They Went to Jared

The pitch deck from a new investment fund called Affinity Partners was one of the most laughable presentations the potential investors had ever seen. Consisting of 20 black-and-white slides, the PowerPoint resembled something an undergraduate would have put together. It verged on satire, drenched in corporate pabulum, it touted “accelerating transformation through connectivity” and “aligned economic interests” that could “create previously unrealized value.” Specifics were minimal at best, but the opportunities, whatever they were, were apparently endless. The would-be investors “said they’d never seen such a joke of a deck,” one source told the Intercept.

Despite its startling amateurishness, the gist of the pitch, proffered in 2021, was clear enough. Affinity sought to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from both American investors and the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom, eager to diversify its economy and launder its image as a repressive kleptostate, had already bankrolled professional golf, tennis, and soccer leagues; commercial real estate and luxury properties; video games and celebrity influencers; PR agencies and consultancy firms, even corporate giants like Boeing, Citigroup, and Disney. And much of that investment flowed to Westerners willing to overlook Saudi human rights abuses.

The Affinity pitch, though, was so vapid, so vacuous, so devoid of content that even Saudi officials blanched. A due diligence report conducted on behalf of the kingdom found Affinity’s operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” But there was one element that would get its pitch over the finish line: Taking up two full slides at the end of the presentation was a 1,200-word biography of Affinity’s founder, Jared Kushner.

This article was adapted from Casey Michel’s forthcoming book, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally With Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.Mother Jones illustration; photo by Versha Sharma

By this time, Kushner was out of the White House, where he’d served as a top adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump. The disgraced former president was back in Florida, licking his wounds after losing to Joe Biden, railing about election fraud as he plotted his return to power. Kushner took a different tack. Instead of, say, spending more time with his young children or turning back to the New York real estate scene that had chewed him up and spit him out, he would try something new, something that didn’t require too much talent and hinged almost entirely on his proximity to power and wealth. He would be a private equity fund manager. And Affinity, which he launched the day after Biden was sworn in, would be Kushner’s vehicle to greater riches than he’d ever known before.

But again, this was 2021. The world viewed Trump as little more than a twice-impeached former president who’d attempted a coup to remain in power. Kushner was tainted by association with his father-in-law, whose circle of contacts was increasingly worthless. Moreover, doing business with Kushner came with all sorts of hazards, not least the potential blowback from a Biden administration watching out for any foreign governments partnering with the Trump family.

The Saudi officials tasked with screening investments had their answer. Affinity’s lack of clarity or strategy, the absence of other major investors, the “inexperience” of its managers, and “public relations risks,” as their report put it, all pointed to an unequivocal no. They would not back Affinity. They would not fund Kushner.

But only one vote mattered. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, architect of the grisly assassination of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, lord of the Saudi kleptocracy, a leader opposed to extending women or minorities or gay people anything resembling equal rights, would have the final say. And as MBS saw it, Affinity wasn’t just some panhandling, fly-by-night investment group looking for a handout. It was a fund overseen by a fellow princeling whom the Saudi dictator had already befriended.

MBS also knew that if America’s political tides were to turn, Kushner could prove an indispensable asset. So he overruled his experts. Kushner and Affinity would have their funding, $2 billion to start, with potentially much more down the road. And MBS would again have an American partner he could steer in whichever way he wanted.

The Saudi investment proved fruitful. Despite Kushner’s insistence during the 2024 campaign that he would have little involvement in a second Trump term, he is once more at the center of almost every major geopolitical event. In the occupied Palestinian territories, he’s point man for what should supposedly emerge from the rubble, a “New Gaza” that promises to restore jobs, prosperity, and peace. He was dispatched to Moscow with special envoy Steve Witkoff to seek a diplomatic solution to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. In January, he and Witkoff were appointed executive board members of Trump’s new Board of Peace, itself a breathtaking attempt to monetize foreign relations. The following month, Trump named Kushner his “special envoy for peace,” shortly before dispatching him and Witkoff to lead the administration’s disastrous negotiations with Iran. To each of these assignments, Kushner has brought a mind-boggling array of ethical conflicts. His financial entanglements span the globe, touching on the diplomatic hotspots where he is supposed to be negotiating on America’s behalf. He has made an art of cashing in on his foreign relationships, which, for those partners, are also paying off as never before.

