The moral laryngitis of Kushner

From where I sit, Jared Kushner hasn’t been much of a blessing to America. But he has been a boon to clichés. Like the one about having your cake and eating it, too. Only in his case, there’s extra frosting: He doesn’t pay any tax on the cake, either.

Or the one about having everything served to you on a silver platter. Except Jared bobbles the platter, sends the delicacies atop it to the floor and squashes them under his tasseled loafers. Then his enablers whisper to the media that the delicacies were pulverised all along and would have looked worse without his princely footwork. We’re not to fault Jared. We’re to fete him.

I’ll pass, and I’ll note that while he and Ivanka Trump seemed at one point to be taking a wise break from centre stage, he’s back in the spotlight, identified as one of the most gullible fan boys of Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and exposed as an epic tax evader. He really is the perfect son-in-law.

Where Jared goes, embarrassment follows. He’s Midas minus the touch and the humility. Oblivious to the truth of the kingdom that he was romancing, he bought into and promoted the idea of the Saudis as forward-thinking fixers who would make his self-aggrandising delusion of peace in the Middle East happen. Now he watches and winces as they clumsily try to settle on the right lie about what happened to journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who is believed to have been tortured, murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Last year Jared persuaded President Donald Trump to choose Saudi Arabia as his first big stop on his first big foreign trip. He was on the phone with the kingdom so often that it frightened some American security experts. America’s spies, meanwhile, caught wind of communiqués between foreign officials talking about how easily manipulated Jared might be.

What does he have to say about the Saudis and Khashoggi? Nothing. He has his usual moral laryngitis. He’s integral when there’s the hope of credit, invisible when there’s the certainty of blame.

Jared, 37, fancied himself a visionary. So did the 33-year-old Saudi prince, known as MBS. When they met at the White House two months after Mr Trump’s inauguration, they reportedly forged an immediate friendship, each affirming the other’s precocity and royal glow. Two princes are even smarter and shinier than one.

But this was another Jared misjudgement: MBS imprisoned business executives, kidnapped the prime minister of Lebanon and surely had knowledge of, if not a hand in, the silencing of Khashoggi.

And so the list of Jared’s screw-ups grows.

He was among the Trump intimates who wanted all those fat-cat bankers in the administration; the resulting optics have dazzled. He pushed for the firing of former FBI director James Comey; that worked out brilliantly. He advocated the hiring of Anthony Scaramucci for the White House’s communications operation; that was the stuff of farce.

Meantime, he and Ivanka told the world — and themselves — that they were the better angels of the administration. Never mind that to campaign for her father, they shelved many of the principles discussed at cocktail parties for years. They weren’t really shelving them, you see. No, they were sneakier than that! They were positioning themselves to be traitors within the new regime. They would bring it to power, then undermine it. They would create the problem in order to solve it.

This made no sense unless you factored in their desire for the personal advantage a Trump presidency would afford them, no matter how wretched it may be. They wanted the ride. So they rationalised it.

Then they crashed. To measure their softening effect on Mr Trump, just watch his recent 60 Minutes interview. He dismissed climate change. He shrugged off the brutality of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. He all but begged Jim Mattis to resign.

Stephen Miller lives large. Steve Bannon lives on. Jared, are you alive?

From where did he get this outsize confidence? His father bought him his admission to Harvard. His management of his family’s company — in particular, his $1.8 billion purchase of 666 Fifth Ave — led Vanity Fair to ask last year, “Is Jared Kushner the World’s Worst Real-Estate Investor?”

He’s the embodiment of the Trump administration ethos that you’re entitled to take a whack at something by dint of affluence and arrogance not expertise.

Frank Bruni is a columnist with The New York Times.