Below is what happened on Trump’s 32nd day in office. You can find out what damage was done every other day so far on the Saddest Calendar on the Internet.
President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will reportedly head a new White House team that aims to use business strategies to revamp the federal bureaucracy. According to The Washington Post, the new office will be called the White House Office of American Innovation and it will operate as a “SWAT team of strategic consultants.”
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This comes at the same time that the Senate Intelligence Committee announced plans to question Kushner about meetings that he arranged with Russian ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak during the Trump administration’s transition as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“We should have excellence in government,” Kushner told the Post. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”
It’s worth noting that past presidents—and presidential candidates—have had or proposed similar teams: Obama had similar plan, complete with a SWAT metaphor, Hillary Clinton proposed one targeted to education reform, and George W. Bush aimed his toward financial crimes.
The specific language around treating the government like a great American company isn’t all that surprising coming from either Trump or Kushner, a media executive who has no government experience and was born into wealth through his father’s real estate organization. Kushner reportedly loves to talk business.
“My husband’s idea of a date night somehow always involves me looking at a development site,” Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, told Vogue in 2015.
To help run his new governmental team like a business, Kushner has cobbled together a team of billionaires. Among those who will lend their counsel are Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, who’s behind the company with the world’s largest market capitalization at more than $610 billion, according to Forbes; Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the richest man in America; and Tesla founder Elon Musk, whose net worth is $13.9 billion. None of these men have government experience.
According to The Hill, Ivanka will help the new office with workforce development though, unlike her husband, she will reportedly not have an official title.
