Kushner's updated to-do list includes establishing peace in the Mideast, reorganizing the entire federal government, creating an "Office of American Innovation" across departments and agencies, overseeing US relations with China and Mexico, reforming the criminal justice system and the Veterans Administration, organizing the visit of Chinese president Xi Jinping, plus much more - leading Trevor Noah to ask whether he is, in fact, "The Real President."
Why would Trump demand that Kushner perform so many vital tasks that are far beyond his competence? ... it isn't owing to his worldly experience or deep knowledge (remember, he was unaware last January that the entire White House staff would soon depart with President Obama).
Some say he wants to run for president himself someday, so he's learning on the job - just as he did in real estate, where his purchase of a Fifth Avenue office tower for an exorbitant price has jeopardized his family's company. Good luck, Jared! (And good luck, America.)
From the New Yorker:
On Monday, when Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, was asked how Kushner could handle it all, he answered, “He has a team that he oversees.” Asked if he might offer a hint as to the composition of Team Jared, Spicer, after a stumbling reference to a middle emissary and “a bunch of those folks” in the Office of American Innovation—who would help Kushner in yet another project, the battle against the opioid epidemic—gave up and said that there would be “different people” for “different parts.” Many jobs, many people, many parts: a prismatic Jared-orama.
The "Office Of American Innovation." Let us speak of that, since that after all is the crux of Team Jared and the miracles that he is yet to have wrought. The Office of American Innovation is a reboot of the think tank that Steve Bannon formed three months ago, called the "Strategic Initiative Group," The Strategic Initiative Group, SIG, was a lot more sinister in its stated aims and objectives than the considerably white washed Office of American Innovation is. To start at the beginning, Kellyanne Conway said two days after the inauguration that "it's really time for (Trump) to put in his own security and intelligence community." To that end, Bannon created a think tank composed of himself, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, and several Breitbartians.
There’s a new center of influence that’s quietly being built in the White House—and answers to two of President Donald J. Trump’s most influential, most controversial advisers. Counselor to the president Steve Bannon, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner—arguably the top two aides to Trump—have set up a brand-new body called the Strategic Initiatives Group, an internal White House think tank that answers to them, as well as to Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, a senior administration official tells The Daily Beast.
The idea is not to make but to inform policy, helping guide a new president unfamiliar with the levers of power in Washington, D.C., and bridge the gap between the White House and industry, said the official, who spoke anonymously as a condition of describing White House deliberations.
Less-charitable observers say the SIG is intended to be an alternative lodestar of power and influence to just possibly supersede the advice coming out of the traditional centers of influence like the National Security Council and the wider agencies of government.
There you have it, "to possibly supersede the traditional centers...like the National Security Council." Steve Bannon’s intent is clear. He was going to do an end run around the NSC, undermine the NSC, and seize whatever power he could. For more details on SIG please see my diary, Steve Bannon's New Think Tank Is Planning A Coup. It should be clear at this point with Steve Bannon's removal Wednesday morning from the NSC that General McMaster had no intention of allowing SIG to stay in effect. Conway's comment about Trump having his own security and intelligence community, especially one promulgated by Steve Bannon, had to have rankled the powers that be, McMaster, Mattis, everyone in either the military or intelligence communities, not to mention federal law enforcement. This may be in fact the mis-step that is going to cost Steve Bannon his role as head of the Trump regime. Interestingly enough, The Hill reported yesterday that the White House had just released information on Tuesday that SIG never existed. Odd thing to do, issue a press release about something that never existed. How often do you suppose that happened in the Obama administration, roughly?
The White House is downplaying the importance of an internal policy shop that was once believed to be the brainchild and power center of chief strategist Stephen Bannon, saying the Strategic Initiatives Group (SIG) never even existed.
That appears to contradict media reports and the claims of at least one White House staffer who previously said that he was a member of the SIG.
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The group — described in scores of media reports as an internal think tank launched by Bannon, chief of staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Jared Kushner — would be irrelevant now even if it had formed, a White House aide said.
Any need there may have been for the internal policy shop, which critics have described as an attempt by Bannon to promote his own agenda, is moot now that President Trump has tapped Kushner to run the Office of American Innovation (OAI), which is charged with government modernization, according to multiple White House officials.
