By the way, Jared is dumb as a brick too

By the way, Jared is dumb as a brick too

by digby




That's how Steve Bannon described Ivanka Trump. But it's not just her or her daddy. Recall this from November:

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, a conservative who once enjoyed a friendship with President Donald Trump and the first family, railed on Jared Kushner as an unthinking, uninterested simpleton on his Wednesday MSNBC broadcast. 
Scarborough described moments from along the 2016 presidential campaign trail in which he said he observed the president's son-in-law and senior adviser displaying a lack of regard for international policy matters, despite his role as the president's Middle East peace envoy. 
"I have spoken with him a lot, I like Jared, but any time he tried to explain the history of the Middle East, he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to hear it," Scarborough said Wednesday. "He said, ‘I’m tired of the talking. We don’t need to read history books.’ Here is a guy — how old is he, 34, 35? — I’m sure he’s great in real estate and everything else, but the point is that this entire administration has shunned experts."
By the way, I'm glad Scarborough has come around to the side of sanity. But I can't help but remember how he kissed Trump's hem over and over again during the campaign until Trump finally turned on him too. He was an insider at one point and he knew all this stuff about Trump. By the time he started talking about it it was way too late. Unlike other GOP apostates (who have their own demons to purge) Scarborough was a friend of Trump's and knew what he was.

But anyway, about Jared, he's a lot like his father-in-law:

My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.

“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me.

“His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

This is the guy Trump put in charge of solving the Israeli-Palestian problem and bringing middle east peace, NAFTA renegotiation, diplomacy with Mexico and China, the opioid crisis, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing veterans care, making the government work like a business.

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