The photo accompanying the Forbes fanfic article says it all.
Over the past week, your daily “Donald Trump does an unimaginably bad thing” news items have spotlighted an interesting new character: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law (married, as you know, to Golden Child Ivanka). The conspiracy theories keep pouring in: Did Jared’s father pay off Harvard to get him in?! (Yes.) Are Jared and Ivanka using their newfound positions to further their own business interests?! (Come on; of course they are.) Is Jared The Boss Of The World now?!?!? (Maybe; he certainly holds huge sway over the decisions of the impulsive, self-indulgent emotional toddler who will soon become president.) The answers to these questions matter, but the reasons why he is extremely, extremely dangerous extend far beyond them. I’m aware that sounds like hyperbole. Stay with me.
Jared’s involvement in the national disaster we collectively refer to as “The Year 2016” has been particularly interesting on a personal level, because I know the guy pretty well. We were friends in college, and briefly dated a few years later, and I liked him a lot: I thought he was kind, and interesting, and have genuinely fond memories of him through the years. He’s the sort of guy who makes you feel like he’s really hearing you. He is, in a word, charming.
I say these things now because I have said them many times before; until very recently, I’ve never had a bad word to say about Jared. And that fact alone is enormously distressing, because it puts a fine point on why Jared’s recent prominence in the political sphere is so frightening.
First, let’s get The Harvard Issue out of the way. Jared’s (allegedly undeserved) admission to Harvard has been the focal point of headlines over the past couple of days thanks to a reveal by the author Daniel Golden that Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, donated 2.5 million dollars to the university in advance of Jared’s (otherwise highly unlikely) admission. Some of these articles have suggested that this means that Jared is not, in fact, especially intelligent. This is reductive and seriously besides the point. Jared is smart; certainly he was smart enough to be at Harvard. That doesn’t make it okay that his father paid to get him in. It speaks to a willingness to use power and money to get what you want, and is a pretty obvious precedent for Jared’s own recent decision-making process. The focus on whether he “deserved” to get into Harvard, however, is also a distraction.
Because the real question is this: Why do you think Jared just popped up out of more or less nowhere, suddenly revealed as the (cute!) (dimpled!) (and Jewish!) mastermind behind the circus sideshow that has played out under the guise of an election cycle? Why do you think we’re even talking about him? Are we finally seeing what’s really been going on these past many months?
We are not. We are seeing what Trump and his people want us to see: the fiction that the layers have been peeled back from this insane spectacle…and have revealed, at their core, nothing more terrible than a smart and capable young man who just so happens to have married Trump’s equally smart and capable daughter.
“Well,” one of my relatives said to me a week or so ago, “Isn’t this good news? I mean, Jared’s better than Trump, right?”
Putting aside for a moment the (previously) unthinkable idea of handing over even an iota of control over the United States to a man with literally zero political experience and massive interest in pursuing a personal agenda…oh wait, we just did that. But still: no. Jared Kushner may be politer; more refined of character; more careful with words, but he is not better than Trump. Take, as just one of many examples, his recent willingness to serve as a character witness for Steve Bannon (let those words sink in: a character witness for Steve Bannon): “He’s an incredible Zionist,” he told Forbes. “What I’ve seen from working together with him was somebody who did not fit the description that people are pushing on him. I choose to judge him based on my experience and seeing the job he’s done, as opposed to what other people are saying about him.”
Y’all, an Orthodox Jew is cool with Bannon. Shouldn’t we all be?!
Except Jared, you know how you don’t want to judge Bannon based on stuff you didn’t witness personally? That “stuff” includes decades of support for a white nationalist agenda. Like the kind that resulted in the deaths of your own family members. You don’t get to plug your ears and la-la-la away that fact because he seemed cool when you guys went out for hamburgers last week.
Look at the dimples! Look at the baby! Nothing more to see here, folks!
Jared’s closeness to Trump’s ear and his obvious willingness to set aside small things like morals and logic in favor of reductive myopia is scary. What is scarier, however, is what his prominence in Trump’s inner circle suggests to the public: it dissociates Trump from the circus act of his campaign (“he wasn’t even running it!”) while simultaneously lending it credence (“it was all a MASTER PLAN! They’re GENIUSES!”). And even worse: for the millions out there desperate for some ray of light to hold on to for these next four years – millions who, like my relative, are daring to dream that Jared’s “reveal” could be a positive thing – his presence at Trump’s side makes a Trump presidency seem far less like the global tragedy we’ve all been bracing for. If a charming young man (did we mention he’s Jewish?!) is behind all this, really: how bad could it possibly be?
I was recently talking on Facebook with another college friend about that Forbes “exclusive” – you know, the one that glamorized Jared’s achievements and virtually credited him with the Trump win in a display of scarily sycophantic journalism? Right, that one. My friend referred to it as “the sort of immediate revisionist history that would make any propagandist proud, recasting an ad hoc, chaotic campaign as some sort of sophisticated, ‘orchestrated’ operation, in which this scrappy young upstart disrupted the system and bested the old political hands. Plausible basis for a screenplay, perhaps, but it’s not reality.”
That, exactly.
I’ve heard a lot of people out there wondering whether the “nefarious” aspect of Jared’s involvement in Trump’s campaign is that he’ll try to use his proximity to the presidency to benefit his and his wife’s business endeavors. Of course he will. But that’s not the worst thing he’ll do; not even close. Jared’s appearance on the national stage is a calculated effort to make Trump’s election seem less unthinkable by introducing characters that appear normal by comparison…thereby making this entire sideshow seem normal as well.
And that, right there, is the most dangerous thing about Jared Kushner: the fact that he is putting a sane face on a situation that is anything but.
Jared, I have a strong suspicion that you’re not a regular Ramshackle Glam reader and are likely not going to come across this article unless you happen to be on the hunt for a tasty Thanksgiving recipe idea, but I’m going to say it straight to you anyway:
Jared, you want power. You’ve got it. You want people to respect you. I’m sure you have a lot of people respecting the hell out of you these days. You also want people to know your name, and to speak it with gravitas and awe. You will get both of those things; surely you already have. But I also want you to think, for just a moment, about how people will speak your name decades from now, when you are nothing more than a figure from the past. I want you to think about the history books that your great-grandchildren will read, because you, my friend, are going to be in them. And I think you know what they’re going to say.
