Who Wants To Read About Savvy Peacemaking Genius Jared Kushner WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

In advance of the public House Select Committee January 6 hearings (starting tomorrow!), the New York Times has just dropped a large piece on two figures who have talked to the January 6 Committee, but whose voices we otherwise haven’t heard much in this process: golden daughter Ivanka Trump and her grifter husband Prince Jared of Kushner. What were they doing during all that time, and could they have done anything to stop Daddykins from mounting a coup and ordering attacks on America?

Or were they just totally checked out? Peter Baker’s sources would like you to know that they were just totally checked out:

On Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020, barely 24 hours after President Donald J. Trump claimed in the middle of the night that “frankly, we did win this election,” Jared Kushner woke up in his Kalorama mansion and announced to his wife that it was time to leave Washington. “We’re moving to Miami,” he said.

When there is a story in the newspaper about Jared and Ivanka and it cites “people close to them,” the skeptical reader should always assume they are personally whispering to reporters, or directing people to whisper to reporters, in order to make themselves look good. So when we read that “neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen, according to people close to them,” it’s reasonable to assume this is a personal message from those two, to please not include them in any unseemly discussions about who did or did not do a coup on America.

While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency.

We bet. Baker writes that their relative absence was what allowed fucking crazy people like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani to take up so much of Donald Trump’s time during those months. That sounds right, because before Jared and Ivanka left, everything was just smooth sailing and nobody crazy ever got to fill Trump’s head with syphilitic brain thoughts and crime strategy.

Mr. Kushner’s decision to withdraw from the most consequential moment of the Trump presidency left few effective counterweights to the plotters seeking to subvert the will of the voters to hang on to power. While the president’s son-in-law had arguably been the most influential adviser to the president through four years, weighing in at times and carefully cultivating his reputation, he chose at that pivotal moment to focus instead on his personal project of Middle East diplomacy.

“Diplomacy” is a strange word to use here in place of “grifting.”

He returned to the region to meet with figures who would also be helpful to him later in making money after leaving the White House.

Oh OK, he says it in the next sentence.

It was the final act in the myth that Mr. Kushner would be the moderating force on a president who resisted moderation.

Oh golly, we’re just abandoning all kinds of myths today.

So this is a fascinating take on things that we are sure please the Kushners!

Now, what could be very interesting about this is that Baker reports in his nice journalism article — about how Jared decided not to coup so he could focus on saving the Middle East by letting the Middle East put money in his Paypal — that the January 6 Committee plans on playing testimony from both Jared and Ivanka during the hearings, which suggests to us that they might have said something interesting.

Despite how much those two were obviously aboveboard and beyond reproach and Jared was busy helping little old ladies cross the street in the Middle East (Saudi ATM over there maybe), it’s been clear they were present for some stuff. We knew the committee wanted to ask Ivanka some serious questions, for instance about her father’s knowledge about just how illegal his coup planning was, and about her process of begging him to stop the violence on January 6. And so much more!

Jared wasn’t actually in DC on January 6 (serving at a soup kitchen in Riyadh probably, just kidding he was on a plane coming back from there), but the committee knows he saw some shit and also ended up in Ginni Thomas’s treason texts. And so much more!

In short, we look forward to see what kind of home movies the committee took of those two wild and crazy kids.

The rest of the piece is quite, ahem, flattering to our Jared. Did you know he was “strategic in his interventions” with Trump? Did you know he had a math formula for conversations with Trump, where he gave him two ice cream scoops full of good news for every one scoop of bad news? Did you know that he told his father-in-law that five percentage points should be added to any poll that made him look bad?

All very cool information. But the main thrust of the piece seems to be that Jared is just a really keen and savvy guy, and that’s why he noped out of all the election-stealing, because of his smarts.

“You have to realize you don’t make the waves,” Mr. Kushner regularly advised other officials. “He makes the waves. And then you have to do your best to kind of stay on the surfboard.”

Mr. Kushner the surfer had come to recognize when the waves were too rough — as they were after Election Day 2020. He understood that his father-in-law would not concede right away and would ask for recounts and file lawsuits, but he believed that even if there were some irregularities, it was mainly a way of soothing a wounded ego and explaining defeat. Mr. Trump would lash out and make outlandish claims but eventually accept reality and move out of the White House — an assumption many Republicans in Washington made, only to discover how far the president was really willing to go.

To Mr. Kushner, his father-in-law’s decision to turn once again to Mr. Giuliani was a red flag.

Jared knew Rudy was red flag because he has a special sense for things like that.

And that is why Jared and Ivanka instead just quietly looked at mansions in Miami, when Jared wasn’t busy granting everlasting peace to the Middle East. Jared reassured Mitch McConnell’s team early on that Trump would give it up sooner or later. Know who secretly helped do transition stuff with Biden people? Jared did. Jared is good. Jared is competent. Jared is normal. Jared decided to write book about his experiences, because there’s an audience for that. “He even took an online MasterClass on how to write a book, taught by the prolific best-selling novelist James Patterson.”

And when people came begging for Jared to help, when Mike Pence was refusing to overturn the Constitution to make Trump dictator-for-life, when people needed him to get through to his father-in-law, Jared stood his ground, because Jared is a ground-stander:

[S]eeing the collision that was coming, Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, tried to enlist help from Mr. Kushner, calling him over the holidays to ask him to get his father-in-law to stand down. “Look, can you help us with this?” Mr. Short asked.

But Mr. Kushner brushed him off. “Look, when Rudy got involved, I stopped being involved,” he told Mr. Short. The vice president “is a big boy,” and if he disagreed with the president on a legal issue, he should bring in his lawyers. “I’m too busy working on Middle East peace right now, Marc.”

He was too busy working on Middle East peace right now, Marc.

In summary and in conclusion, we are here for whatever dirt Jared and Ivanka dropped on videotape for the committee, not so much for this New York Times fanboying, Jesus Christ.

[New York Times]

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