By Monica Showalter, AMERICAN THINKER
The media has been having a field day writing about the supposed ‘chaos’ and ‘turmoil’ engulfing the West Wing staff, focusing on an emerging rivalry between White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, and senior advisor Jared Kushner. It’s like they’ve found a who’s-up-who’s-down, who’s-been-whited-out-of-the-picture Kremlinology of their own, to keep themselves busy.
But instead of giving them the game-of-thrones drama they wanted, President Trump just stepped in and told his boys to ‘knock it off,’ focus on his agenda and play nice. And not just play nice, but ‘make up,’ too. He wanted their reconciliation to be real.
It’s very reassuring to the rest of us, because let’s face it, we like them both, and don’t want to read about them fighting, either.
It shows a fascinating leadership style – one derived from something any ordinary American can recognize, that of the good father. It comes to mind because Trump’s secret weapon with voters has always been in the evidence that he’s a very good father – there hasn’t been a lot of commentary on this, but many voters have noted that with all his reputation for bombast and well-known his tumultuous love life, he seems to have done something very right in raising such fine children. Five kids, a celebrity spotlight, and ALL of five them turned out well? He’s obviously done something very right.
He’s a good father. A good father of course, is very good at telling boys to ‘knock it off’ and break up fights. It looks like that’s what happened here.
And that’s a good thing because the differences between Kushner and Bannon are real enough. Kushner was a registered Democrat for most of his life, an unusually successful businessman, and apparently not all that involved with political ideas. Bannon is another story – he does have a Boston working class Democratic background too but the veteran executive of Breitbart News is known to be an economic nationalist, and like Breitbart himself, defiantly means to break the corrupted culture of the establishment. Both men played indispensible roles in engineering President Trump’s black swan presidential victory last November.
For those of us on the outside, both men are amazingly competent people who could contribute hugely to the success of the Trump administration, whatever their differences.
Let’s remember who these people are and why we like them both, Here’s something from Kushner’s Wikipedia:
According to Eric Schmidt, “Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election, Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”[6] Eric Schmidt said, “Jared understood the online world in a way the traditional media folks didn’t. He managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won. That’s a big deal. Remember all those articles about how they had no money, no people, organizational structure? Well, they won, and Jared ran it.”[6] Peter Thiel said “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”[6]
Here’s something from Bannon’s:
In 2004, Bannon made a documentary about Ronald Reagan titled In the Face of Evil. Through the making and screening of this film, Bannon was introduced to Reagan’s War author Peter Schweizer and publisher Andrew Breitbart, who would later describe him as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.[34] He was involved in the financing and production of a number of films, including Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, The Undefeated, and Occupy Unmasked.
…
In 2007, Bannon wrote an eight-page treatment for a new documentary called Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Facism (sic) in America. The outline describes Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America as “cultural jihadists“. Bannon wrote the outline himself, and it labels the Washington Post, the New York Times,NPR, “Universities and the Left”, the “American Jewish Community“, the ACLU, the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, and the White House as “enablers” of a covert mission to establish an Islamic Republic in the United States.[48] In 2011, Bannon spoke at the “Liberty Restoration Foundation” in Orlando, Florida about the Economic Crisis of 2008, the Troubled Assets Relief Program and their impact in the origins of the Tea Party movement, while also discussing his films Generation Zero and The Undefeated.[49]
Bannon was executive chair and co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, where he helped orchestrate the publication of Breitbart News senior editor-at-large[50] Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash,[34][51] from its founding in 2012 until he left in August 2016.[52] For the years 2012 through 2015, he received between $81,000 and $100,000 each year; the organization reported that he worked an average of 30 hours per week for the organization.[52] He has also worked as vice president of Cambridge Analytica‘s board, a data-analytics firm owned largely by the Mercer family[53]; said family are also co-owners of Breitbart News.[54]
The two are people of talent. Trump seems to be a master at spotting that, and must believe that ideological differences probably aren’t that irreconcilable among family (in this case political family) in the long run. Trump knows that people are complex. He also knows that sometimes, more than one strain of ideas can exist in the same head, which is why people can find common ground if they are disciplined enough.
One Trump insider has pointed out to us that there’s an even more critical factor the media always miss: all the talk of conflicting ideas in the Trump administration is irrelevant as a matter of fact because the only opinion that matters is that of Trump himself. Want to understand what U.S. policy is on anything? Watch Trump’s press conferences, that is policy. Anything else being heard is white noise.
That info makes it clearer to the rest of us why he wants his team to get along, whatever their differences. It takes a special kind of leadership to do that – a recognizable one – the one of Big Daddy coming over there to break up the kids’ fights. But it may just work.
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“Kushner was a registered Democrat for most of his life, an unusually successful businessman, and apparently not all that involved with political ideas.”
Ridiculous assertion about the former Publisher of the NY Observer.
