Democrats need a fighter, but the congressional leader is addicted to illusory comity.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that “Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, and discussed potential areas of common ground.” On one level, the meeting was clearly good news for Jeffries. The midterm elections will be held just 71 days from now, and there is every possibility that the Democrats could take control of the House and make Jeffries the next House Speaker. The fact that Kushner, who holds no official position but functions as the president’s consigliere, met with Jeffries is a sign that the White House is seriously contemplating such a defeat.
Not surprisingly, congressional Republicans are unhappy. Current House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to pooh-pooh the meeting and minimize Kushner’s importance, telling Fox News, “I don’t know what that’s about. I know Jared has interest in lots of other things going on.” Johnson added that Kushner “hedges bets” and is “not really directly involved in the admin, at least in the day-to-day in the White House.”
It’s hard not to be delighted by Johnson’s discomfort. But the meeting also raised red flags for those who worried that Jeffries was helping whitewash one of Trump’s most corrupt cronies. Tommy Vietor, the former Obama adviser who cohosts the Pod Save America podcast, noted, “Jared Kushner has no actual government job he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way [Jeffries] should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas.” Mehdi Hasan, the CEO of Zeteo, echoed Vietor, writing, “The only meeting Hakeem Jeffries should be having with Jared Kushner is to tell him he’ll be subpoenaed by the House for a corruption investigation on day one of Democratic control of the House. This is just pathetic stuff from the House Dem leader.” Erstwhile neocon turned anti-Trumper William Kristol posted, “Really? Or, as the kids say, AYFKM?” (The acronym stands for “Are you fucking kidding me?”)
Between them, the progressive Hasan, the Obama liberal Vietor, and the former neoconservative Kristol represent very different wings of the Democratic coalition. But they were all united in their alarm over the Kushner-Jeffries sit-down.
Still, the House Democratic leader found his defenders among the centrist establishment, with Neera Tanden, CEO of the Center for American Progress, predictably emerging as the congressional leader’s most forceful defender on social media.
Responding to a Jeffries critic, Tanden wrote, “Ask Mike Johnson how he feels about Trump White House admitting Dems are going to win the House before everyone loses it on this website.” Tanden also compared the Jeffries-Kushner private meeting with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s public meeting with Donald Trump last year.
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But this is a spurious parallel. As journalist Brian Beutler, who writes at the Off Message Substack, notes,
Mamdani’s goal is to reduce harm to NYC. Jeffries is about to lead a coequal branch of the federal government under hostile occupation. I had mixed feelings about the Mamdani meeting (much as I enjoyed the pictures). This is worse…. Mamdani has almost no power over Trump; Jeffries will have a great deal over Trump, but not if he’s working cooperatively with him (as opposed to adversarially) on the issues he and Kushner reportedly discussed.
Strangely, Tanden undercut her own support for Jeffries by re-tweeting a poor defense from an anonymous account on X.com called “Scary Lawyerguy” noting that the Times report was cowritten by Maggie Haberman, famed for her extensive access to Trumpworld. This post speculated, “Trump’s son-in-law leaked to Maggie that he met privately with Jeffries as a means of stoking intra-party discord among Democrats.” Although meant to exonerate Jeffries, this theory makes him look bad, as someone who was successfully played by Kushner.
Leaving aside the murky matter of whether Kushner leaked the news of the meeting, the president’s son-in-law clearly outfoxed Jeffries. If he becomes speaker of the House, Jeffries will have to tackle the issue of Trump’s corruption. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has cogently argued, House Democrats have been maddeningly reluctant to make the president’s crookedness a top political priority, preferring vague rhetoric about “kitchen sink” issues.
This myopia on corruption is especially frustrating because it has fueled Trump’s sense of invulnerability. The penny-ante pelf of his first term has been replaced by world-historical grifting, with the president and his family enriching themselves with billions of dollars in business deals.
No one in Trump’s inner circle embodies this naked venality more than Jared Kushner, who acts as an ambassador without portfolio, negotiating with countries in the Middle East, while also being enriched by deals with autocrats in the region.
In 2021, Kushner founded the investment firm Affinity Partners, which has received $2 billion in funding from the Saudi state as well as another $1.5 from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Writing in The Atlantic, Andrea Bernstein noted that Kushner has been given a unique post that evades transparency:
While carrying out public business for his father-in-law, he has continued to pursue his private interests and declined to disclose any information about them. There’s a carve-out designation in ethics laws known as the “special government employee,” which allows businesspeople to perform work for the government. Elon Musk was a special government employee, and so was Corey Lewandowski. But Kushner has not been designated one. He is both outside and inside government—a “volunteer,” the White House calls him. And he is vaulting over strictures that were put in place to defend the mechanisms of government from becoming tools of foreign or private interests….
[Kushner] has a direct line to the president. But his political dealings are ineluctably intertwined with his businesses. Kushner is related by marriage to the president, one who smiles on those who do business with his family, and the 2021 Saudi investment in Affinity Partners was made despite the Saudi fund’s own finding that the company’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Kushner has defended the deal, saying that the Saudi fund “is one of the most prestigious investors in the world.”
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If the Democrats win the House, Kushner’s many conflicts of interest should be a major focus of investigation. Unfortunately, Jeffries’s meeting with Kushner indicates that this is unlikely to happen, since Jeffries seems to think the president’s son-in-law is someone worth negotiating with.
Worryingly, Jeffries seems to have been motivated by positive memories of working with Kushner during Trump’s first term. As the Times reports, “The private get-together was described by one of the people as a catch-up for Mr. Kushner and Mr. Jeffries. The two men have stayed in touch since they worked together on a criminal justice bill midway through Mr. Trump’s first term.”
There’s an argument to be made—although one that requires an extraordinary generosity of spirit—that Kushner was a moderating influence on Trump’s first term. In truth, this claim rests more on PR spin than actual policy outcomes. But in Trump’s current term, Kushner is something different: an avatar of the president’s epic lawlessness. The fact that Jeffries can’t see that is disqualifying.
The Democrats need a fighter as their House leader. Instead, they have a collaborator, one who is loyal to dreams of comity even at the expense of tolerating corruption.
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