The Shadow Following Trump

No matter how fast you run, or how far you go, you can never outrun your shadow. The shadows that have been following Donald Trump from the day of his inauguration have caught up with him even during his pompous wandering between the Middle East, Brussels, Rome and Taormina. One of these shadows is Russiagate, an inquiry that has now become a formal investigation through the appointment of a special prosecutor. On Thursday night, news broke that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who follows the president everywhere and is the most influential person in the White House, is a person of interest in the investigation. The reason for this lies in Kushner’s meetings with Russian emissaries, including people from the government and private individuals — often a meaningless distinction in Putin’s kleptocracy — during the weeks of transition from the Obama administration to his father-in-law’s administration.

Formally, Kushner is neither under investigation nor is he a suspect. However, up until he became a person of interest, the investigation had not officially reached any of the “big shots” from the White House. The fact that one of the Russians Kushner met was a banker from Moscow, therefore someone who had no diplomatic or official reason to get so close to the president-elect, harkens back to another classic source of America’s great political-legal scandals: money. As “Deep Throat” whispered to the journalists of The Washington Post who were after Nixon in 1973, you always have to “follow the money” in order to get to the truth.

Kushner, husband of the president’s beloved daughter Ivanka, is a millionaire without a shred of experience in public administration. He owns tens of thousands of low-income housing units rented out to those “forgotten” Americans whom his companies bleed dry, as demonstrated in The New York Times Magazine’s thorough investigation, which included names, surnames and court verdicts. To put it in the jargon of the oppressed, he is a “slumlord,” an owner of dumps which make a fortune for those who exploit them without scruples.

While the Russiagate resumed its gnawing, another appeals court, this time not in “lefty California” nor on the “liberal” West Coast, but rather in Virginia, crushed for the umpteenth time the so-called Muslim ban, i.e., Trump’s attempt to discriminate against the entry of travelers in possession of regular visas — mind you, not “illegals.” By an overwhelming 10-3 vote, the judges determined that, “[The president’s power] cannot go unchecked when, as here, the president wields it through an executive edict that stands to cause irreparable harm to individuals across this nation.” I want to stress that tell-tale word: “edict.” One court after another is telling the president that he is not an emperor who may rule by edicts.

Once he is done strutting on the international scene, embarrassing himself, bullying leaders of marginal countries like Montenegro — whose prime minister he shoved just so he could get to the front for a picture in Brussels — in the coming hours, upon Trump’s return to Washington, he will find out that his shadow has been following him faithfully, and that, as predicted, the rhetoric and pompousness of these increasingly useless summits can not shake it from him. Nobody can outrun one’s own shadow.