They keep trying to make a joke out of this genius. Aside from being a long-time supporter of the settlement of Beit-El in Samaria, as was Trump, he is a 3rd Gen Bielski partisan and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Observer
http://observer.com/2016/04/new-york-citys-political-power-50/
“Dear Democrats: Nobody Cares About Your Feelings
Conservatives are much more clear-eyed—and that’s why they win so often
By Cliston Brown • 01/16/17 8:00am”
http://observer.com/2017/01/democrats-need-to-learn-how-to-win-elections/
” In January 2013, Kushner hired a new editor-in-chief, Ken Kurson. Kurson had been a consultant to Republican political candidates in New Jersey[41] and one-time member of Rudy Giuliani’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential primary campaign.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kushner
“From the outset of the presidential campaign of his father-in-law Donald Trump, Kushner was the architect of Trump’s digital, online and social media campaigns, enlisting talent from Silicon Valley to run a 100-person social-media team dubbed “Project Alamo”.[8] Kushner has also helped as a speechwriter and was tasked with working to establish a plan for Trump’s White House transition team should he be elected.[54] He was for a time seen as Trump’s de facto campaign manager, succeeding Corey Lewandowski, who was fired in part on Kushner’s recommendation in June 2016.[55] He has been intimately involved with campaign strategy, coordinating Trump’s visit in late August to Mexico and he was believed to be responsible for the choice of Mike Pence as Trump’s running mate.[8][56] Kushner’s “sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign” has been described as “the locus of his father-in-law’s presidential bid”.[57]
According to Eric Schmidt, “Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election, Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”[6] Eric Schmidt said, “Jared understood the online world in a way the traditional media folks didn’t. He managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won. That’s a big deal. Remember all those articles about how they had no money, no people, organizational structure? Well, they won, and Jared ran it.”[6] Peter Thiel said “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”[6]
On July 5, 2016, Kushner wrote an open letter in the New York Observer addressing the controversy around a tweet from the Trump campaign containing allegedly antisemitic imagery. He was responding to his own paper’s editorial by Dana Schwartz criticizing Kushner’s involvement with the Trump campaign.[58] In the letter, Kushner wrote, “In my opinion, accusations like “racist” and “anti-Semite” are being thrown around with a carelessness that risks rendering these words meaningless.”[59]
Trump presidential transition[edit]
During the presidential transition, Kushner was said to be his father-in-law’s “confidant”[60] and one of Donald Trump’s closest advisors, even more so than Trump’s four adult children.[61] Trump was reported to have requested the top-secret security clearance for him to attend the Presidential daily intelligence briefings as his staff-level companion, along with General Mike Flynn who already had the clearance prior to his resignation.[62]
The Washington Post, New York Times and numerous other national news authorities explain Kushner was an influential factor behind the firing of New Jersey governor Chris Christie as head of the transition team, as well as the dismissal from the Donald Trump transition team of anyone connected to Christie.[63][64] A source familiar with the Trump campaign explained that “Jared doesn’t like Christie. He’s always held [the prosecution of his father, Charles Kushner] against Christie.”[65] Kushner told Forbes that the reports that he was involved in Christie’s dismissal were false: “Six months ago Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together. The media has speculated on a lot of different things, and since I don’t talk to the press, they go as they go, but I was not behind pushing out him or his people.”[66]
Senior Advisor to President Trump[edit]
Japanese PM Shinz? Abe, Jared Kushner, Ivanka, and President Trump, November 17, 2016
In January 2017, Kushner was named a Senior White House Advisor to President Trump. Kushner’s appointment was questioned on the basis of a 1967 anti-nepotism law.[67] On January 20, 2017 the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating “the President may appoint relatives to his immediate staff of advisors.”[68][69] Kushner was sworn in on January 22, 2017.[70]
Trump put Kushner in charge of brokering peace in Israeli–Palestinian conflict as well as making deals with foreign countries, although in what way he is in charge is unclear.[71][72][73] Furthermore, after Donald Trump became President-elect, Kushner and his wife met with Japanese Prime Minister and other Japanese officials while his wife was conducting a licensing deal between her namesake clothing brand and a Japanese government-owned company.[74] His wife sat in on a meeting between her father, then President-elect Donald Trump and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.[75] In February 2017, his wife Ivanka Trump was a surprise attendee at the Chinese Embassy’s New Year’s party.[76] In late March 2017 he was also given the new role of leading the “White House Office of American Innovation”.[77][78]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kushner
And, much as I respect and agree with Bannon, why does this former Goldman Sachs Executive dress and shave like a derelict?
On a lighter note, I am reminded of the liberal catechism in response to the urging that they get along and play nice:
“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”
Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts On Common Things
“These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):
1. Share everything.
2. Play fair.
3. Don’t hit people.
4. Put things back where you found them.
5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
7. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody.
8. Wash your hands before you eat.
9. Flush.
10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11. Live a balanced life – learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.
12. Take a nap every afternoon.
13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Stryrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.” ”
– Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2399046-all-i-really-need-to-know-i-learned-in-kindergarten