner with the most intentionally milquetoast praise for Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Three years later, more than half of all diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and Arab nations came from the Trump administration because Kushner, with his 25 books, and his careerlong consigliere Avi Berkowitz brokered the Abraham Accords and enhanced relations with the (slowly) liberalizing Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies.
Iran is now so isolated that even Europe doubts that the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement can be revived. Kushner didn’t merely disprove the disastrous Obama doctrine. He disproved decades of a broken, bipartisan foreign policy consensus promulgated by everyone from Kissinger to former President George W. Bush.
In a sane world, and ideally one in which his father-in-law didn’t leave the presidency by inciting an armed mob to storm Congress and rob President Biden of his electoral victory, the current president could have theoretically kept Kushner on, even as a lower level adviser on politics in the Middle East. After all, even Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have conceded that the Abraham Accords marked a serious accomplishment and a step in the right direction. But that’s not the world we live in.
Kushner is not one of the Trumps beloved by the base. He doesn’t put himself out there, trolling on Twitter and mouthing off at every opportunity. But he gets the last laugh.
