Elections have power, which goes beyond voters, polling booths, even candidates—whether it is in the United States, India or anywhere else in the world.
For proof, witness the resurrection last week of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate for the 2024 US election. Kushner, who had no prior political or administrative experience which qualified him to work in the White House, was appointed senior advisor to the president by his father-in-law on the very day Trump was sworn in as president. Subsequently, the doting father-in-law created an additional job in the White House—an Office of American Innovation—and made Kushner its director. One of Joe Biden’s first actions on the day he was sworn in as Trump’s successor was to close this amorphous office.
Very little was heard of Kushner for over three years, although his wife Ivanka Trump used to grace the society pages of tabloids in New York and Miami fairly frequently during her husband’s virtual sanyas from public life. Now Kushner is suddenly back in the news. This is being interpreted as a sign that people who ‘own’ the material world far and near to him and tycoons of global real estate have concluded that Trump will return to the White House next year.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and de facto ruler—Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, popularly known as MbS—never stopped befriending Kushner. According to the business media in the US, particularly The Wall Street Journal, the Saudis liberally bankrolled Kushner since his departure from the White House as an insurance for their prosperity and strategic influence in case Trump ever returned as president. Kushner had defended MbS when the latter faced the biggest challenge of his nascent but rising public career—the murder of Saudi dissident and newspaper columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The killing was allegedly approved by the crown prince, according to conclusions of America’s intelligence.
Last week, Dubai’s biggest property developer with an imprint across continents gave up one country for another in order to have a partnership with Kushner. Mohamed Alabbar, the guiding light behind the world’s tallest skyscraper, Burj Khalifa, scrapped entire projects in Belarus, potentially incurring huge losses, so that the emirate can have a partnership with Kushner in Serbia. Belarus is under US sanctions as Russia’s closest ally. Americans are prohibited from doing business with its President Alexander Lukashenko or members of his inner circle, who were involved in the Dubai-Belarus real estate development. Alabbar personally—or via Emaar Properties, Dubai’s biggest listed property developer—is now charting a partnership with Kushner for a huge project in Serbia, according to reports.
Last week also brought news that Albania is not resisting Kushner’s plans to cut down pine forests and olive groves and destroy pastoral hiking trails to build a lucrative resort for well-heeled overseas tourists. Which small country can say “no” to a businessman who is likely to be a central figure in the White House for four years if his father-in-law is chosen as the occupant in November. For that matter, even India kowtowed to Ivanka, the father’s favourite daughter when Trump was president. She was treated like a state guest at global events in Hyderabad hosted by India.
Meanwhile, candidate Trump has hard tasks ahead, which may well make many of his supporters realise that bluff and bluster are not enough to be US president in a world which has changed considerably since Trump vacated the presidential mansion. So far, he has managed to evade important policy questions, letting the incumbent president stew in the hot gravy of his actions as America’s commander-in-chief. Trump has avoided any serious policy prescriptions on two of America’s most vexing external challenges of the day—Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine.
Biden, on the other hand, is accountable for his actions as president. If he is defeated in November, part of the reasons may be Arab American opposition to him costing the Democrats states like Michigan and Minnesota. If Trump loses these states, where large Arab American communities have traditionally voted Democrat, he has no chance of retaining the presidency. The Biden campaign’s recent overtures to Arab American representative organisations have so far drawn a blank. They plan to sit out the election and not vote, giving Trump an edge in these states. Arab Americans have accused Biden of being a Zionist by adoption. Except for routine support for Israel, Trump is yet to answer any hard questions on what he will do on Arab-Israeli issues as president. Here, too, Kushner’s alliance with Gulf rulers poses more questions than answers.
On Russia-Ukraine, too, Biden is hoist with his own petard while Trump has got a free pass. The shadow of his past association with Russian President Vladimir Putin has not haunted him on the campaign trail. Public memory being notoriously short, voters appear to have forgotten that Russia, by intelligence consensus in the US and Western Europe, manipulated the 2016 election and helped Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won majority popular votes. Further investigations never exonerated Trump. They merely said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him for collaborating with Putin’s allies.
Trump made an intriguing statement in a recent interview that the Russia-Ukraine war will end in 24 hours once he becomes president. What he means is anybody’s guess, given his past associations with Russia. While Biden is getting caught up in hard policy issues on aid to Ukraine and further pursuit of Kyiv’s battles with Russia, Trump has had the luxury of being evasive.
This week, for the first time since Trump re-entered the fray, he addressed an issue that will drastically determine how Americans vote: abortion. If Biden wins, a key factor will be the support of women voters who want choice on this issue after a Supreme Court verdict took away this right from them. Throughout his life, Trump has oscillated on the issue. His suggestion this week to leave abortion laws to the states amounts to shirking executive responsibility. It may not help him in the campaign and the crucial advantage is likely to remain with Biden.
K P Nayar
Strategic analyst
(Views are personal)
(kpnayar@gmail.com)