A real estate guy and Ivanka’s beloved Jared
The dynamic duo of Kushner and Witkoff have an excellent record of failure. But Trump still thinks they’re great:
The unprecedented dynamic of two men leading negotiations with Iran, Israel and Hamas and Ukraine and Russia — sometimes all in one afternoon — underscores how the Trump administration believes peace deals should be forged. It views diplomacy like a real-estate venture, requiring a business mindset and a small team tasked with securing a big development deal, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to explain how the president’s closest advisers think about their mission.
And if negotiations with one party fail as they did with Tehran, use the failure as leverage for another deal. Trump, on Friday, did just that, suggesting that the war with Iran may prove a boon for Kushner’s notable first-term achievement — the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
Sure. It’s all part of the plan…
Trump’s optimism comes as critics accuse the president of placing overwhelming trust in underwhelming men. While Kushner and Witkoff, a New York and Miami real estate developer, are widely lauded for shepherding the deal that brought home Israeli hostages, their brokered ceasefire remains fragile and Hamas is still a force in Gaza. Negotiations to end the Ukraine war have not produced a ceasefire. And attempts to persuade Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program were unsuccessful.
The breakneck pace leads to a “risk of overextension,” said former State Department negotiator Aaron David Miller, who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. The volume of detail required to handle three negotiations at once is too much to place on two businessmen, and there is a risk that the administration’s top negotiators lack a sufficient understanding of history and psychology, “which is critically important to how the combatants in these conflicts actually see matters,” Miller said.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran deal the Obama administration negotiated and Trump has widely panned, was 159 pages long and took two years to hammer out. But Trump’s confidence is unwavering. “They don’t have too much,” he said. “They actually have — they have capacity for more, to be honest with you.”
Trump and his two accomplices are tearing the world apart and they simply don’t see it. It’s not as if they have any strategy. It’s just, “try to get a deal, any deal, and then move on to the next thing before anyone notices that the deal is bullshit and has actually made everything worse.”
They’re a couple of hustlers just dancing as fast as they can to get through the day before everything blows up. Just like Trump. It’s hubris but also elite impunity. They’re very rich and they don’t believe there are any real consequences to what they do. And even if they somehow got caught committing a crime you will probably end up being the ambassador of France, as Jared’s father did.
They are just crashing through the world randomly wrecking things, secure in the knowledge that everything will always turn out all right. For them.