It’s worth pausing to reflect on just how unprecedented this entire play has been. True, Kushner is hardly the first family member to profit from their presidential connections. Billy Carter moonlighted as a lobbyist for Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and hawked “Billy Beer” to make a buck off his brother’s presidency. Hunter Biden’s attempts to cash in on the family name, via crooked networks out of Ukraine and Romania and the sale of overpriced artwork, helped derail his father’s presidency.

But in scale and audacity, what Kushner has attempted, and achieved, is on another level entirely. He asked foreign regimes to trust him with billions of dollars even though he’d never managed an investment fund. One former Republican official, as the New York Times noted in April 2024, “could recall no precedent for a government official leaving office and starting an investment firm that would immediately receive billions of dollars from foreign governments with which the official had been working while serving in government.” And that was before Trump placed Kushner, who had zero diplomatic or foreign affairs expertise until his father-in-law rose to power, at the center of every international crisis, elevating him to the role, arguably, of the nation’s leading diplomat.

Even Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who led the charge against Hunter Biden, was taken aback: Kushner’s Saudi funding arrangements, he said, “crossed the line of ethics,” and when a consultant close to Kushner called and asked him to tone down his criticism, Comer said he instructed the intermediary “to tell Kushner to fuck off.”

Kushner was denied top-secret clearance until Trump overruled intelligence officials. “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him,” said a former White House official.

Of course, it wasn’t just Saudi Arabia that saw Kushner as a pliable source of influence. The United Arab Emirates, whose own despot had cultivated Kushner years before, began tossing money at Affinity Partners around the same time. So did the Qatari regime, which slipped back into America’s good graces as it was helping bail out Kushner’s family company. To date, firms linked to the UAE and Qatar have invested at least $1.5 billion in Kushner’s fund. With more modest infusions from smaller investors, nearly all foreign, Affinity’s asset pool grew and grew, topping $6 billion and generating more than $100 million in management fees for Kushner and his partners. (Affinity’s fee structure, the Saudi investment officials wrote in their analysis, seemed “excessive.”)

If the investments themselves weren’t enough of an ethical hornet’s nest, the contracts Affinity signed give the regimes troubling leverage over Kushner. They allow investors to pull out after a five-year window, which means Saudi Arabia and Qatar have the power to implode Affinity in the middle of Trump’s second term, decimating Kushner’s standing, a financial sword of Damocles that, by extension, dangles over the federal government.

Playing Both Sides

A brief history of Jared Kushner profiting from his proximity to power.

This situation was entirely foreseeable, and yet Kushner’s foreign dealings were largely ignored by Democratic lawmakers until Biden was headed for the door. There were no formal investigations or high-level hearings into his doings, even after Trump announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Democrats appeared reluctant, with Hunter Biden under investigation, to draw attention to the issue of family members profiting off a presidency. Kushner, after all, seemed unlikely to have a future in US politics. Ignore him and he’d go away. The Trump era was over, right?

One of the few Democrats to raise the alarm was Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, then-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who attempted to pierce Affinity’s veil of secrecy once it became clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee. In June 2024 and again that September, he wrote to the company seeking information. Affinity resisted, withholding key financial details and refusing to fully reveal its foreign investors. Wyden’s request rested on two unknowns: how much Kushner profited personally from his foreign dealings and what he was doing, precisely, for those clients. Kushner “has some experience in real estate, but no experience running hedge funds and private equity,” a source familiar with the back-and-forth told me. If anything, his affairs gave the appearance of a simple playbook: selling access, influence, and even policy.

In October 2024, with less than two weeks left until the election, Wyden and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland accusing Kushner of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and asking Garland to name a special counsel to investigate. “The scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner coupled with the national security implications of his apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder are unprecedented and demand action from DOJ,” they wrote.

Soon after, Garland was on the way out, Trump was incoming, and the Republicans were poised to run Congress. There would be no special counsel, just a vastly more lucrative fundraising landscape for Affinity Partners.

