Problems in Trump Kleptocracy
Are Jared's Middle East investors getting their money's worth? Wrong question.
Steven Greenhouse today posted a handy review of Trump kleptocracy in The Guardian. It’s a lot to keep track of! I wish someone would design a user-friendly Trump Kleptocracy Tracker. Johns Hopkins’s SNF Agora Institute has an OK one, inspired by the work of Atlantic writer (and SNF Agora fellow) Anne Appelbaum, but I find its slide-show format kludgy. Other such trackers are not kept up to date. What we really need is a searchable Trump Kleptocracy Tracker that isn’t some nonprofit’s intern project but rather the work of an obsessive completist with strong programming skills.
We could also use a quasi-academic journal to examine subtle paradoxes and other interpretive challenges surrounding the Trump kleptocracy. We could call it Problems in Trump Kleptocracy. A topic for today would be The Jared Problem.
Jared Kushner made himself a billionaire by cashing in on Middle East connections he made during his father-in-law’s first term while shepherding through the Abraham Accords. Kushner has an investment firm called Affinity Partners (it should really be called Abraham, Inc.), that collected $2 billion from the Saudis after Trump’s first term ended. Now Kushner’s trying to raise $5 billion more from the Saudis even as he’s acting (with Steve Witkoff) as Trump’s negotiator in the Iran War. That of course is an even bigger conflict of interest, not to mention in extremely bad taste. Greenhouse quotes (via the Associated Press) a former Republican White House ethics lawyer commenting, “This is going to be the first family of a president to make a lot of money off war.”
What is the Jared Problem? Not that he's a kleptocrat; that’s beyond dispute. Rather, it’s the question of whether the Saudis are getting their money’s worth. Greenhouse suggests that the Iran war is at least in part a payoff to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, according to a March 24 New York Times report, was (at least as of two months ago) pushing Trump to go all-in on smashing the Iran regime. That’s simple enough.
But a new Bloomberg report says Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and even the Saudis, all of which poured money into Affinity Partners, are now grousing that they aren’t getting their money’s worth from Jared—which would be to end the Iran war. I have no difficulty believing bin Salman is urging Trump to escalate and simultaneously wanting to end the war. Theoretically, the two positions can be compatible, though in practice I think they are not. Anyway, according to Bloomberg, Kushner is compartmentalizing to the detriment of his Middle East investors. He is taking a bribe and then welshing on it, putting at risk the payment of future bribes.
I propose a third way to look at this, which is that the power relationship between Kushner and these Middle East leaders has changed. Before, Kushner was collecting bribes. When you take a bribe you’re agreeing to do someone’s bidding. Now, Kushner is engaging in extortion. When you shake somebody down you’re collecting a toll: This is what you must do just to stay alive (or, less dramatically, just to stay in the game).
(Legal disclaimer: I am not using the words “bribe” and “extortion” in their legal senses, in part because the Supreme Court has more or less decriminalized these activities, at least within the political realm. I fully expect Kushner to go unpunished for this behavior.)
Every bribe-taker dreams of becoming an extortionist because it’s obviously a much better gig. When Kushner started his Affinity racket he was just a schmuck bribe taker trading money for influence. Now that circumstances have put him in charge of Iran peace negotiations, all parties must kiss his ring and call him Godfather. Eventually Kushner will revert to being a mere bribe-taker, but for now he’s enjoying being capo di tutti capi and extracting maximum benefit from it; after initially saying he wouldn’t raise money for Affinity during Trump’s second term, he’s now doing just that because of course he is.
My latest, for the New Republic, concerns a different Problem in Trump Kleptocracy, which is how to negotiate a cash settlement when you’re the president and you sue your own executive branch. Trump appears to be closing in on an answer. Sadly, this was never a particularly difficult Problem, which is another way of saying it’s a really big problem for you and me, one for which I cannot think up a solution. You can read the piece here.