In an old country song, the singer knows his lover has been unfaithful. He just doesn’t know how luridly, flamboyantly, incessantly unfaithful. “How many, how many, I wonder, but I really don’t want to know,” he laments. Republicans must be feeling a similar dread as they contemplate the spreading stain engulfing the Trump administration. How many, how many are implicated, they may wonder. But they really don’t want to find out.
In the latest episode of this telenovela, Jared Kushner has taken his turn on the hot seat. Many have been taken in by superficial aspects of this princeling. He is quiet, polite, neatly turned out, has dimples so it was assumed by the naive that he was a moderating influence on his father-in-law, the mad king.
In fact, Kushner is far from as squeaky clean as he appears. Yes, he has Harvard and NYU degrees, but classmates describe him as a mediocre student at these institutions whose matriculation was greased by a cumulative $5.5 million in donation’s from his felonious father.
And Kushner is actually an acolyte, a willing henchman in this White House version of the Court of the Borgias. Like Trump, Jared’s father is a crooked real estate tycoon. Unlike Trump, Kushner failed to wriggle out of his crimes — including illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. He served 14 months in federal prison and paid $500,000 in fines.
Close observers of the Kushner saga believe the lesson Jared took from his father’s downfall was not to be honest, but to not get caught and to get even with your enemies. So, since Chris Christie had a hand in jailing Kushner pere, he and everyone friendly to him have been banished from the Trump orbit by Jared.
But in a telling glimpse of the Kushner style, when Christie was caught in the act of punishing a political opponent by blocking traffic from his town, Jared sent Christie a note congratulating him on a nifty bit of payback.
When Trump was young he sought out a mentor on how to succeed in Manhattan rather than in his father’s Queens. That was Roy Cohn, the ruthless, implacable,vicious attorney who taught him to lie, stonewall, litigate but never to settle. When Jared sought mentors to help him succeed beyond his father’s New Jersey habitat, he chose the piratical media mogul Rupert Murdock and Trump, who made fortune at the expense of suppliers, customers and lenders. Thus, Jared’s rise amounts to a sort of satanic version of the apostolic succession.
Now Jared appears to be up to his neck in the rising slime of the Trump famiglia. He lied about his Russian contacts to get his security clearance. He had secret dealings with Vladimir Putin’s corrupt banker, whose institution is the subject of U.S. Government sanctions. He bizarrely sought to establish a secure communications channel with Moscow via the Russian embassy in order to prevent American intelligence services from knowing what passed between the Administration and Putin.
Clearly none of this was undertaken on Jared’s initiative but on the orders of his Don. He is a consigliere who serves a master. And in this role he has encouraged Trump’s worst impulses, telling him to fire FBI director Comey, for instance, because he wouldn’t pledge his loyalty. He has also encouraged Trump to ignore the press because “if they had any power your approval rating would be at one percent.”
Like Trump himself and Ivanka, Jared has business interests that conflict with his role as a public servant. It is not farfetched to suppose that he too is wetting his beak by profiting from the opportunities his position presents. However, now that Robert Mueller is on the case, he may wind up like his father and Al Capone before him, hoist on his own cupidity. The special prosecutor has the power to subpoena business records, tax returns and bring to light not just the Trump dynasty’s contacts with Russia, but its financial entanglements and conflicts.
Will Jared be loyal to the boss or save himself if push comes to indict? It is worth recalling that the witness against Jared’s father was his sister’s husband. To keep him from testifying, Charles Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce him, taped the encounter, then sent the tape to his sister with the instructions to clam up, or else. That earned him the extra count of witness tampering. What lesson did Jared learn from that? We shall see.