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The 800-Pound Gorilla in Trump’s Inner Circle

President Donald Trump made his valiant and long-awaited return at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where he made it clear that the GOP is the Party of Trump and will be for the generation to come.

The CPAC faithful overwhelmingly picked Trump as their standard-bearer, with only proto-Trump candidate, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, coming close. This despite the ongoing whelps from Conservatism, Inc. declaring that Trump’s time has passed. The GOP establishment has never been more out of touch with the grassroots and are becoming increasingly irrelevant, with their treasure trove of money buying them less and less favor with a constituency who cares more about putting America First than the golden calf of gross domestic product.

These are all good developments but it is important for those of us in the grassroots to begin demanding more from Trump as well. Republicans must demand excellence of all of their leaders, particularly at the highest levels of government. 

In the months following President Donald Trump’s loss to the Biden fraud machine, there has been far too little introspection about what went wrong for the Trump campaign. Trump supporters instead have blamed everything on the outside forces responsible for voter fraud while anti-Trump forces among conservatives deliberately have ignored evidence of electoral wrongdoing and used the loss to throw Trump under the bus.

To be clear, election fraud occurred and further investigations are needed to show the true extent of it so it can be rooted out of future elections. This fraud cannot excuse President Trump’s own missteps, however, some of which doomed him to be a one-term president (for at least the time being). 

Personnel Is Policy

The biggest missteps for Trump had to do with personnel. He hardly lived up to his boast of “hiring the best people.” Several of Trump’s hires—including former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—have already come out and denigrated the president, and now actively work to undermine his legacy. These folks are not worth mentioning, as their careers in Republican politics are over whether they realize it or not. 

The insidious enemy within is far more dangerous than any of these RINOs who are never likely to have access to Trump again. 

The swamp showed Trump who was boss in November by rigging an election and then bragging about getting away with it. But there is another part of the swamp, directly surrounding Trump, that he never even attempted to drain. President Trump has retained many of the holdovers from his previous operation despite their lack of success, receiving counsel from them at his Mar-a-Lago compound

The most dangerous flunkie leading Trump astray by far is connected to his own flesh and blood. No one man or entity has been more destructive to MAGA than his own son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Kushner’s relative fealty has been downplayed over the years, as the globalists have recognized that he is the weak link of the entire operation. He failed on virtually every single issue, making it more difficult for President Trump’s America First agenda to be realized on a day-to-day basis. Although he was a frequent punch line due to being hilariously unqualified for the position of senior adviser, the true extent of Kushner’s failures has been obscured in the media because of his continued usefulness to them as the Achilles heel impeding America’s national renewal.

On crucial social issues, Kushner was wildly out of step with Trump’s conservative populist base. He actually advised Trump against making transgender school athletes an issue on the campaign trail because of political correctness. He also attempted to gut the GOP platform to remove pro-Christian and family values language that could be considered offensive to the LGBT community before being overruled by other more savvy advisors. His groveling approach to the Left, such as his invitation to NBA star LeBron James to discuss social justice, served no purpose beyond self-aggrandizement and made the administration look schizophrenic when paired with the brash confrontational style of his boss.

Kushner also has been the primary driving force keeping Trump from considering social media alternatives. He has been in Trump’s ear convincing the former president not to use Gab, perhaps after being greased over by the tech giants. Jared’s wife, Ivanka, was given an Internet Freedom Award by a trade group representing corporations such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. They laughably said that Ivanka was being recognized for “extraordinary contributions to public policy and the internet economy,” but in actuality, they were cementing influence with undeserved flattery, and Kushner—the eternal novice—always took the bait.

It was through his close relationship with Kushner that Brad Parscale became the campaign manager for President Trump’s presidential campaign for most of 2020. Parscale, a figure who had zero political experience before 2016, was promoted to the post because of his familiarity with Trump and Kushner. He was hailed as a genius for the campaign’s digital strategy in 2016, soaking up the credit for President Trump’s viral social media posts, and riding that to the post of campaign manager with Kushner’s blessing.

