upon the release of his taxes, it appears that Donald Trump has paid astonishingly little federal income tax ($750 in 2017) and even zero in 2020. The Washington Post wants you to think this is a “setback” for him, but I’m not sure that is true. In fact, the New York Times reports that Trump’s own tax law hurt him.
So, could this be that rare instance where Trump deserves less focus than the tax code that gave him so much wiggle room?
I think so. Here’s why.
I am back in London for the holidays. As you may recall just a couple of weeks ago, I was here for a wedding and had a fascinating conversation with a taxi driver. It emerged that the country is riddled with striking unions in an alarmingly large number of sectors.
So, on my return, one of my British friends showed me a pamphlet she’d received in the mail from her local council, entitled “Stay Healthy and Warm this Winter.” She figured, rightly, that, like the cab driver’s narrative, it’d give me further insight into the current state of affairs in England.
This time, the picture was even bleaker than that of the cab driver’s.
So, there he was, photographed at the World Cup Final. In the VVIP box. In Qatar.
The brazenness is fascinating.
I’m talking not about Elon Musk, the leading contender as the world’s most controversial billionaire—who, wrongly in my opinion, has been the focus of most news articles covering the event. Why shouldn’t Musk be at the World Cup?
Kushner on the other hand? Well, there is a very good reason he shouldn’t have been there, as it happens.
As I reported last weekend, there’s currently an amping up of the congressional investigation into whether Kushner’s family business was saved by a firm whose second biggest shareholder was the Qatari Investment Authority—at a time when Jared was Senior White House Advisor (where his unofficial title was “Secretary of Everything”) and the Qataris needed U.S. help in ending a Saudi- and Emirati-driven blockade that had reportedly begun with Kushner’s knowledge but not the knowledge of the U.S. secretaries of state and defense. In the spring of 2018, following a visit to the White House by Qatar’s Emir, the U.S. withdrew its support of the blockade of Qatar. And then the Kushner business was suddenly saved—by a fund in which the Qataris had a huge stake. The two events occurred within weeks of each other.
Coincidence? Or more? That’s exactly what Congress wants to know.
And yet here, investigation notwithstanding, is Kushner. In Qatar—the very Middle East state that is the focus of his troubles. Standing publicly beside Musk, whose acquisition of Twitter has meant there’s rarely a day the billionaire is not in the news. If ever a gesture was designed to flip the bird, this surely is it.
The photograph of the pair—who, comically, do look as if they could be plotting world domination—has spawned news articles questioning what the nature of their relationship is.
Well, one answer is in my 2019 book, Kushner. Inc.
I wasn’t planning to write another “Harry & Meghan” review. I couldn’t see how there would be much, if anything, to add, particularly given the rash of negative press Part Two has garnered— again, on both sides of the Atlantic.
But the second half is actually more revealing and interesting than the first half. IMHO, director Liz Garbus should have just made the second half and discarded the first—but perhaps there were too many dollars involved to do that. (I’ve always thought that a particularly destructive way to pay creative people is per episode or word or anything to with quantity rather than quality. Readers, viewers, and listeners want the best product—not the longest.)
So: why was this half so much better?
It’s hard to imagine there’s any more to say than has already been said about the first half of the Netflix series “Harry & Meghan.” But I urge you to read the reviews, for it is there, unlike in the series itself, that there is a very interesting story.
Until now, there’s been a transatlantic divide over the couple. Traditionally, Americans think they are great, liberated independents speaking truth to power. The English think they are treacherous, self-involved publicity-seekers who are as guilty as the press they despise of milking (and knocking) the institution that created them for money.
But this past week, I googled, searching in vain for an American publication that had a wholly positive review of this series. And I couldn’t find a single one. The New York Times deemed the series a tedious Instagram story, calling it “an image-making exercise for the endless scroll.” Peggy Drexler, writing for CNN, said “it’s self-promotional, self-aggrandizing and, frankly, a little boring.”
It seems that even the liberal U.S. media has finally seen through this paper-thin PR exercise and realized that the couple’s narrative is rather more about self-service than public service, and that, yes, even in our social-media-driven-world there is still such a thing as over-exposure. The series’ audience score on Rotten Tomatoesstands at the time of writing at a miserable 11 percent. That is even worse than the score for the fiasco of a movie that was “Gigli,” which is currently at 13 percent.
At the risk of sounding smug, what I told you would happen has come true. Testimony given at the trial of a Trump friend, the real estate financier Tom Barrack, has led to a far more potentially serious Congressional investigation—or re-investigation, to be precise—as to whether Jared Kushner’s foreign policy machinations in the Middle East were primarily driven by the financial dire straits his family business was in while he was in the White House. If there were hard evidence of that, it would be an extremely serious criminal offense. (There has been none found so far.)