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"I've never known [SIG] to exist,” said a White House aide. “There was a lot of speculation about this early, but it was never officially rolled out and if anything, the OAI is an evolution and realization of some of these initial ideas.”
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A second White House official said the SIG was “always informal” and has since “morphed to the new group,” the OAI.
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A third White House official echoed that sentiment but said it’s possible that Bannon could still use the SIG for his own projects.
What might Steve Bannon's "own projects" be, one wonders? The crooks and liars are scurrying to cover their tracks for some reason. Sounds clandestine, doesn't it? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Get a load of this.
ProPublica published a list of more than 400 hires last month, providing the most complete accounting so far of who Steve Bannon has brought into the federal government. These people were hired to spy upon cabinet secretaries and government agency personnel, believe it or not. The Bannon spies are an eccentric lot and that's putting it mildly:
A Trump campaign aide who argues that Democrats committed “ethnic cleansing” in a plot to “liquidate” the white working class. A former reality show contestant whose study of societal collapse inspired him to invent a bow-and-arrow-cum-survivalist multi-tool. A pair of healthcare industry lobbyists. A lobbyist for defense contractors. An “evangelist” and lobbyist for Palantir, the Silicon Valley company with close ties to intelligence agencies. And a New Hampshire Trump supporter who has only recently graduated from high school.
These are some of the people the Trump administration has hired for positions across the federal government, according to documents received by ProPublica through public-records requests.
The Washington Post isn't mincing any words about Steve Bannon's intent in hiring people to spy. It went on record recently saying, "This shadow government of political appointees with the title of senior White House adviser is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary’s suite.” The Washington Post reported that some of the people under scrutiny are not happy with the arrangement and Trump appointees and the people hired to watch them are already clashing.
At the Pentagon, they’re privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who’s supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “the commissar,” according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It’s a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.
The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks on the job, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior administration officials.
These political appointees do not have to withstand the scrutiny of Senate confirmation. Therefore, they operate largely in the shadows. Many of the appointees come out of “beachhead teams,” according to Politico, i.e. transition team members who originally were appointed to effect a smooth transition of power between administrations. However, not surprisingly, with Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist and intellectual force behind the throne, the appointees are basically unknown and not answerable to anybody except Steve Bannon. According to ProPublica the White House has declined to publicly reveal their identities, which prompted the website to seek redress through the Freedom of Information act. Unsurprisingly, many of the political appointees hired to shadow cabinet secretaries and agency personnel are Breitbart alumni. For more detail see my diary Steve Bannon hires spies to insure loyalty to Trump.
Now, connect the dots. Bannon, unquestionably drunk with vainglory from having successfully perpetrated his schemes as far as he did, all the way from taking over as CEO of the Trump campaign and actually getting Trump elected, felt that the world was his oyster and all he had to do was grab for the gusto and take whatever he wanted. So he put together his think tank with the sinister agenda that Conway blurted out -- and it's pretty clear at this point that Conway's blurtings are the reason that she has a diminished role in the Trump regime and is not the star of the Sunday shows any longer. Then he embedded his shadow government of spies. Concurrently with the embedding of the shadow government, Bannon took advantage of Jared Kushner's craving for power and gave him the role that Bannon would fill himself if he wasn't so dark and controversial a personality. Both Jared and Ivanka Kushner are power mad. They have all the money they could ever possibly want, but power is ostensibly the ultimate aphrodisiac and to the siren call of power the Kushners have responded and Steve Bannon is their pied piper. Instead of coarse (and now compromised) Steve Bannon, polite, preppy son in law Jared Kushner was chosen to carry the Trump standard into all the major battles of the world.
New Yorker, "Welcome To Jared Kushner's World"
In a sense, there was nothing surprising about the surprise trip to Iraq that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, made this week. It can’t come as a shock, at this point, that anyone in the Trump Administration thought it was a good idea to send a neophyte to a war zone, or to bypass normal diplomatic procedures, or to turn a fight in which American troops are at risk and Iraqi civilians are being killed by errant air strikes into a venue for familial posturing. [...]
Indeed, the only real puzzle of the Kushner trip is which particular Trumpian political vice it best illustrates: deluded self-aggrandizement or a callous indifference to other people’s lives; conflicts of interest or a lack of any interest in the consequences of the use of power. [...]
