In the grand opaque hierarchy of the Trump administration, few figures are more vexing than Jared Kushner. He is alternately the architect of Trump’s victory and a sniveling court jester, a figure now tasked with, among other things, orchestrating peace in the Middle East, reforming the government, handling the opioid crisis, serving as liaison to Mexico and China and the Muslim community, and reforming our criminal justice system. His chief political accomplishment thus far seems to have been marrying Ivanka Trump, and if you’d like to feel more confidence in him than that, good luck; he has literally never opened his mouth in public.
Until today, that is! For reasons that will probably be clear in two weeks, when some new scandal casts all of the immediate past in a troubling new light, Kushner was shoved out in front of the cameras today to do a little reading. The little guy did well!
“It’s working, and it’s very exciting,” he says, before going on to blandly talk about cloud computing and data migration. Look, it does not matter what he is saying, the point is that he is saying it—in public, and while people are recording him! It’s a pinched, nasal speaking voice, not used to the challenges of being heard by other people. Close your eyes, though, and this could be the voice droning on about Q3 IT plans in an inter-departmental all-hands presentation. It’s a wheedling, blandly competent voice, which is, all things considered, a fine change of aesthetic pace from Donald Trump’s freewheeling, real-time portrait of senility.