Emily Jane Fox writes in Vanity Fair that President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner has assembled a “dream team” of “lawyers, P.R. people, and advisers” to “disseminate his message or wield power from behind the scenes.”
From Vanity Fair:
On Monday afternoon, shortly after he delivered a closed-door testimony to Congress regarding his interactions with Russian officials, Jared Kushner huddled in a governmental office with a select group of advisers, including newly appointed communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who once likened the scion to Alexander Hamilton. Kushner may be President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, but he also commands a sprawling empire of his own. Not only does Kushner oversee the Office of American Innovation, a veritable government-within-the government that helps him manage his seemingly limitless portfolio, which extends from negotiating peace in the Middle East to resolving the country’s opioid crisis, but he is also a pillar in the so-called globalist wing of the White House. This large infrastructure has generally facilitated Kushner’s ability to disseminate his message or wield power from behind the scenes. But on this Monday, the Kushner deep state was getting ready to put the boss out there, front and center, to create their own narrative on a day in which a negative one could easily have been written for them.
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Kushner is frequently derided for his inexperience in government, but a number of people I’ve interviewed from his past career as a publisher-cum-real-estate-executive have frequently pointed out that he is the first to admit when he does not know what he needs to know, and never hesitates to seek out expert advice. It helps when his rolodex includes media moguls, heads of state, and titans of technology and business.
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Kushner and Ivanka have repeatedly said that they left their lucrative, comfortable lives in New York to move to Washington and serve in the White House in order to make sure their father was the most successful president he could be. None of them probably anticipated that the administration would be mired, stalled, and crippled by a criminal investigation that would call its legitimacy into question and potentially implicate the Trump family and associates. What started out as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to serve the country, and wield the sort of power that real-estate heirs usually could only fantasize about, quickly turned into an exercise in self-preservation. While Kushner’s experiences running his family business and a weekly newspaper may not have prepared him to run the upper echelons of government, they did prepare him for a situation in which he would need to defend himself and cover his own behind, even if it came at the expense of his in-laws. That is something he knows how to do by heart.
Read the rest here.
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