Kushner’s deep ties to foreign despots are a remarkable breach of ethical norms. But they also are of a piece with his personal and professional histories, and perhaps especially his attitude. Kushner, much like his father-in-law, behaves as though rules and restrictions don’t necessarily apply to him and as though private-sector dealmaking somehow suits him for high-stakes international diplomacy. “A lot of the people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats,” he conceded late last year. “It’s just different being ‘deal guys’, just a different sport.”

Hints of this pay-to-play worldview, this notion that there’s a deal to be cut wherever one looks, ethics be damned, were first evident decades ago, when Kushner was a high schooler in New Jersey. Despite reportedly being a “less than stellar” student, he was accepted at Harvard, a move preceded by the pledge of a $2.5 million donation to the college from Charles Kushner, Jared’s father. For good measure, the payment was structured to begin only “after Jared matriculated,” journalist Andrea Bernstein wrote in her 2020 book, American Oligarchs.

In March 2005, less than two years after Jared graduated from Harvard, Charles was sentenced to 24 months in prison (and served 14) after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering, he had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, filmed their tryst, and sent the tape to his sister. (Trump would pardon Charles in December 2020 and appointed him ambassador to France four years later.) But the younger Kushner continued his unqualified ascent.

Charles Kushner (second from left), his wife, and his lawyers make their way through the media scrum outside the federal district courthouse in Newark, New Jersey, on August 18, 2004.Chris Hondros/Getty

At age 25, he purchased a majority stake in the New York Observer, once a staple of the city’s media and real estate landscapes, for $10 million, his own money, he claimed, from real estate deals he’d closed during college. He evinced little interest in good reportage or journalistic ethics. To the contrary, multiple editors later asserted that Kushner ordered the paper to run “hit jobs” on people he felt had wronged him or his family. “I came to believe that Kushner wanted the Observer to succeed not because he believed in what it was, but because he needed it as a bullhorn for his own business interests,” former editor Kyle Pope remembered. The paper, already losing money, failed to thrive on Kushner’s watch. By the mid-2010s, less than a decade into his ownership, the “once-proud” Observer was a “Potemkin village” of a publication, limping along with clickbaity articles and little impact.

On September 16, 2025, a UN commission declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. That same day, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire.

The Observer was hardly Kushner’s biggest financial fiasco. That honor belongs to a high-rise building at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Constructed in 1957, the 39-story, glass-and-steel office tower had been a Midtown staple for decades, with tenants ranging from Citigroup to Warner Brothers and Xerox. It would become an albatross around the Kushners’ neck. In 2007, their commercial real estate firm, Kushner Companies, with Jared at the helm, purchased the tower for nearly $2 billion, a staggering markup from its $518 million sale price seven years prior. The family invested $50 million and borrowed $1.75 billion to cover the remainder­, a remarkable risk at the best of times, which these were not.

A few months later, the subprime mortgage crisis sent the global economy into a freefall. Jared’s acquisition became, as the New York Times put it, a “classic example of reckless underwriting.” Vacancy rates spiked as interest on the family’s 10-figure debt accumulated. To cover costs, Jared sold off nearly half of the family’s stake in the building’s retail space and subsequently had to restructure the loan. Even as Trump ran for president in 2016, the family was still scrambling for funding. (“Is Jared Kushner the World’s Worst Real-­Estate Investor?” asked Vanity Fair.)

There was a moment just before the election when Kushner, who was helping run his father-in-law’s campaign, thought he’d found a lifeline. Together with Charles Kushner, he solicited a personal investment from former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who also had previously overseen Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

The sheikh, who goes by HBJ, agreed to put up $500 million to help refinance 666 Fifth Avenue if the family could raise the rest elsewhere. Negotiations bled into 2017, as Kushner, by then a White House official and diplomat, was charged with brokering Middle East peace. But after a controversy arose in relation to other potential investors, HBJ pulled out, leaving the Kushners again on the hook for their spiraling debt payments. At that point, the Intercept reported, Charles went directly to Qatar’s finance minister seeking an investment from the nation’s sovereign wealth fund. He failed to land a deal.

President Donald Trump, with Kushner in attendance, meets with Saudi Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office in March 2017.Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty

A regional blockade of Qatar began two months later, in June 2017. The Saudis, Emiratis, and other Middle East regimes severed ties with Doha as part of broader jockeying for regional supremacy between Gulf rivals, all US partners. The scent of invasion hung in the air. It was a tinderbox primed to explode.

