He Went to Jared

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

American norms around diplomacy are strange. For instance, next month the president will roll out the red carpet for a nuclear-armed Asian communist dictator whose political enemies routinely end up in gulags. And no one has very much to say about it.

 

As it happens, the president is also hoping to meet this year with another nuclear-armed Asian communist dictator whose political enemies routinely end up in gulags. And pretty much everyone to the left of Kid Rock is appalled.

 

Likewise: Try to imagine the public’s reaction if U.S. officials reached out to the leadership of al-Qaeda for talks. (It’s not that implausible.) We must not meet with jihadists who’ve killed Americans, most of us would say, rightly outraged.

 

But last year a former member of al-Qaeda in Iraq who surely killed some American soldiers back in the day was given a grand reception at the White House—and, again, hardly anyone batted an eye. As of yesterday, the nation Ahmed al-Sharaa now leads is no longer considered a state sponsor of terror by the U.S. State Department.

 

Ronald Reagan correctly described the Soviet Union as “evil” yet met Mikhail Gorbachev repeatedly without much fuss. Richard Nixon paid his respects to Mao Zedong, whose policies killed tens of millions of Chinese, and his trip was considered a diplomatic master stroke.

 

Dialogue with monsters: It’s a fine line!

 

The lines around dialogue with hated domestic opponents can also be awfully fine.

 

Socialist heartthrob Zohran Mamdani has met with Donald Trump twice since being elected mayor of New York, appearing conspicuously chummy with the president before the cameras after their first meeting. (The two have reportedly also been known to text.) The left’s reaction to that, broadly speaking, was delight. Not only did Mamdani successfully disarm Trump’s usual demagoguery about “communists,” he scored a policy victory in the process.

 

That’s a reliable rule of thumb for dialogue with bad guys. If you believe you can get something useful out of them by talking, then talking is acceptable.

 

Not coincidentally, that’s also how House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is defending his decision to meet recently with presidential son-in-law turned globetrotting envoy Jared Kushner. Clad, oddly, in a mint green polo shirt and matching Yankee cap, Jeffries cut a video for social media explaining that Kushner “asked for a meeting, and I took it to discuss the affordability crisis that exists—that is not a hoax.” (That last bit alludes to a notorious Trump sound bite.)

 

Jeffries believed he could get something useful out of the White House by talking, as Mamdani did. And not for the first time: As House minority leader, Jeffries was also part of the Democratic team that met with the president and J.D. Vance during last year’s shutdown negotiations. It’s not like he hasn’t spoken with Trump officials before. Surely the left wouldn’t care about his conversation with Kushner.

 

But the left does care, it turns out—a lot—and not just the usual progressive garment-renders. Clinton administration veteran James Carville has spent much of the summer bashing the Democratic Socialists of America, even threatening to leave the Democratic Party at one point if far-left streamer Hasan Piker continued to gain influence within it. But Carville sounded as irate as any hair-on-fire DSAer over Jeffries’ rendezvous.

 

“On one thing, on one thing, there is no disagreement. There’s unanimity,” Carville said in a video about his disagreements with the left. “And it is simply this: in the opinion of every Democrat in the United States, progressive, moderate, middle road, left, f—, I don’t know whatever you want, we believe one thing above all. These people are a pack of felons and traitors and you do not meet with them. You do not meet with them!”

 

Just as only Nixon could go to China, it appears only Zohran can go to the Oval Office. Why do Democrats have their undies in a twist about Hakeem Jeffries chatting with Jared Kushner?

 

Strange circumstances.

 

The answer has partly to do with leftist grievances against Jeffries, partly with grievances against Kushner, and partly with the distinctly odd circumstances of this encounter.

 

Start with the last. Why on earth is Jeffries meeting with Kushner less than three months before the midterms?

 

It’s not like there’s a chance of the two parties striking a grand bargain on the cost of living before November. Even if Republicans were game, Democrats wouldn’t dare throw them an electoral lifeline by handing them a bipartisan victory on affordability in the home stretch of the campaign. Jeffries should have refused any talks until the expected blue wave arrived this fall, then used his new leverage as presumptive House speaker to open talks with the White House from a position of strength.

 

Holding negotiations now, even informally via an envoy like Kushner, achieves nothing while handing the GOP a useful headline about how earnest it supposedly is about solving Americans’ cost crunch.

