Jared Kushner did more damage to the presidency and the Trump agenda during his four year reign of error at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than anyone.

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.”

Jared’s “neuter the boss” role quickly became a source of friction between us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/15/the-clown-prince-of-pennsylvania-avenue/