Remarkably, rather than act as a neutral arbiter, the Trump administration immediately threw its weight behind the Saudis and Emiratis, and Kushner, according to investigative journalist Vicky Ward, “greenlit” the entire operation. “The Saudis would not have risked moving forward without permission from somebody,” an aide to then, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told her. “That person must have been Jared.”

While there’s no direct evidence linking the blockade to Kushner’s investments, his family’s financial entanglements raise legitimate questions about his motivations. He had already “reamed the Qatari ruling family for not doing the deal” on 666 Fifth Avenue, Ward wrote on social media. Would the Qataris view the administration’s support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, she added, “as Kushner saying, ‘If you don’t pay my father, the Americans are going to sanction an invasion of your country’”?

Put another way: Lovely country you have there. Shame if something bad were to happen to it.

The blockade persisted for years, as did the ever-present threat of invasion. But the Trump administration began changing its tune in April 2018 after an intensive Qatari lobbying campaign culminated in the first of several Oval Office meetings between Trump and the emir. The following month, the New York Times reported that Charles Kushner was in “advanced talks” about 666 Fifth Avenue with a company partly owned by Qatar. Jared then flew to Doha, where he met with the emir to discuss “increasing cooperation.” Early that August, Kushner Companies inked a deal with the Qatar-backed company, eliminating what the Times called “the family’s biggest financial headache.” Trump’s new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, pushed for a resolution in the meantime, and just before Trump left office, the Saudis and Qataris reached a deal to end the blockade.

Everyone involved denied that the deal had any relation to Kushner’s White House role, but the timing was intriguing. Either way, it was a remarkable turnabout for the family, and a complete dissolution of the traditional separation of public and private interests.

Kushner Companies struggled to service the massive debt the Kushners took on when they purchased an office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.Drew Angerer/Getty

The Qatar affair set the tone for Kushner’s second stint as a public official. He’d struck up a friendship with MBS during Trump’s first term, engaging in text­ing sessions and jetting off to Riyadh for unannounced talks. The Saudi regime “cultivated the relationship with Mr. Kushner,” whom it saw as someone with “scant knowledge about” the Middle East and, specifically, “ignorance of Saudi Arabia,” the New York Times wrote. At one point, MBS reportedly bragged he had Kushner “in his pocket.”

It was difficult to conclude otherwise. US intelligence officials grew increasingly alarmed by Kushner’s private communications with MBS even as the prince sought retribution against regime critics like Khashoggi. “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him,” said a former White House official. The concerns reached such a breaking point that Kushner’s application for a top-secret security clearance was initially rejected over fears “about potential foreign influence,” NBC reported. But Trump overruled his intelligence officials, granting Kushner access to America’s most closely held secrets.

As MBS tucked Kushner further into his pocket, other regimes tried to replicate the Saudi success. One year into Trump’s first term, US intelligence analysts reported that officials from a range of foreign countries had “privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner,” the Washington Post noted, “by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties, and lack of foreign policy experience.” They’d hit on the same conclusion as MBS: Kushner was tractable, and perhaps the best vector for influencing Trump.

“I was very surprised that the United States would send two negotiators who clearly had done almost no research into Iran’s negotiating history or even the basic facts surrounding the nuclear program.”

One of those countries was Israel. For years, Kushner and his family had supported Israeli imperialism in the Palestinian territories, helping bankroll the settler organizations stealing Palestinian lands in the West Bank. Kushner also had a decades-long personal relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Their ties stretched back to the 1990s, when Charles Kushner supported Netanyahu’s political rise and invited “Bibi” to their sprawling home in New Jersey. Young Jared even gave up his bedroom to Netanyahu and, according to Andrea Bernstein’s book, played basketball with him in the driveway. That familiarity has paid dividends for Netanyahu and Israel. With Kushner ensconced in the White House, the Israelis had their Trump whisperer. (He would broker the Abraham Accords, which brought Israel closer to the Gulf states but sidestepped the Palestinians. Al Jazeera and others cited Arab, Israeli normalization as a key factor in Hamas’ brutal October 7 attacks and the retaliatory razing of Gaza.)

