Last Tuesday, Jared Kushner showed lawmakers a PowerPoint presentation on his immigration reform plan. It included circles and pictures of other nation’s flags.
How did one Republican in the meeting thank him for his hard work? By making fun of him to Politico.
“Certainly not a McKinsey presentation. But it wasn’t purporting to be. It was a conversation opener, not a closer,” a Republican who saw the presentation told the site.
This is not a unique experience for Kushner, who presents “his political inexperience as an asset” as he tries to solve intractable problems. He gathers experts, often at the White House, and gives them briefings that critics call “woefully short on detail.” And he seems to be the only one who doesn’t realize this is a problem. Per Politico:
His air of breezy self-assurance in the private meetings he is conducting to tease his plans at times astounds the battle-scarred veterans of past such efforts.
Kushner, Politico reports, feels emboldened after he helped passing criminal-justice legislation and by the departure of former White House chief of staff John Kelly, who had clashed with the president’s children. He also saw the end of the Mueller probe “as a personal victory and a green light to ramp up his public presence in D.C.”
He seems to have forgotten his failures though, such as earlier this year when he said he could strike a deal with Democrats ending the government shutdown and funding Trump’s border wall. He didn’t.
But that’s part of being irrationally self-confident and totally oblivious. And it’s why even Republicans are talking about Kushner like this:
“He perceives himself as a dealmaker with elected senators and representatives.”
His role, the senator said dismissively, “was to get his father-in-law” on board.