 

Another thing: Why was this meeting secret?

 

One reason Mamdani’s backslapping with the president was acceptable to Democrats is that it was above board. The visit was announced in advance and the two men met the press afterward to reveal what was discussed. Ditto for Jeffries’ meeting with Trump and Vance during the shutdown. All sides recognize that political necessity sometimes requires bitter opponents to converse.

 

What’s sketchy about the Kushner confab is that it wasn’t strictly necessary—and, as far as I can tell, might never have been disclosed if not for the reporting of the New York Times. Jeffries’ jolly green social media video about it was a simulacrum of transparency after the fact, posturing as being forthcoming once the Times had already let the cat out of the bag.

 

The episode has the curious odor of the Democratic leader in the House inexplicably doing the Trump White House a favor at a moment when Democratic fortunes are rising and Republican fortunes are declining. The left has endured nearly two years of remorseless Trumpian ruthlessness, counting the days until it regained some power to hit back, and now it’s at last on the cusp of doing so … and, instead of making a fist, its next speaker is extending an open hand to a presidential flunky.

 

And not just any flunky. For very different reasons, Kushner and Jeffries each have particular legitimacy problems with the left.

 

Kushner’s illegitimacy.

 

Legitimacy is the dividing line in the various examples I gave at the start of this newsletter, of course. Trump can meet with Xi Jinping without major objection for the same reason Reagan could meet with Gorbachev: For better or worse (i.e., worse), modern China and the Soviet Union amassed too much military, economic, and diplomatic power for America to effectively marginalize either.

 

We can try to stigmatize them all we like by calling them “illegitimate” and refusing to meet with them, but the rest of the world is going to engage because the rest of the world has no choice. So we’re better off talking instead.

 

Not so with weaker powers like North Korea and (until recently) Iran. Less formidable militarily and less influential economically, they can more plausibly be turned into pariah states by stigmatizing them diplomatically. That’s why it’s infuriating when Trump reaches out to Kim Jong Un or, to take another au courant example, Vladimir Putin. Rather than join the international (or at least Western) effort to isolate those rogue regimes in hopes of forcing them to behave, the president is undermining the pressure campaign by meeting with them.

 

Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s two terms as president illustrates the point about legitimacy, ironically. Resistance 1.0 was essentially an attempt to stigmatize the bad orange man as illegitimate: He lost the popular vote, after all, and his boorish authoritarianism was far out of whack with American civic traditions. Resistance 2.0 has all but given up on trying to stigmatize him and has pivoted instead to norms-busting solutions of its own designed to beat Trump and postliberals at their own game.

 

That might help explain why Mamdani got a pass for meeting with the president. As with China and the Soviets, there’s no point in trying to marginalize someone whom a majority (well, near-majority) of Americans legitimized on Election Day 2024. For the same reason, I doubt that a meeting between Jeffries and Trump or Jeffries and Marco Rubio would have caused much of a ruckus on the left.

 

But a meeting with Jared Kushner? That’s a problem. More so than any figure in the administration apart from the president’s own sons, Kushner epitomizes the corrupt cronyist irregularity of the Trumpist government.

 

When Carville sputters about “a pack of felons and traitors,” he’s alluding to the egregious conflicts of interest Kushner has created for himself by retaining his private business interests while conducting shuttle diplomacy. According to House Democrats, no less than 99 percent of the funding for Kushner’s multibillion-dollar investment firm comes from foreign nationals, including a notorious $2 billion from his pals in Saudi Arabia.

 

Normally that sort of thing would require ethics disclosures but, as of April, Kushner hadn’t filed any. Why? Because, as a “special government employee”—i.e., a volunteer, supposedly acting in his private capacity—he’s not bound by ethics regulations, according to the White House.

 

Civically, in other words, he’s a symbol of a grotesquely rogue regime whose apparatchiks flagrantly monetize their access to America’s monarch. Kushner’s business dealings should be one of the very first targets for Democratic oversight next year. Yet, rather than stigmatize him by refusing to meet, Jeffries opted to legitimize him by granting him an audience.

 

Kushner isn’t even supposed to be involved in domestic matters. If Jeffries was keen to talk to someone in the White House about affordability, why didn’t he call up Scott Bessent or Howard Lutnick or some other figure with power over economic policy? When I say that their meeting felt like the Democrat was doing his counterpart a favor, that’s what I mean.

