Ivanka
Trump and Jared Kushner flush their reputations down the toilet
Opinion by
Columnist
Jan. 14, 2021 at 6:07 p.m. CST
The Post published a
stinker of a story Thursday
morning, one involving Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, the Secret Service and
toilets. Specifically, it was about the need for them, and how much the federal
government was made to pay so that the agents assigned to guard President
Trump’s daughter and son-in-law could take a bathroom break.
These needs,
apparently, did not concern the Trump-Kushner family. As both policy and
personal behavior show, the needs of others rarely do.
The issue began when,
according to sources, the Trump-Kushner clan denied the agents assigned to
protect them access to one of the 6½ bathrooms in their 5,000-square-foot
Kalorama mansion, instead making them use a port-a-potty outside. Their
neighbors, many of whom paid millions of dollars for their own homes, were not
interested in living with a permanent port-a-potty and said so. “Tacky,” one
neighbor complained to Cosmopolitan.
“Ewww, really?”
What came next was
even tackier. For several months, the agents — responsible, mind you, for
protecting the lives of Ivanka, Jared and their children — didn’t have much
access to a bathroom at all. They needed to beg — first, from the Secret
Service detail guarding the nearby Obama family, and then from Vice President
Pence, and then even neighborhood restaurants. Finally, the Secret Service
arranged to pay a nearby property owner $3,000 a month for the use of a
basement apartment.
The situation stinks
to high heaven. That the government has spent more than $100,000 because Ivanka
Trump and Jared Kushner couldn’t bother to consider their Secret Service
detail’s bathroom needs is the least of the things wrong with this setup.
I need to note here
that the White House denies that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were behind the
bathroom ban, saying the Secret Service made the decision. Others familiar with
the situation say that’s not so. But even if the White House is correct, it
seems extraordinary to think that the entire neighborhood apparently knew about
the Secret Service’s potty problems while Trump and Kushner did not bother to
raise their voices to say to someone in authority, “This is all a mistake. Use
a house toilet while we straighten this all out.”
But thinking about
others is not the modus operandi of anyone in this
administration or the Trump family more generally. They lack empathy for
working or struggling people. They simply don’t consider the help.
When President Trump
shut down the nonessential services of the federal government in a budget fight
with Congress, how federal employees would get by without a paycheck didn’t
apparently enter his thoughts for a moment. “I’m sure that the people that are
on the receiving end will make adjustments. They always do,” he said at the time. More recently, his slipshod approach to
covid-19 exposed numerous White House employees to the coronavirus.
This contempt — and
make no mistake, that’s what it is — transferred over to policy. Families were
separated at the border. Numerous attempts were made to weaken the government
safety net. Student loan lenders were favored over borrowers. The workplace was
treated no differently. During Trump’s time in office, the Labor Department
weakened or fully did away with protections in areas ranging from hourly pay to worker safety,
cutting back on inspections of workplaces by the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration. Heck, OSHA removed the names of workers who died in workplace accidents from
its homepage.
Ivanka Trump wanted
us to believe she was better than this reign of meanness — that she was, as
Peter Wade wrote over at Rolling Stone, the “more palatable”
Trump. But this was always an act. Ivanka Trump possesses a long track record
of treating her help carelessly, and acting in a self-interested way. A
self-proclaimed champion of women’s empowerment in the workforce, her
motivational skills included making surprise visits
to her office on Sundays to encourage her corporate employees
to show up on their day off. She didn’t offer paid maternity
leave until pressured to do so. Her clothes were manufactured
at factories where workers were paid little and treated
worse. When she promoted the Trump tax package as offering an enhanced child
tax credit, she seemingly forgot to mention the law’s real estate provisions
almost certainly benefited husband Jared Kushner.
This sort of
callousness and cluelessness almost always catches up with people in the end.
In this case, it’s all too fitting that as the Trump administration ends,
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s reputations are getting flushed down the
toilet with it.
