Donald Trump has tapped his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to lead the White House’s “Office of American Innovation”—or as Stephen Colbert called it Monday night, “the Bureau of Obvious Nepotism.” Kushner’s role as the head of what is being described as “a SWAT team of strategic consultants” is just one of the many hats he wears in the Trump administration, also advising on domestic and foreign policy, personnel decisions, and relations with countries that include Mexico and the Middle East.
With all that already on his plate, you would think Trump could find another family member to give the new “innovative” position to. (Tiffany, maybe?) But Kushner was evidently tapped to uphold Trump’s promise to run the country like a business, and that makes him the right man for the job—at least in Trump’s eyes. After all, notes Colbert, we all know Kushner has great business ideas, like “being born into a wealthy real estate family, or marrying into a wealthy real estate family. Why hasn’t the government tried that?”
Never mind that Trump has had plenty of businesses fail, which doesn’t bode well for our new U.S.A. Corporation. But there’s a larger problem with the country-as-business mindset, chiefly that Kushner views the American people as customers: “Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”
But that’s not an accurate analogy at all, and it raises questions about who exactly Kushner considers himself accountable to. “We’re not customers,” pointed out Colbert. “We’re citizens, which means we own the store. You work for us, buddy. While we’re on the subject, break time is over. We got a cleanup in Aisle 5, because somebody took a dump in health care.”
