Electrocuting Sharks

And Jared Kushner's $3 billion windfall

“Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?” - Presidential candidate and convicted felon Donald Trump, Las Vegas, June 10, 2024.

Two old white guys will meet next week in Atlanta to debate about which man is best qualified to lead the Free World - what we used to call it, anyway. America and the world will have to live with one of them until 2028. And they are the two least-liked major party presidential candidates in three decades, according to Pew research. 

Biden will wipe the floor with Trump verbally and intellectually, of course. 

But as we’ve known since Nixon v. Kennedy and the dawn of the televised candidacy, what they say is far less important than how they look. And unfortunately Trump’s strict Big Mac and Mar a Lago well-done steak diet doesn’t seem to have had the predictable cardiac effect - yet anyway. The force of rage and lust for revenge are apparently keeping the blood coursing through the plaque.

We don’t know how the debate will play out. Will Trump lumber over behind the frailer 81 year old president, will he loom and stalk him across the stage as he famously did to Hilary? If he meanders into a verbal side show about, say, sharks, will it even matter anymore what Biden says?

The bar for Trump, as has been pointed out helplessly, to no discernible effect, over and over by political reporters forced to keep eyes on him, is low, low, low. Somewhere along his life path, his Saurian eye identified a need among a swath of Americans for nonsensical gibberish. The MAGAs love it. And the rest of the world barely raises an eyebrow anymore when he rants about whether sinking electric boats can electrocute sharks — his rationale for a serious policy proposal to ban electric vehicles that is shameless, open payback for his one billion dollar campaign donation ask from fossil fuel giants.

In another era, Trump’s true calling in life would be a traveling tentpole circus barker, hustling from town to town with an entourage of snake oil salesmen, other grifters, and assorted freakish animal and humanoid curiosities. The Sinatra croon, the show, that’s entertainment, and as ever, it serves a nefarious purpose - diverting the crowd from the pickpockets. 

Serious people, the 21st Century American oligarchy, the chiefs of the oil companies, the hedge fund and private equity dukes, the Silicon Valley magnates, and all the one percenters around the world interested in exploiting the United States for natural resources, cheap union-less labor, weapons, are staking their hopes on the diversionary madness he provides. 

The show means that the entire Republican Party, the right wing media and its Foxbot-hypnotized millions can continue to pretend that Hunter Biden’s Chinese contract is an actual issue, while they don’t raise an eyebrow over Jared Kushner’s very sketchy looking $3 billion dollar paycheck, much of it from Gulf oil potentates, just six months after he left the White House.

A few days ago, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) finally announced a long overdue investigation into how and why Kushner raked in 99 percent of a total $3 billion invested in his newly minted private equity firm, Affinity Partners, from foreign sources. Wyden is seeking records and information “pertaining to the tens of millions in payments Kushner is receiving from the Saudis and other foreign sources every year while exploiting private investment fund disclosure loopholes to shield the arrangement from public scrutiny.”

Attorney Virginia Canter, former chief ethics counsel for the Treasury Department and now with the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Salon that the investigation of Kushner is not just “long overdue” but “vital for our national security.”

“It’s pretty apparent that he made and was involved in decisions that were unusually favorable to the Saudis and then he turned around, within weeks of leaving the White House, and was engaging in negotiations with them to obtain a $2 billion investment,” Canter told Salon. She called it “a payoff” that “raises all kinds of national security concerns for a former government official at that level – a former White House official — who never qualified, legitimately, for a security clearance.”

Last year, economic analyst Steven Rattner tried to gin up some shock about Kushner. He shared a chart on MSNBC (preaching to the choir alas, and not on Fox) showing that just one percent of the $3 billion in investments Kushner's private equity firm Affinity Partners raked in shortly after he left the White House came from domestic sources. He banked $2 billion from the Saudis, $400 million from Qatar and the UAE, and about $625 million from other foreign sources. 

"This is extraordinary — unprecedented — I've never seen anything like it,” said Rattler, who was at least nominally a Republican when he served in Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. Rattner also pointed out that these investors forked over tranches of money without Kushner having any plan for what he planned to do with the windfall. 

"I've seen nothing else about what he's actually done with the money," Rattner continued. "It is normal to invest this money over a period of several years, so I don't think we can draw a firm conclusion yet. But, again, we're going back to a guy who's a real estate guy, and frankly, not a particularly good one at that, who's suddenly got $3 billion trying to do private equity deals competing against people who've been in this business for a long time. And I wouldn't, if I were the Saudis, count on making a lot of money from this any time soon." 

So, what gives? What kind of investor would lay that kind of money on an inexperienced man with no track record of success in the business? Canter had a suggestion -  the investment “may be a way of keeping Trump, in or out of office, on the Saudi side.”

It’s a giant influence scam, of course, the kind of scam that the superrich pull pretty regularly. And at $3 billion, it makes the bogus China conspiracy that the right has pushed about Hunter Biden and his father look like a game of chumps. 

Of course, that oversight is part of the beauty of Trump - for his true following. Trump was and probably still is a laughing stock among the real billionaires (just as Kushner is among the Arab princes, who he visited ten times on taxpayer dime during his tenure as White House “senior advisor”). Saudi Crown Prince MBS even bragged that he had Kushner “in his pocket.” 

Every oligarch needs a useful idiot in the U.S. government. The higher the rank, the better. 

As I wrote in my book about the Trump women, the way to understand the Trump regime and its true base - not MAGAs, but the ultra-rich behind the high hedge -  is to remember that, for all its America Firsting, its jingoism and flag-hugging, Trump serves people and entities with no national loyalty but to the flag of Mammon. 

From my book:

To understand the lives and histories of the Queens of Trumplandia, one must understand the social and financial microcosm in which they exist: The Yacht People are a sliver of the global one percent and besides the Trumps and the Wall Street billionaires whose respect he vainly tries to win, and their wives and children, the club includes scions of the Nigerian kleptocracy, the British nobility, Russian oligarchs including Putin, media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, and the Saudi and Emirati princes.

Their wealth is borderless, their nation anywhere with a tarmac and enough cell power to call the banker. And then there are The Civilians, the 99 percent. That would be, you and me. The rules - laws and norms - are different for The Yacht People and The Civilians, because anybody with just $1 billion in net worth possesses a tranche of wealth greater than the gross domestic product of 60 individual nations. 

The fact that the Republicans have for years delayed and fought against an investigation into Kushner’s colossal foreign investments from rich men with nation-size sovereign wealth and who assassinate journalists and kidnap their women with impunity reveals the deep hypocrisy of the MAGA crowd. 

Republicans are running a felonious fake businessman with an affiliated coterie of criminals. Eight members of his inner circle, some of whom worked with him in the White House, have been sentenced to prison. Dozens more are facing criminal charges. But the circus barker has managed to divert his MAGA base from all that and from gross, medieval wealth inequality. For his true base, that’s all that matters. He is the global oligarchy’s court jester. 

It’s all bread and circuses, gawping and laughing, all sideshow, while the thieving happens in broad daylight. “So I said, ‘There’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards, or here,” Trump said at his Vegas rally. “Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?’ Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.’ But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks.”

Oh how the MAGA eyes sparkle, how they laugh with joy, while the oligarchy plucks the pockets and slinks back behind the hedge, secure in the certainty that they’ve got a guy in Washington.