We begin today’s roundup with an editorial from The Los Angeles Times calling on President Trump to fire his son-in-law, Jared Kushner:
Yet it's important not to fixate on the security-clearance issue. Kushner's presence in the highest councils of the administration would be objectionable even if he passed his background check with flying colors.
To be brutally frank about it, Kushner isn't qualified for his lofty position. His appointment as a senior advisor in the White House is an obvious and offensive exercise in nepotism. [...]
Whatever the explanation [for not having the proper security clearance], Kushner has been hobbled in performing duties for which he had no compelling qualification in the first place — other than having married the boss' daughter. He should pack up and return to New York.
The New York Times:
So one year in, what has Mr. Kushner accomplished? The answers point to why, from the nation’s founding to the present day, the architects of American democracy have tried so mightily to restrict the hiring of presidential relatives. Mr. Kushner’s achievements have not only been paltry, but he is directly implicated in some of the president’s most destructive — and self-destructive — decisions, as well as in some of the most serious accusations of self-dealing that have been made against the administration. [...]
What a liability Mr. Kushner has proved to be. American officials have intercepted conversations in which at least four countries, including China and the United Arab Emirates, discussed ways to take advantage of Mr. Kushner’s indebtedness, naïveté and ignorance of foreign policy to further their interests, according to The Washington Post. This week, The Times reported that Kushner Companies received hundreds of millions of dollars in loans through American companies, including Citigroup and the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, after their top executives met with Mr. Kushner in the White House. The Qatari government’s investment fund was a major investor in Apollo’s real estate trust.
This was all occurring while Mr. Kushner had access to top-secret intelligence, despite having failed to secure a permanent security clearance.
Ryan Cooper at The Week details how obscene the whole Kushner situation is:
In any other administration, the simple fact of the president hiring an untested and inexperienced son-in-law as a senior aide — a 36-year-old real estate developer with precisely zero political experience suddenly tasked with brokering peace in the Middle East — would have been a presidency-shattering scandal. (Remember how Republicans freaked out when Bill Clinton had his wife, who had many years of actual political experience as Arkansas' first lady, run point on health care?)
Obviously, the Kushner situation is galactically worse than Trump simply hiring a relatively dim relative. Indeed, Kushner (who recently lost his Top Secret security clearance) is also up to his armpits in extremely shady business deals that reek of corruption. In a healthy democracy, law enforcement would already be closing in.
Damon Linker says this chaos was expected and no one but Trump can control it:
Supporters of the Democrats should be happy that the more disorder and confusion Trump sows in the GOP, the likelier it will be that his party gets thoroughly creamed in the upcoming midterm elections. But Americans who care about the longer-term good of the nation should also find it supremely disconcerting to see one of the country's two main parties (and the country itself) led by a man who actively spreads ideological disarray and institutional dysfunction to everything he touches. But that, apparently, is where we are.
The chaos candidate has become the chaos president. And none of us has any choice but to ride out the storm.
David Graham over The Atlantic explains the chaos on steel tariffs:
The president, and the presidency, are as far off the rails as ever. The story that exemplifies this, strangely enough, is steel tariffs.
Wednesday evening, The Washington Post reported that the administration would impose new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, with the announcement coming as soon as Thursday. The news didn’t just take media organizations, business, and interest groups by surprise: It also came as a shock to many in the White House. Post reporter Damian Paletta says tariff backers kept the news completely under wraps, even omitting it from a high-level trade meeting on Wednesday. That’s impressive information-management for a White House that leaks nearly everything, but it’s also no way to run any kind of organization.
On a final note, here’s Eugene Robinson’s take on the chaos:
None of what’s happening is normal, and none of it should be acceptable. Life is imitating art: What we have is less a presidency than a cheesy reality show, set in a great stately house, with made-for-television histrionics, constant backstabbing and major characters periodically getting booted out. [...]
I spent years as a foreign correspondent in Latin America. To say we are being governed like a banana republic is an insult to banana republics. It’s that bad, and no one should pretend otherwise.