Russia had a similar epiphany. Once Trump was sworn in, Kushner became a Kremlin target second only to Trump himself. President Vladimir Putin, federal documents show, tasked businessman Kirill Dmitriev with courting top White House officials, and Dmitriev took a particular interest in Kushner. Now head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund, Dmitriev, who was personally sanctioned by the US in 2022, along with the fund itself, controls a massive trove of Kremlin assets. He also studied at Stanford and Harvard and once worked at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. “It was with Kushner that Dmitriev established the closest and most trusting relationship,” the Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta noted. And that relationship would flourish again during Trump’s second term, as Kushner’s foreign ties came full circle.

Alex Fine

Kushner’s assertion that he would play no role in a second administration crumbled as soon as Trump returned to power, and foreign regimes were quick to recapitalize on his proximity to the throne.

Dmitriev is now steeped in negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine on Russia’s terms, with his old pal Kushner representing the United States. The Kremlin is dangling potential deals for US invest­ors that are reportedly worth trillions of dollars, if only America would lift its sanctions and welcome Russia back in from the cold. Kushner, meanwhile, has proved willing to peddle pro-Kremlin talking points time and again. In late 2025, he and special envoy Witkoff, whose family and the Trumps co-founded World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm in which a top UAE official would later purchase a 49 percent stake, publicized a “peace plan” for Ukraine. But its provisions, from capping Ukraine’s military to forcing Kyiv to cede territory that Russia hadn’t even conquered, were conspicuously pro-Moscow.

A Kremlin-friendly push by a US president with a mysterious Putin affinity might be unsurprising, but the details are galling. As investigative journalism site the Insider revealed, Kushner’s peace plan was in no way original. “Many of its most controversial conditions were contained” in a months-old Kremlin document the outlet had obtained. The plan was “at its core a recycled Russian document,” the Insider wrote, with “specific language that appeared almost exactly word-for-word in an earlier text, one drafted solely by Dmitriev.”

Israel also redoubled its relations with Kushner, whom Trump reappointed, with Witkoff, as a key interlocutor for the administration’s Palestinian efforts. Left unacknowledged was the fact that Affinity Partners had secured financial deals in Israel and was therefore in a position to profit from the ongoing theft of Palestinian lands. In 2025, the Israelis approved Affinity’s purchase of nearly 10 percent of an insurance and financing behemoth called Phoenix Financial Ltd., making Kushner’s fund the largest shareholder. Phoenix is a bulwark for Israeli expansion in the Palestinian territories and Syria, enabling more building, construction, and imperialism.

All of this has fattened Kushner’s wallet, and by extension Ivanka Trump’s. And yet the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are no closer to a conclusion. On September 16, 2025, a UN commission officially declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.

That same day, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire.

“Can you imagine, like, a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars?”

While still juggling Ukraine and Gaza, Kushner added Iran to his remit. If his Israeli investments made him a bad choice to broker peace with the Palestinians, the billions Affinity has received from Iran’s geopolitical rivals make his involvement in those negotiations just as shocking. His glaring conflicts of interest, combined with his lack of the knowledge and experience to lead such dicey negotiations, have resulted in what may be the greatest strategic failure of Trump’s presidency. Those conflicts perhaps might be easier to overlook were Kushner a nuclear policy whiz or an Iran expert. Instead, life-and-death decisions, and the fate of world affairs, have been left to a naive oligarch who seems to believe his ascent to ­billionaire-dom qualifies him to thread this difficult diplomatic needle.

The Guardian reported in March that Kushner claimed he and Witkoff both have “a pretty deep understanding of the issues that matter” in the Iran negotiations. But if Kushner has any nuclear know-how or useful knowledge of Iranian history and policy, it wasn’t evident during the failed negotiations that preceded the attacks Israel and the Trump administration unleashed in February without consulting Congress or America’s other allies. “I was very surprised that the United States would send two negotiators who clearly had done almost no research into Iran’s negotiating history or even the basic facts surrounding the nuclear program,” Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told me. “You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to negotiate an effective nuclear agreement, but you should be surrounded by nuclear experts.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (seated in front of the flags) is flanked by US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Kushner at a meeting in Jerusalem on October 9, 2025.Chen Junqing/Xinhua/Zuma

Kushner and Witkoff, by all appearances, misunderstood Iran’s recent diplomatic history with the United States, not least the nuclear deal struck under President Barack Obama, which Trump scuttled during his first term. For instance, when Iranian negotiators turned down Kushner’s offer of free nuclear fuel in return for ending the regime’s nuclear fuel enrichment, Kushner apparently took it as a sign that Iran would never abandon its bomb-building efforts. He can be heard complaining, in an early March recording obtained by Mother Jones, that Tehran was not taking the US position seriously and was responding simply with “games and tricks and denials.”