What happened as a result was a very predictable disaster that should have been easily avoided. Parscale lacked the depth to perform his role adequately, despite the best of intentions. Parscale blew millions on a minority-outreach campaign that failed to yield any substantial results. He pocketed millions more while running campaign ads directed at President Trump himself in order to justify his undeserved position. It peaked with the embarrassing Tulsa campaign rally, in which TikTok users duped Parscale into thinking there would be record-breaking attendance, and ended up with a mediocre turnout which was seized upon by Trump’s enemies. He was dismissed shortly afterward and continued to provide humiliating headlines after a domestic dispute.

Holding His Place at the Globalist Table

Kushner failed Trump on race issues as well. He brought in former Obama Administration official Van Jones, an unabashed Communist and CNN analyst, to write criminal justice policy for the law-and-order administration, resulting in thousands of violent felons being let out onto the streets. During the anti-white Black Lives Matter uprising of summer 2020, Trump sat idly by and let the movement of revolutionary leftist violence gain momentum. Trump could have stopped it anytime but chose to let businesses burn and cities be destroyed, perhaps irreparably, because Kushner convinced him it might hamper Parscale’s minority outreach strategy—a strategy that perhaps accounted for a slight uptick in black voters but was negated many times over by Trump’s reduced share of white voters

On immigration, Kushner has been the most subversive, cajoling Trump essentially to abandon the issue responsible for winning him higher office. Kushner convinced Trump to curtail his efforts to oppose immigration policy, allowing multinationals to squeeze native-born Americans out of the workplace. Trump transformed into a Jeb Bush Republican on this issue and even dropped immigration as a campaign talking point for the most part throughout 2020. Thanks to Kushner’s hard work, America’s demographic avalanche is still on schedule to meet globalist timetables. 

Even though Trump capitulated to the pro-immigration lobby, the likes of Americans for Prosperity and the Chamber of Commerce—so-called pro-business “conservatives” addicted to the spigot of cheap third-world labor—still turned their backs on the president during his re-election campaign, preferring the globalist Biden despite Trump’s willingness to fold on key issues. 

This familiar pattern presented itself every time Trump served the establishment throughout his first term. There was never any reward, and the damage to his cause was always tremendous. There is quite the reward, however, for Kushner as he cashes out on his wholly undeserved connections.

 While they were working inside of the White House, Jared and Ivanka reported an astounding amount of revenue, as much as $640 million. The lowball figure of their combined earnings is $172 million. It was frequently reported throughout Trump’s term that Ivanka used less-than-legitimate means to boost her fortune, perhaps keeping her own father in the dark about her methods and motives. Previously, these arrangements were banned to prevent nepotism, but President Trump ordered the Justice Department to reverse decades of established policy in order to get Kushner and Ivanka into the White House.

This is not what his supporters had in mind when they elected Trump to drain the swamp. 

Never expect Jared or Ivanka to receive the personal and professional consequences that will be doled out to the likes of former White House strategist Stephen Miller, former White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, and others who held the administration to its America First mandate. The Kushners will be allowed to slip right back into their seats at the globalists’ table so much more qualified and intelligent people can manipulate them in case Trump successfully reclaims the office of the presidency in 2024. This is why they will be spared, and it is the reason why they are allowed to dine with the likes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, while other administration officials are treated like pariahs.

Trump has not ruled out another run for president and would be the immediate frontrunner for the nomination were he to announce. If he does, however, grassroots Trump supporters need to demand more from their president the second time around. So many dedicated loyal Trump supporters waved the banner and believed Trump hired the best people, only to be left looking like fools. 

If Trump cannot learn from his most glaring mistake, Jared Kushner, it is time for the Republican Party to move on from Trump and find a worthy successor for the MAGA revolution he started.

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About Gavin Wax

Gavin Wax is the 76th President of the New York Young Republican Club, Chairman of the New York Republican Liberty Caucus, an Ambassador for Turning Point USA, and an Associate Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research. You can follow him on Twitter at @GavinWax.

Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images