by Peter Navarro at American Greatness
While there is no love lost between former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly and me, I would be the first to dispute Jared Kushner’s ridiculous claim that Kelly would ever shove a woman, much less the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump. The grimmer truth here is that Jared and Ivanka did everything within their considerable Javanka powers to neuter a man who, even in the best of circumstances, would have had a tough time excelling in a job that required far more finesse and intelligence than brute force.
That was one of my main beefs with Javanka. It did not matter who was chief of staff. If these two spoiled scions did not get exactly what they wanted in the West Wing during the day, they went straight to the East Wing during the evening to lobby their patriarch.
Such meddling might have been all well and good if Javanka had been in sync with Trump’s agenda. But too often, Jared would undermine the president’s tough-on-China policies on behalf of his once and future Wall Street benefactors, while Ivanka would push a steady stream of New York liberal Democratic causes to subvert Trump’s efforts to make America great again.
As for John Kelly, my biggest problem with this four-star bully—on that appellation, Kushner and I agreed—was his intense opposition to my key remit in the White House: advancing the Trump trade and manufacturing policy agendas.
Because Kelly had no training in economics, he easily fell prey to the facile globalism of National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and Staff Secretary Rob Porter. I quickly became Kelly’s odd tariff guy out.
Because Kelly had no training in politics…
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