Home of all bad ideas
Even Rex Tillerson told Kushner he had no business meddling with US foreign policy. (Neither did Tillerson, but giving big policy jobs to CEOs didn’t start with Trump.)
Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was confronted by two of the most senior US government officials for mixing his personal interests with US foreign policy, according to a new book.
Kushner, an envoy to the Middle East for his father-in-law, is said to have been robustly challenged by both Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, and Gary Cohn, formerly Trump’s top economic adviser.
The confrontations are detailed in Kushner Inc by the journalist Vicky Ward, who also describes interference in foreign relations by Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump.
The Guardian’s been reading it.
Ward reports that Tillerson blamed Kushner for Trump’s abrupt endorsement of a provocative blockade and diplomatic campaign against Qatar by Saudi Arabia and several allies in June 2017. The US has thousands of troops stationed in Qatar.
Tillerson “told Kushner that his interference had endangered the US”, an unidentified Tillerson aide tells Ward.
And then there’s that 666 Fifth Avenue thing…
Meanwhile, Cohn is said to have rebuked Kushner in January 2017 after it was revealed Kushner had dined with executives from the Chinese financial corporation Anbang, which was considering investing in the Kushner family’s troubled tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
“You’ve got to be crazy,” Cohn is said to have told Kushner in front of others. Kushner met the executives around the time he hosted Chinese government officials at the Fifth Avenue tower. The building was eventually refinanced by a Qatari-backed investment fund.
Well he needed the money. What’s he supposed to do, not use his wife’s daddy’s theft of the presidency in his own financial interest?
Ward’s book portrays Kushner and Ivanka Trump as relentlessly ambitious operators who are loathed by many forced to work with them. She reports that White House staffers mocked Kushner as the “secretary of everything” for his wide-ranging meddling and derided Ivanka Trump’s team as Habi – “home of all bad ideas”.
Other than that, they’re a lovely pair.
Why the HELL don’t the people like Tillerson make their objections loudly and publicly? Especially on their way out. If they really had any concern for the welfare of the United States, they should have been protesting this shit on as many platforms as possible instead of remaining mostly silent and contributing to the normalization of the Trump regime. Someone rich like Tillerson is better placed and more financially sec ure than a lot of potential whistle-blowers.
YNnB? Financially secure, perhaps, but there’s always one more payday to hold out for. These people can never be too financially secure, nor yet secure enough.
I was just thinking of Jeff Bezos publicizing the National Enquirer’s attempt to blackmail him. He decided to go ahead and face the consequences of standing up to them because, he felt he could afford to do it, unlike some of American Media’s other targets. Maybe Tillerson really doesn’t have much public spiritedness in him and has little concern for the fate of the United States beside what it can furnish him in wealth and luxury. Or he’s saving it up for a tell-all book. Who knows.
Or maybe he’s afraid speaking up against Trump might lead to some Democrats doing better in elections. That would be my guess if forced to understand what any of these people do. Swallow your upset with Trump just to make sure people don’t get so disgusted that the Democrats actually turn out to vote in larger numbers, or perhaps the Republicans decide to stay home rather than vote for corruption and incompetency again (I think he underestimates the willingness of GOP voters to vote for corruption and incompetency, though).
To many of these people, the worstest of the worst things that could happen would be seeing a Democrat in power. They have still not forgiven the country for electing Obama, who not only was Democrat, he was not white. And he could speak in complete sentences, using big words and everything.