The reports on Kushner’s dealings often observe that foreign dignitaries take his role seriously precisely because it is, in many less-than-democratic nations, a familiar one: the autocrat’s extended family acting as a substitute for the institutions of state and, in the process, corroding their legitimacy. As Evan Osnos notes, Xi himself rose to power in part because he was an important man’s son. Should the life of Jared be a surprise, just because this is America?
Jared Kushner did nothing whatsoever to earn or deserve the role that he is playing in our nation’s history. He’s there simply because Trump wants him there and Bannon is pulling the strings. It is a sad commentary that in a country where individual merit has always been the basic standard by which one is measured, at least theoretically, that somebody un-elected and un-accountable should be in the forefront of our government merely by virtue of marrying into the right family and nothing more.
Steve Bannon has gotten this far in corroding the legitimacy of our institutions of state, as its been put, by spinning out the fable, which is continually ratified by the GOP, that Trump is going to come into government and clean it up, streamline it, and drain the swamp. Bannon has been successful in selling this drivel to a certain class of American who is desensitized to truth due to the pain of living with increasing economic fears and worries about their future and their children’s future. Bannon was successful with Breitbart because he is tuned in to the zeitgeist of our time. He understands the impotent rage and frustration which so many average Americans feel. They feel forgotten and passed over by a world that has left them behind and that's why they voted for Donald Trump; to strike back at a society they feel abandoned them.
That is what the Bannon-authored "American Carnage" inaugural address was about. Even George W. Bush was quoted as remarking about that speech, "That was some strange shit." Bannon has come to depend upon the "art of the spin" if you will, telling the "forgotten Americans" what they need to hear, all the while executing his nefarious schemes, ideas he formulated from reading "The Philosophy Of War," and other such treatises in college. Bannon the intellectual, hippy-turned-revolutionary, has been busy seeding the government with his think tank, his spies, and last but most definitely not least, his one-on-one tutelage of Reince Preibus, Paul Ryan (who shifts between being cast as an enemy and then as an ally for his breathtaking tax reform proposals, which are a pale rehash of Reaganomics) and Jared and Ivanka Kushner.
The past two weeks has been a turning point for Steve Bannon. He was devastated by the ACA repeal loss, and he and Breitbart and Jeannine Pirro at Fox News were calling for Paul Ryan's resignation. Paul Ryan has not resigned and it is likely that that signals the end of the plan that Bannon has been declaiming about since last fall, reported in The Hill and also in RedState, that Ryan will be "gone by Spring." At this point Ryan hasn't toppled; perhaps he will or perhaps Bannon doesn't have the power he thought that he did. As of Wednesday morning, Bannon has had another blow to his esteem and power base, that of being booted off of the National Security Council. It is pretty evident at this point that General McMaster has more power than Steve Bannon. As well he should.
Bannon's last shot may well be to pull the strings for puppet Jared Kushner, and to a lesser extent for Ivanka, who will soon be installed in the White House close to Bannon's "war room" as he calls his office. It is clear and obvious that Donald Trump is desperate, if he's turning over the reigns of power this overtly to his daughter and son-in-law, albeit under Bannon's close direction. Undoubtedly that was Bannon's deal with Trump to begin with, give Bannon a "free hand," i.e., the ability to dictate and arrange matters to his liking and in return for that he'll give Donald Trump results.
Bannon has been successful in generating results for Trump, but he's bitten off way more than he can chew and Project Trump, headed by Team Jared is chaotic and out of control to say the very least. Jared Kushner is ridiculously in over his head, Steve Bannon's only hope is to solidify his hold on Jared Kushner, primarily and Ivanka secondarily. Considering how Bannon's mojo has been reduced by the events of the past two weeks with the ACA repeal and the NSC firing, Kushner is Bannon's only hope. It may be that Kushner, clueless and inexperienced as he is, may find his only hope in Bannon.
This is clearly the symbiotic relationship to watch in Washington D.C. It's been said that Kushner will outlast Bannon in the Trump regime due to the conventional wisdom of blood being thicker than water. But Kushner without the backfield and coaching that Bannon provides is an empty suit, and both of them know that. This fight will be to the finish. If you want to place bets, Paddy Power in Dublin is giving odds that Trump himself will be finished before he serves one year in office. I wonder what odds Steve Bannon would lay at this point, with all that has transpired?