“Iran’s response should not have been a surprise,” said Davenport, whose organization has laid out perhaps the most thorough criticism of the US, Iran communication breakdown. “Iran had been burned in the past on fuel supplies, and it views uranium enrichment, the production of fuel, as not only a source of pride, but also as a sovereign right.” She added: “Witkoff and Kushner fundamentally misread the Iranian position and jumped to conclusions about Iranian intentions that just aren’t supported by the evidence.”

Yet despite the US contingent’s technical ignorance and general obtuseness, the Iran­ians appeared willing to keep talking. The Omani foreign minister, who was helping mediate, cited “substantial progress” between Washington and Tehran. And British mediators saw “no compelling evidence” of any imminent nuclear threat from Iran. That, too, appears to have been the conclusion of Trump’s White House predecessors. But Kushner, parroting Netanyahu’s rhetoric, claimed the Iranians “basically could have been days or weeks away from a weapon if they would have put the effort into it, and they had all the capability to accomplish that.”

That’s the conclusion he took to Trump, resulting in a war that has destabilized the region, alienated US allies, and bled Americans’ wallets. “All the reporting suggests that a strong deal was on offer had there been the patience and expertise from the US negotiating team, and it appears Mr. Kushner was not interested in that level of patience, and investing the time and effort needed for intensive negotiations on nuclear policy,” Jonathan Guyer, program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, told me.

Kushner was, however, interested in soliciting new investments. The New York Times reported in March that, even as US bombs rained down on Tehran, he was meeting with foreign regimes, including the Saudis, to raise additional billions for Affinity. “Other Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that invested earlier in Affinity, including those in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, are also expected to be asked for more,” the Times noted.

And how could they say no?

Back in DC, now that Kushner has his official title of special peace envoy, the law requires that he produce a financial disclosure. He hasn’t, but a Republican-­controlled Congress doesn’t seem inclined to haul him in for a grilling. That could change if the Democrats retake either chamber in the midterms. “Can you imagine, like, a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars?” Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, looking very much like a 2028 presidential candidate, asked a crowd of supporters in a clip posted on TikTok in mid-April. “No!” a man yells. “But he’s a Trump!” Ossoff adds perkily. “A royal. A princeling!”

This past spring, Raskin, along with Wyden and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-­Calif.), announced separate committee investigations into Kushner’s conflicts of interest. “Kushner makes up for his flaws as an investor by being a wildly corrupt appendage of his father-in-law’s wildly corrupt administration,” Wyden said in a press release. “The guy is literally on the payroll of the Saudi government and trying to take even more of their money while simultaneously hijacking US foreign policy with his shadow State Department.”

Kushner, whose companies did not respond to questions for this story, may not be directly responsible for the Iran war, the thousands of deaths, billions in damages, shortages of fuel and fertilizer and key metals, economic disruption, and, by some estimates, expenditure of nearly $50 billion in US military resources. That was Trump’s call. But Kushner’s leading role in the bungled negotiations makes him complicit in what, by most accounts, has been a costly and humiliating defeat for the administration, and for the nation, whose alliances and global standing may never recover.

In many ways, the Iran mess is a fitting capstone to Kushner’s career to date. Rather than a seasoned diplomat with a deep understanding of Middle East policy and history, a person of integrity with no financial stake in the outcome, we got a feckless wheeler-dealer, and a global quagmire. For Kushner, none of this appears to matter. He and his partners are traveling the world, gleefully raking in cash as they cultivate relationships with sordid regimes and kleptocratic leaders in the interest of making a buck. The world burns and Jared Kushner gets richer.

It seems he was right when he said it’s just different being a “deal guy.” Never mind what that means for the rest of us.