I will never forget reading New York Times book critic Dwight Garner’s 2002 review of Jared Kushner’s loathsome memoir, Breaking History, because if you cull it down and paraphrase it, it becomes a perfect description of Kushner the person.
So I’ll attempt to use the magic of Garner’s wonderful wordsmithing.
Kushner is a soulless, mannequin-like vanity project. He is the ultimate political arsonist, happily burning down the very democratic foundations and institutional norms that he relies on to sustain his global grift.
His efforts on behalf of his equally grifting and crooked father-in-law are queasy-making money-grabbing stunts that feel exactly like watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo. He is a deeply uncomfortable, unnatural experience. He is superficial and self-serving.
Oh, there is so much more to say about Kushner, but column space prohibits me from expanding on my rewording of Garner’s poetry.
Kushner is nothing more than a spoiled real estate heir who got his job because he married Trump’s daughter before Trump did. I’m referring, of course, to Donald’s well-documented incestuous infatuation with Ivanka.
What business did he have negotiating nuclear disarmament with Iran? That sentence, however, gives it all away. Because his business is an illicit and, arguably, illegal one.
The original JCPOA nuclear deal was negotiated over years by the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia, and China, with nuclear physicists and non-proliferation experts, and ran to 159 pages.
Now, you tell me why a guy whose business dealings have frequently hovered near severe financial distress was sitting at a table yammering about nuclear weapons.
Iranian officials were reportedly confused when the White House kept sending Kushner and his partner Steve Witkoff, since neither has any background in nuclear policy. One former senior State Department official who participated in actual Iran nuclear negotiations said it plainly: “I’m not saying you need to be a diplomat to be a good negotiator. But you need to have some sense of history, and you need to know geography.”
If you base your assessment of Jared Kushner’s diplomatic chops and sense of history on those criteria, you can once again relegate him to dog-eye goo.
And since this deal involves enormous sums of money, Kushner’s association with companies in financial distress should instantly preclude his participation. The framework deal released, and presumably the one the prodigal whiz-kid helped cook up, would release up to $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets, authorize Iran to sell oil on global markets in U.S. dollars, and, if a final deal is reached, lift all sanctions on Iran entirely.
Energy analysts say Iran could ramp up exports to roughly 2 million barrels per day, one-third higher than before the conflict, potentially unlocking hundreds of billions of dollars for the Iranian regime. Iran’s total frozen assets abroad are estimated at somewhere between $124 billion and $167 billion.
From the looks of it, “negotiator” Kushner is giving away money fast and furiously, much like Saudi Arabia gives money to Kushner.
And just who in Iran will see that money? The Iranian people have lived under crushing poverty and religious authoritarianism for nearly half a century. The regime that runs Iran doesn’t build hospitals and schools with windfall money from the Kushner cash machine.
No, it funds proxy militias, builds missiles, and pays for the apparatus of repression that keeps its own citizens in line, and they will never see a dime of it. They never do. And J.D. Vance’s comments about turning over a “new leaf” in the relationship with Iran are as naive as…well, Jared Kushner!
I will wager money I don’t have that Jared is involved in all this wheeling and dealing because he is representing the interests of his father-in-law and two brothers-in-law, dunce Donny Jr. and dim-witted Eric.
It’s all so blatantly obvious, and no one is sounding the alarm.
Let’s be abundantly clear about why Kushner was really there, and that was to make sure the Trump family gets their cut.
Whether it’s reconstruction contracts, sweetheart investment deals, or some back-channel percentage of the billions being unlocked, Kushner is the family’s eyes on the money. He and Trump couldn’t care less about Iran’s nuclear program, its regime, or its people. They care about the cash and making sure some of it flows back to them. That’s the only reason he was in the room.
Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has garnered $6.16 billion in assets with an eye-popping (not eye-goo in this case) 99 percent of its funding derived from foreign nationals, including sovereign wealth funds operated by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion into Affinity, despite senior Saudi officials registering their own opposition, which was overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself. Only the dubious MBS would override his own financial experts to hand billions to a guy with a lousy investment track record.
Meanwhile, as Kushner purportedly represented the United States in negotiations with Iran, his private equity firm was simultaneously seeking to raise an additional $5 billion from foreign sources, and Affinity’s representatives had already met again with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
Rep. Jamie Raskin put it bluntly: “You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time. You cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.”
If Joe Biden had sent his son-in-law to negotiate a nuclear framework with Iran, Republicans would have whipped themselves into stroke-inducing frenzies. There would be unrelenting, hysterical screaming from the dog-eye-goos at Fox News.
Yet here we are. Jared gets to run all over the Middle East and meddle in nuclear deals, and gobble us cash simultaneously, and no one is stopping him.
Sen. Ron Wyden said it plainly last year about the malevolent misanthrope: “Jared Kushner makes up for his flaws as an investor by being a wildly corrupt appendage of his father-in-law’s wildly corrupt administration.”
Thoughtful words, for sure, but much too kind.
In the end, Kushner remains a soulless mannequin of pure vanity, a political squatter who burned down the guardrails of law and decency just to clear a path for his own enrichment, leaving the rest of us with the queasy-making task of watching something akin to a cat lick a dog’s eye goo as he squirrels away the money.