For Trump, is there life after Jared Kushner?

On the plus side, he’s unlikely to be missed. Soft-spoken though he may be, he has often used his silence for bad. He has a pattern of charging headlong into things, like building purchases, even when they are unwise. When he bought The New York Observer a decade ago, he presided over its gutting and used it to call in hit pieces on enemies. He also reportedly alienated numerous employees and did things like welsh on a bonus payment deal for one employee, allegedly telling her to “take one for the team.” His reputation in the White House appears to be one of arrogance and overconfidence, and rather than keep his head down with the proper humility of one who is in over his head and there by the grace of nepotism, he seems to hold it all the higher.

He’s also got a lot of baggage in his relatives. Of course, Kushner can’t help that his dad went to federal prison about a decade ago for evading taxes and taking revenge on his sister by hiring a prostitute to seduce her husband and sending her a videotape of the tryst. Stuff happens. But he’d be easier to defend if he’d forged his own path as, say, a botanist, and not simply grabbed the wheel of the Kushnermobile when Dad was indisposed. It doesn’t help that he presides over an empire of poorly maintained low-income housing accompanied by a relentless pursuit of penniless people for their money long after they’ve left. Nor does it help that his sister is willing to capitalize on the Trump proximity to promote the sleazy EB-5 visa scheme in which putting down $500,000 on a condo in a “targeted employment area” essentially buys you a route to citizenship in the United States. Every large family has a sleazeball among the gems, but in this case one looks for gems among the sleazeballs.

So, on the face of it, everyone apart from Donald, Jared, and Ivanka Trump is happy if Jared goes. Trump’s deplorables would cheer the departure of Steve Bannon’s purported nemesis. White House staffers would feel less resentful of the favoritism. Trump’s aggression might get dialed back a little. Comey supporters would get revenge. Democrats would collect another scalp, and the most partisan of them wouldn’t care much even if Kushner were in reality a moderating force. For them, each win against the Trump White House is like a block being removed from a Jenga tower, with collapse as the main goal.