Remember the good old days - by which I mean just a few weeks ago - when there was hope and talk that Donald Trump's 36-year-old son-in-law would play the angel to Steve Bannon's devil, tempering the president's policies and keeping his crudest and most belligerent tendencies in check?
Well, the devil is running rampant in the Trump administration so far. The angel looks ever paler and frailer, with a halo that's hard to find.
Jared Kushner, where are you?
I ask that specifically, in terms of Trump's inner circle and Bannon's obviously greater sway. But I ask it in a broader sense as well. Where among Trump's sanest advisers and the most reasonable Republicans in Congress is the degree of pushback that's called for? Where are the sufficiently loud voices of dissent? Right now Trump has too many mum collaborators too content to hope for the best. I put Kushner in that pack.
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Bannon certainly knows how to manipulate the president and get what he wants. He's Trump's unabashed Iago, whispering sweet fictions about the magnitude of the "movement" that the president is leading and specifying how to feed it. He has a seat on the National Security Council. Kushner has his hand on Ivanka Trump's seat.
If you haven't seen that photo of the couple, do find it, and bear in mind when Ivanka posted it on her social media accounts: around midnight on Saturday. Her father's hastily, sloppily composed immigration ban was just being implemented. Many confused, frightened travellers languished in detention or limbo. Protests had erupted at American airports. But she and her husband were on the town! They beamed, resplendent in formal wear and peerless in tone deafness.
A clever observer tweeted an image of Ivanka in her metallic gown next to one of a Syrian girl in a metallic emergency blanket, asking: "Who wore it better?"
If Kushner has sturdy principles or half the say that Bannon does, then explain the wording of the statement that the president put out Friday in remembrance of the Holocaust. It failed to mention Jews, an omission so glaring that it incited a furor among Jewish Republican groups. And rather than apologise to them, the administration dug in, reprimanding them for being too touchy.
This had all the markings of Bannon, who deplores what he deems the politically correct coddling of minority groups. But it seemed to go against what Kushner holds dearest. He's the descendant of Holocaust survivors, including a grandmother who helped to found the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and once complained of America's reluctance to take in Jewish refugees who were trying to avoid extermination.
His family is famous for its Jewish philanthropy. He and Ivanka, who converted to Judaism for their marriage, observe the Sabbath from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday. And yet his father-in-law fell short of the presidents before him in recognising the horrors inflicted on Jews.
Some observers point to the Sabbath as proof that Kushner does indeed exert a taming force in Trump World. They say that the president is most reckless during these periods, because Ivanka and her husband aren't around to baby-sit.
It was during the Sabbath that Trump pressed the National Park Service for more-flattering inauguration photos and gave that cockamamie, vainglorious speech to the CIA. It was the next day that he calmed down and tweeted a tribute to the Women's March, calling peaceful protests "a hallmark of our democracy."
Both before Trump's candidacy and at its start, Kushner was pegged as someone with mild political views. He and Ivanka ran in socially liberal crowds, and their presence beside Trump provided at least an iota of reassurance for some of the many people aghast at his racially incendiary tactics.
But for Kushner, the campaign was less a political journey than an emotional one. His family had felt the lash of disdain after his father was sent to prison years earlier, and he was intent on redemption, revenge or something along those lines. Trump represented a road to a summit from which his son-in-law could lord it over the elitists who had looked down on him.
Maybe he didn't register all the ugly swerves along the way. Maybe he convinced himself that they weren't so ugly. Maybe he believed that he'd be able to grab the wheel and correct the course. Maybe he still tells himself that, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Sometimes I study him and see someone drained of colour, even thinner than before, haunted. More often I see an emblem of our morally compromised capital, full of people willing to let the Trump juggernaut flatten essential American values just as long as they get to go along for the ride.
The New York Times