If there is any single person who bears responsibility for the Iran war and its calamitous consequences -- aside from Donald Trump -- it is his son-in-law and diplomat plenipotentiary, Jared Kushner. Bumbling but conceited, ill-informed but haughty, the New Jersey real estate heir (and his trusty sidekick Steve Witkoff, a Bronx tenement hustler) drove us blindly into a military conflict because, according to The New Yorker, he had no idea what the Iranians were offering to prevent it.
In the magazine's damning profile, Dexter Filkins reveals the breathtaking arrogance behind Kushner's failures, both in Iran and Ukraine, where he and Witkoff likewise botched their peacemaking mission. Unduly distracted by greedy grasping or simply too stupid to know what he didn't know, Kushner exemplifies what might accurately be termed Trump derangement syndrome: the belief, mirroring the president's own bloated self-esteem, that "only I can fix it," whatever it is.
Highlighting a 2024 speech that Kushner delivered at Harvard -- where his father once paid $2.5 million to gain his admission -- Filkins deftly captures both the overweening self-regard and the shallow disdain for experience, knowledge and real achievement. In that address, Kushner disparaged the 2015 Obama nuclear deal with Iran as "one of the dumbest agreements" ever and the 1993 Oslo peace accords as "a total failure." Of his own work during the first Trump administration, he said with characteristic modesty:
"My track record of success in the Middle East I do think is second to none over the last many years." (Having seen Kushner up close when he put the New York Observer newspaper into the ground, none of this has surprised me.)
If "success" means pulling down billion-dollar bribe-like transfers into his private fund by the region's despotic regimes, his boast would be hard to dispute. Meanwhile, the Iran war drags on with no exit and nothing but shame, expense, economic hardship and pointless bloodshed for the U.S. and its allies.
The style of Trump derangement syndrome exemplified by the president and Kushner is epidemic among his top appointees.
Trump has an unerring sense of how to choose individuals who mimic his worst qualities, with predictably bad results. An outstanding example is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the historically underqualified military chief who insists on being called the "secretary of war."
His mismanagement of this war -- and his ongoing attempt to conceal its actual damage to our soldiers, our defense infrastructure and our security -- displays a level of incompetence rarely seen even in the Pentagon, which is saying a lot. Troops in the region have sent clandestine images and messages exposing what Hegseth and Trump have tried to hide.
Perhaps that's why House members are tabling resolutions to impeach Hegseth, which forced Speaker Mike Johnson to recess early this week so that Republicans could avoid an embarrassing vote.
Across the Trump 2.0 cabinet, we see again and again the same blustering, ignorant and ultimately ruinous conduct modeled by the president for his subordinates. They respect no authority or expertise except what they claim to see in Trump, to whom they defer with a sickening sycophancy.
The examples are legion, but some are more dangerous to the nation than others. Among the very worst, of course, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary whose tenure has seen deadly outbreaks of measles, a disease formerly eradicated on these shores until he undermined vaccination, and cyclosporiasis, a parasite that ravaged communities after cuts to the systems that control such threats.
When Kennedy isn't lying, which is almost always, he is uttering nonsense that makes scientists blanch. Naturally he has spent years slandering Dr. Anthony Fauci, a dedicated official with actual knowledge about infectious diseases and public health. Bobby would rather rely on a mishmash of murky opinions from online weirdos profiting off snake-oil remedies. It's the worst of the 19th century delivered at 21st-century velocity.
The list goes on and on and on, over the horizon of doom. Consider Elon Musk, a presumptuous fool whose "efficiency" in cutting government caused hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad (and could still bring a record-breaking and incurable Ebola infection over here). Or Todd Blanche, whose jaw-jutting approach to federal prosecutions has hollowed out the Justice Department and wrecked the criminal justice system. Or Kash Patel, the perk-abusing imbecile who has dismantled federal law enforcement and the country's counterintelligence capabilities, to the delight of our adversaries in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Nobody who knows Kushner or Hegseth or Kennedy or Patel -- or Trump -- is shocked by this performance. What remains shocking still is how so much of the country has come to accept the unacceptable.