The Washington Post reported last week that Sen. Ron Wyden (chair of the Senate Finance Committee) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform) have widened an investigation started in 2020 into Kushner’s possible conflicts, to see whether “Kushner’s financial conflict of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade and national security policies for his own financial gain.”
I’m in London for the wedding of two great friends who are at the heart of political and cultural London society. Former Prime Minster David Cameron gave the toast at the reception last evening.
So it was appropriate that on my ride over to the reception, my cab driver decided to use the opportunity of the holiday traffic to explain the misery—at least as he saw it—of living in a post-Brexit, post-12-years-of-the-Tory-party England. (It’s famously customary for London cabbies to chat. It’s less customary for them to start conversations, as mine did, with “I am a socialist” because most London cabbies are conservatives.)
Still, it’s just one of those ever-green English truisms: If you want to understand the pulse of England, talk to a London taxi driver. Or rather, listen and learn.
My driver had a litany of issues. And let me just tell you: We think things are bad in the U.S., but all is not so peachy in the UK either.
For rather obvious reasons, my phone has been pinging with texts and emails from readers suggesting that Donald Trump is having a very bad week. There’s the fact that the Trump Org was convicted of tax fraud. Then there’s the fact that his chosen Senatorial candidate, Herschel Walker, was beaten in the Georgia run-off by Sen. Raphael Warnock. And then there’s the news broken by the Washington Post that an outside team hired by Trump discovered items with classified markings in storage that they’ve passed on to the FBI to add to the pile found at Mar-a-Lago.
So, yes, the former president has probably had better weeks, but I am not sure that the consequences for his future are as disastrous as some of the alarmist headlines imply.
First: his business. I phoned around to my sources in real estate, who include people who run funds that have lent to Trump, and asked, Does the conviction change anything? Would you lend to him again?
The answer was yes.
Let me repeat that. Yes.
As long as you are not a bank, where the underwriting committee probably would not let you lend to a business with a conviction against it, lending to Trump is actually now more enticing for the aggressive investment funds.
Why?
I wish I could tell you that I had come up with the outstanding aphorism of “the working Windsors vs. the working-it Windsors” to describe the rivalry—scratch that—the open warfare going on in the U.S. between the “American” side of the House of Windsor (the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, otherwise known as Harry and Meghan), who are currently residing in California, and the Prince and Princess of Wales (aka Catherine “Kate” and William), who are now visiting Boston. Instead, it was coined by my brilliant friend, the historian and philanthropist Amanda Foreman, who, like me, is American (she was born in the U.S.) but spent most her childhood in Britain before moving here in her twenties.
Foreman explained in the funniest, most on-point article I have read on the topicthat Brits who hoped that the Waleses’ visit to Boston this week might clearly illustrate their superiority in what Foreman lists as “duty, probity, discipline, decency, discretion, loyalty and commitment”—versus the Sussex’s currency of “self-actualisation, self-healing, self-identity, self-care, self-expression, self-confidence and self-love”—hoped in vain.
This, Foreman says—in an article for the UK Sunday Times so spikily excellent that I wish it had been published in the U.S.—has to do with a generational divide. According to Foreman, Americans under 40 (i.e., the demographic who don’t read New York Magazine and therefore didn’t appreciate its “Meghan of Montecito” expose in August) don’t want duty, probity, etc. No, they want something called “me-spiration” which, says Foreman, is “not a philosophy so much as an ego massage and…a pure money maker.”
Even if you are not an avid football fan, most likely you’ve noticed that, for the first time, the World Cup is being played in the Middle East—specifically in the tiny state of Qatar—and that there have been all sorts of controversies to do with that.
In no particular order:
Gianni Infantino, the President of FIFA, gave a surreal hour-long interview, seemingly to try to defend Qatar’s human rights and LGBTQ rights abuses (criticism has been levied on the death toll of the migrants building the World Cup stadiums) by accusing the West of being hypocritical.
Then there was the whole flip-flopping on buying alcohol in the stadiums.
Then there was extraordinary fact that Saudi Crown Prince MBS—who, in 2017, joined forces with UAE premier MBZ and Egypt and Blockade to blockade their ultra-wealthy rival Qatar—showed up to the World Cup Opening and, grinning, clutched hands with Qatar’s ruler Emir Tamim Al-Thani for photographers.
This despite the fact that, owing to a dispute over the TV rights, Saudis cannot watch the football live—which makes it doubly ironic that Saudi Arabia won a football match against Argentina!
Apparently, the Saudis are so amped up, they are flocking into Qatar to watch the games. And now the Saudi club Al Nassr is trying to buy UK superstar Cristiano Ronaldo.
Noticeably absent from the action in Doha is MBZ, who reportedly wanted the World Cup to happen in the UAE. “He’s not public-facing like MBS, and you never know—depending on who is in the final, he might go for that,” a source told me.
But who did show up regardless of who was winning on the football field? The U.S.’s Middle-East-Beneficiary-in-Chief Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump.
But what does it all mean for you in your armchair at home?