Signs point to the return of Javanka, outrageous corruption and all

 Don’t look now, but several ill omens point to the possible return of Javanka, the ultra-glamorous Washington power couple who make John and Jackie Kennedy look like two drugged howler monkeys fighting over a tube of stale Pringles.

Ivanka Trump and her alabaster beau Jared Kushner are nothing if not opportunists, and while they might have been temporarily put off by Donald Trump’s fascistic, Reich-wing ambitions—and the high-society defenestration that ensued—Ivanka might be hearing that jackboots are in vogue again and is ready to dip a single toe back into the fire swamp. If she relaunches her lifestyle biz and releases a new line of Hers and Himmler’s bath towels, you’ll know for certain she’s all in.

In a new column for The Guardian, Awra Mahdawi points to several recent developments that augur a potential sequel to the four most irritating years any human has ever experienced:

While “Javanka” kept their distance from the former president during Trump’s lows, there are signs Ivanka might be thinking of coming out of political retirement. Last summer, just as Trump started doing well in the polls, Ivanka started being spotted with Dad again. Now that a second Trump term is a serious possibility, an Ivanka comeback is being more prominently teased. A few weeks ago, the media outlet Puck reported that Ivanka is “warming to the idea of trying to be helpful again … She’s not like ‘Hell no’ any more.” Last week, an anonymous “friend of Ivanka” told Business Insider that the former first daughter has softened her stance on avoiding politics for ever. While a spokesperson for the couple told Puck these rumours were nonsense, it does feel as though Ivanka is testing the political waters.

Of course, while the thought of another Trump term is horrifying enough—if the first iteration was “The Room” of administrations, the second promises to be closer to “The Human Centipede”—it will be a real trip if the kakistocratic Katzenjammer Kids are in tow. No one wants to see that, do they?

Of course not. Then again, there could be an upside. After all, Republicans have spent years harassing Joe and Hunter Biden over Hunter’s business activities—which reached a concerning climax when Joe, as a private citizen, loaned his son $4,140 to buy a truck. So what will they do when they discover that Ivanka snagged 34 Chinese trademarks while her dad was cosplaying as president, and Jared took a cool $2 billion from Saudi Arabia after he departed the White House? And what will they do when they find out both were official White House advisers despite having zero qualifications? The couple might as well don matching tan suits and pop into Comet Ping Pong for a couple of mushroom-and-adrenochrome slices.

Or not—because the answer, of course, is that House Republicans will do nothing. That said, Ivanka and Jared’s presence on the campaign trail would not only provide a clear contrast to the manufactured Hunter drama, but it could also help draw attention to the serial iniquities of the Trump family, including Donald’s fraudulent real estate company, his hush money hijinks, his $83 million defamation/sexual assault judgment, and pretty much everything he said and did as president.

In February, Hunter name-checked Jared during a House deposition, asking, “How come [Republicans are] not curious about the $2 billion Jared Kushner got from the Saudis?” 

And while whataboutism is rarely a good look, in this case Hunter surely had a point. Republicans are gravely concerned that a kid might have stolen a Snickers bar, while at the same time the mafia backs a phalanx of trucks up to the loading dock to clean out the warehouse.

On Feb. 29, the day after Hunter’s deposition, Rep. Robert Garcia of California pointed out the absurdity of holding Hunter’s feet the the fire while Kushner skates:

“Madam Speaker, yesterday I sat in on the Hunter Biden deposition for hours. Republicans once again … provided zero evidence, failing to show any sort of link between Hunter Biden and the president. No links between those business dealings. This entire case is a political stunt and a joke. Donald Trump ordered House Republicans to smear President Biden; they tried and tried and tried and failed.

“But I want to remind everyone about the real White House crime family. Why did Saudi Arabia give Jared Kushner $2 billion—billion with a ‘b’—just months after he left the Trump White House? And why did the Saudis spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump properties while he was still the president? We also know that Jared Kushner used his cushy White House job to secure a $100 billion arms deal for Saudi Arabia and did other favors as well. Now, some members of the majority actually agree that this was unethical. And, in fact, a few weeks ago, Jared Kushner was asked by a reporter about his grift. He responded, ‘Are we still really doing this?’ Yes, Jared, we are still really doing this. The American people deserve answers. I rise yet again to urge my colleagues across the aisle to answer our calls and subpoena Jared Kushner’s companies once and for all. We are not stopping, and we demand answers.”

While that sounded pretty righteous, Garcia was actually being kind—because his mention of “other favors as well” does a lot of heavy lifting. 

As Vanity Fair reports:

As The New York Times reported in 2022, shortly after he left the White House—where he went to bat for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi—Kushner’s investment firm received a whopping $2 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund. That may have struck some people as eye-brow-raising on its own, but making things even more comically corrupt-looking was the fact that the panel that performs due diligence for the Saudi fund concluded Kushner’s firm was “unsatisfactory in all aspects,” and that the country shouldn’t give the former first son-in-law a dime. And then those unequivocal warnings were overridden by the fund’s board, which just so happens to be led by MBS. Kushner, The Times reported, “played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed” after Khashoggi’s murder, and urged Donald Trump to support the crown prince, arguing that the whole situation would blow over.

How can House Oversight Chair James Comer possibly ignore that swampy mess? It’s almost as if Republicans don’t actually care about corruption at all!

Then again, Kushner—who reportedly scrapped a national testing program during the early days of the pandemic because COVID-19 was disproportionately hitting blue states at the time—isn’t exactly a moral paragon. Pocketing $2 billion just for helping an autocrat get away with literal murder is a pretty sweet deal. And Trump no doubt thinks it makes his son-in-law smart. 

Of course, while the return of Javanka could be a turnoff for some voters and would further blunt whatever point Republicans feel they’ve made about the Bidens, it’s important to remember that Democrats are engaged in a form of asymmetrical warfare. Because if voters are somehow fooled into thinking that President Joe Biden has participated in even minor corruption, it would considerably damage his brand, whereas the Kushner stuff is just another twig tossed onto the bonfire of the Trump team’s venality. 

And while it’s unlikely either of these twits would move the needle all that much—will Ivanka’s presumed appeal with suburban women actually make any difference now that their basic reproductive rights have been vaporized?—in a close election, their presence on the campaign trail could have a meaningful impact.

That said, it’s hardly a foregone conclusion that it would redound to the benefit of Daddy Dearest.

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Like many Republicans, Donald Trump has tried to sidestep the issue of abortion and reproductive rights. But he stumbled during an interview with a CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh this week, promising an “interesting” new policy that would let states restrict contraception..