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Yesterday morning I went live and told Hakeem Jeffries that his sit-down with Jared Kushner was the single worst unforced error a Democratic leader could commit seventy days out from an election.
A number of you asked why I went that hard at a man I don’t dislike. Fair question. The answer isn’t temperament. It’s arithmetic, and I’ve been doing this arithmetic since I was twenty-two years old. Washington is a city where the use and abuse of power is a currency, a philosophy, and a dessert topping.
The why of the Jeffries-Kushner Barbie Dreamhouse sleepover is what most people who know Trump’s record want to know.
I went back to some notes on the first Trump term, because the record of Trump and his enablers’ dishonesty is absolutely unambiguous and nobody has to guess who and what he is.
January 2018: Trump sits in the Cabinet Room with a bipartisan group, cameras rolling, and says he’ll sign whatever bill they send him on immigration. Within days he blows it apart. December 2018: he tells Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on live television that he’ll shut the government down and be proud to own it. Thirty-five days later he’s blaming them for the shutdown he took credit for. May 2019: he walks into a scheduled infrastructure meeting (”It’s infrastructure week!”), refuses to sit down, announces he will not work with Democrats on anything while they investigate him, and leaves. Three minutes, start to finish. Then he goes out to the Rose Garden and does a little show about it for the Fox audience.
He always lies. Always. No Trump emissary ever acts in good faith.
Trump has told us, out loud, what cooperation costs; he gets more power, and the sucker who took the deal gets humiliated. He gets no oversight of his venality, his criminality, and his roaring incompetence, and a free pass to keep up his spree of scams, bribes, and grifts. You get humiliation, and ownership of his scandals.
It was the price then, and it is the price now.
Kushner did not fly up to talk about your grocery bill, but to open the bidding on the only commodity his father-in-law actually wants: impunity from the law, to never be investigated by anyone, ever, for anything. It wasn’t an olive branch; it was a trap, and Jeffries should be furious he took it.
Even if this was still the 2016-2020 hellscape, the second term removed whatever ambiguity survived the first.
Donald Trump governs America by decree, treats court orders as vague suggestions, puts masked men with guns into our streets to kill American citizens with impunity. He lost a war and keeps lying about the damage, and his supine Attorney General has spent a year running an Epstein cover-up at industrial scale.
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Rewind the paragraph you just read. Masked men. Guns in our streets. American citizens killed with impunity. An Attorney General running an Epstein cover-up at industrial scale and pointing the DOJ at anyone who annoyed his client this week.
If you write a check to a Democrat, publish a critical column, sit on a school board, hold a Medicare card, or simply exist on the wrong end of a Fox chyron, this is not abstract. The apparatus has a list, and it is expanding.
Where do you think the list gets its addresses?
Have someone who doesn’t like you? They already know where you live.
The Independent reported this year on a woman who’d barely used social media. A stalker still found her home, her relatives, her workplace — all from a single name search on a data broker site.
These sites don’t ask why someone is looking. They just answer. Your address. Your family members. Your daily patterns. Available to anyone — an angry ex, a stranger, someone who just didn’t like something you posted.
Or an ICE contractor cross-referencing against a Democratic donor list. Or a masked man with a printout. Or Blanche’s Payback Squad building the next Comey-seashells case out of an Instagram post and a scraped address book.
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Take yourself off the menu before the apparatus decides you’re the next lesson.
Now, back to Kushner.
And the minority that will serve under Jeffries are fanatics for Donald Trump. You are not dealing with a party that has drifted right. You are dealing with a criminal enterprise that holds the executive branch. They will seek Jeffries’ defeat and destruction from the moment the polls close on their majority.
Set the morality aside for a second, because the D.C. realpolitik case is even stronger.
A negotiation requires two things: terms, and a credible reason for both sides to fear breaking them. Trump has no such fear. The Justice Department is his. The Red Court has shown him where the ceiling for his criminality is, and that ceiling is somewhere past the orbit of the Moon.
His caucus is a hostage population that will not defect, even as he destroys their majority. There is no enforcement mechanism anywhere in the system that can make him keep a promise. Strip out enforcement and what remains isn’t a deal. It’s a unilateral concession with a ceremony bolted onto the front.
Watch which issue Kushner ostensibly chose. Affordability. Housing. Cost of living. Those are Democratic assets, the best ones on the board, and the offer is that Democrats hand over co-ownership of the disaster in exchange for…what?
Then notice who leaked it. That meeting found its way to Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni, and the story does exactly one thing: it makes the incoming Speaker look like a man who can be worked. Ask yourself whose interest that serves, and you’ll understand what the meeting was for.
To his credit, Jeffries didn’t let it fester. Monday night, he posted a video saying no one from the Trump Cartel is getting a pass, that Kushner asked for the meeting and he took it to discuss affordability, and that accountability starts on day one.
Sure. Great. You still should never have taken the meeting.
He was not pleased. It wasn’t the anger of a man who got tricked, but of a man who got caught.
But look at what produced that video. It wasn’t simply the Times story. It was the reaction to the Times story from me, Tommy Vietor, Mehdi Hasan, Bill Kristol, and a great many rank-and-file Democrats who have spent ten years watching this movie and know how it ends. The pressure worked.
And now the next Speaker is on the record, which is the genuinely valuable outcome here. Day one. His words, his commitment, his video. On January 3rd we get to measure the subpoenas against the promise.
I want my readers to understand that this was the gentlest version of this test any of us will see.
Trump is a lame duck with no intention of being one, and he has roughly two years to solve his only real problem, which is how not to leave.
Every institution he needs between now and then will get the Kushner treatment: a mutual friend, a quiet room, a reasonable agenda, a request that sounds like statesmanship and bipartisan comity.
The offers will get better.
That’s what worries me. Sooner or later one of them will contain something a Democrat genuinely wants, attached to something that looks small. That’s the one that takes the hook clean.
The rule holds. You do not negotiate with evil.
Not because it feels righteous to be above their tricks.
But because in the rules of every deal with the Devil, the Devil always cheats, always lies, and always laughs at the suckers who took the deal.
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Mandatory!!! Jeffries must resign or be voted out. The Caucus is damaged under his leadership. Absolutely, Jeffries cannot be trusted.
The only thing not mentioned is that the Kushners are besties with Netanyahu.
That opens up all sorts of sinister possibilities. I also smell AIPAC.