T. Belman. In other words, Kushner is a smuck. Although I knew he was a New York liberal and thus at odds with Trump’s agenda, I didn’t realize how he gummed up the works. When Biden succeeded in stealing the election, the Kushners abandoned Trump rather than stand by him in his efforts to reclaim the presidency. That really pissed me off.
I wish Navarro had explained how Kushner was “the man most responsible for the loss of the Trump White House”.
Jared Kushner did more damage to the presidency and the Trump agenda during his four year reign of error
By Peter Navarro, AM GREATNESS August 15, 2022
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.
Kushner would endlessly peddle this “the polls look great” steaming pile to whoever would listen, and it would be this single piece of utter Kushner bullshit that would contribute so much to the inertia and lack of urgency within both the West Wing and campaign headquarters.
Ultimately, the biggest failure of the 2020 election was the failure of the Trump campaign itself. The campaign went from the beautifully orchestrated Steve Bannon masterpiece in 2016, with 20 people on Trump Force One barnstorming flyover country, to the ugliest equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s beyond bloated Hindenburg of a campaign in just four years.
The construction of this Hindenburg was due entirely to the anything but dynamic duo of Brad Parscale (the putative campaign manager) and Kushner himself (the actual campaign manager). These two “dumb and dumber” political geniuses—Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey should play them in the movie version—squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on ridiculous baubles like Super Bowl ads and a massively bloated payroll.
One of the few staunch supporters of Trump in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, would write a $250,000 campaign contribution check. Imagine how Thiel felt when he realized his tech bucks were used to pay for less than two seconds of a 60-second, $10 million Super Bowl ad aired some 10 months before election day.
In the final weeks before November 3, the Trump campaign—the most well-funded in history—would have to pull its ad expenditures in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin because it was out of cash; and the Biden campaign would outspend Trump by about $75 million in this critical home stretch.
To this day, my old Boss still has no idea just how much damage Kushner/Rasputin did to the presidency and the Trump agenda during his four year reign of error at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The work of fiction Jared is now readying for publication is just more self-serving manure to shovel over the past and obscure our view of the damage.
Fortunately, if Trump makes it back to the White House, it will be a Kushner-free zone. Kushner has already disqualified himself from future White House employment by cashing in on his White House connections to fund his many entrepreneurial ventures.
@Peloni I wonder how much of this Trump has read and if so, his reaction. Was he blind-sided or did he make calculated tradeoffs? Either he was a wizard and master negotiator who thought outside the box or a befuddled emperor betrayed by his own ministers. Can’t have it both ways. (Unless, of course, one is a Marxist. That’s the beauty of looking at history dialectically, I can assure you from personal experience, :D)
Peloni,
I always suspected that President Trump had an achilles heel in his daughter Ivanka. I wonder how many here have a similar weak spot concerning Jared Kushner the Jew.
The “Trump Whisperer”… I imagine he was largely responsible for deparating the President from Navarro and Bannon, probably along with others. What was his role in getting Flynn dismissed? None of this sounds good — it sounds like a president vulnerable to the malevolent charms of the occupant of 666 Fifth Avenue.
@Peloni
Thanks for all that detail. I wasn’t aware of it.
@Ted
This is not the first time Navarro has made this statement, but he has released some support for this claim of which I can relate.
Navarro and Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute have eerily similar descriptions of Kushner’s destructive role in the Trump White House, particularly in the last year. It is claimed that Kushner set the “tone and tenor” of the Covid response from the Trump White House, including the devastation associated with the lockdowns. Navarro claims that Kushner and Pottinger(Deputy National Security Advisor who has his own rather interesting story) specifically brought Birx into the White House to manipulate Trump on their behalf. (link). The lockdowns were precisely the pretext upon which the mail in votes, the drop boxes and the judicial rewriting of election laws were based.
Navarro explains further, however, how Kushner was more directly associated with the election loss. He notes that the election theft was a failure of the Trump campaign to prepare for the fraud that we all saw coming and which Trump himself spoke about during every rally and most press conferences he held in 2020. Additionally, the campaign was warned by Dave Bossie, Corey Lewandowski, Cleta Mitchell, Sundance, and others to be prepared for the legal election challenge following the election itself. Kushner/Sapien/Clark answered by stating that they had “thousands of lawyers ready to roll in every state where there might be even a hint of a challenge”. In reality, what lawyers they did have were woefully ill equipped to face the challenge even in the 6 states where the fraud was most obviously apparent (ignoring for the moment, the judicial resolve to not consider the challenges). As Navarro notes in the above essay, “Kushner [was]…the actual campaign manager”, and therefore responsible for the failures of the campaign to prepare for the election fraud. When Dave Bossie, a veteran of the Bush v. Gore challenge as the congressional chief investigator, warned Kushner directly of the coming threat that they were not prepared to meet, Kushner chided him stating “Hey, Dave, we’ve got it covered. If election day is our biggest problem, we’re gonna be fine.” When Bossie pressed the issue further asserting “you guys aren’t ready”, Deputy campaign manager Justin Clark stated “We’ve got more attorneys than we could ever use, and we are prepared.”
Per Navarro, the destabilization of the Trump administration with Covid and the failures to prepare to face the fraud, were just the pre-show of the role played by Kushner after the election. Upto the election, Navarro states that he presumed that Kushner/Sapien/Clark were simply incompetent, but after the election he came to see “a possibly more malignant set of motives behind the failure…to mount an aggressive postelection legal challenge”.
Navarro states that the trio sat on a war chest of $70 million as the legal effort to challenge the fraud was struggling to find funds, and Kushner et al refused to release any “substantial” financial support towards this aim.
More than the finances, though, Kushner et al were sitting on a treasure trove of data that was desperately needed by the Trump election challenges, per Navarro. A fraud specialist company, called the Berkley Research Group, had been paid about a half a million dollars by the Trump campaign and Navarro claims that he had heard that their report contained “blockbuster results”, but, “as far as [Navarro] can gather, virtually none of their research has seen the light of day.”
I suspect that Navarro has more to report on the Berkley Research Group than this, as it seems somewhat thin in my opinion, to be honest. Navarro has a new book out on the election theft, but I have not read this latest book as of yet, so perhaps there is more on this and other issues related to Kushner in this new volume of his reminisces. In any event, this is the broad picture Navarro relates surrounding Kushner’s vital role in bringing Trump down.
[All quotes from Navarro’s Trump Time book or the War Room episode linked above]
So is this 2016 article a lie?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/