 

Jeffries’ illegitimacy.

 

That brings us to Jeffries’ own legitimacy problem: The left doesn’t trust him.

 

They do trust Mamdani, which is why a private chat between the mayor and Trump raised no alarms. There was no concern that an ardent socialist might be swayed from his beliefs by the president, in the same way that there was no concern that a hawkish Cold Warrior like Nixon might be swayed by Mao.

 

That’s what “only Nixon could go to China” meant: A Democratic president, being more sympathetic to leftist ideology, couldn’t be trusted to the same degree to drive a hard bargain with the commies. Ditto for Trump meeting with Putin, given the president’s glaring authoritarian sympathies.

 

The leftists pummeling Jeffries today for meeting with Kushner regard the summit between the two as more like Trump-Putin than Nixon-Mao. The House Democrat is too simpatico with certain right-wing positions—support for Israel, specifically—to reliably represent his party’s interests in negotiations with a White House, they believe.

 

“Back home in New York City we consider Jerusalem to be the sixth borough,” Jeffries joked in a 2020 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). That rhetoric was unexceptional at the time, as was hauling in hundreds of thousands of dollars in fundraising from pro-Israel groups and visiting the Jewish state as part of an AIPAC-funded congressional junket. Things are different on the left in 2026, causing the would-be speaker to inch away from his old allies—although, as recently as last month, he opposed a House bill to end aid to Israel that dozens of other Democrats supported.

 

Last summer a popular left-wing radio host derisively dubbed Jeffries “AIPAC Shakur,” a nickname that’s stuck on Twitter, and some Israel-skeptic progressives set to enter Congress next year are openly ambivalent about being led by him. You would think he’d be sensitive to all of that and avoid secret meetings with the diplomatic face of Donald Trump’s pro-Israel Middle East policy, one whose family “has longstanding and ongoing deals with major Israeli financial institutions” and is personally friendly with Benjamin Netanyahu. But no.

 

“[I] personally think we deserve an opposition party that doesn’t compromise with the people who want to turn Gaza into waterfront vacation rentals for white people,” one Jeffries critic tweeted, referring to one of the president’s most insane ideas.

 

The speaker-in-waiting has another problem, though. As head of the Democratic House caucus since 2023, he’s presided during an era that saw the president escape legal accountability for his coup plot, return to the White House as a “soft” autocrat bent on retribution, and reduce Congress to a pitiful Duma-fied shell of representative democracy. Not a great track record for an opposition leader.

 

None of that is Jeffries’ fault, his supporters would retort, with justification. The House minority has virtually no power.

 

True, but why voters do and don’t trust certain politicians isn’t always rational. (They elected Donald J. Trump twice. QED.) In the same way, perhaps, that Republican politicians who failed to thwart Barack Obama are presumptively untrustworthy to the right-wing base, Democratic politicians who failed to thwart Trump might be growing presumptively untrustworthy to the left-wing base. That was my theory for why Resistance 1.0 candidates are losing primaries this year, in fact: For all their righteous opposition to the president during his first term, when push came to shove, they failed miserably to prevent a kakistocratic restoration.

 

Jeffries, one of the party establishment’s two most powerful leaders, is obviously part of that failure. By definition, he didn’t fight fight fight effectively enough to avert a total takeover of government by one of the stupidest and most vicious political movements since the Civil War. Why would Democrats trust him now to drive a hard bargain with Kushner, let alone with Trump?

 

The caption Jeffries placed on his video about their meeting said it all: “No one from the Trump Cartel is getting a pass.” So little do left-wing Democrats trust him to fight that he has to reassure them explicitly that he really will investigate the administration’s corruption as speaker. I’m not sure that the Tea Party ever reached a fever of suspicion about John Boehner’s motives as blazing as that.

 

I think the Kushner confab says less about Jeffries’ willingness to hold the Trump administration to account than about his instincts. It’s silly to doubt whether House Democrats will come after the president and his toadies, as there’s an endless amount of political ore to be mined from the endless supply of scandal Trumpworld has provided for them. But it isn’t silly to doubt whether a guy who can’t read the room well enough to avoid looking chummy with an especially shady Trump aide 10 weeks before an election has the chops to prosper in a critical new role.

 

Nixon can go to China, but an establishment Democrat can’t go to Jared. It bodes poorly for Hakeem Jeffries that he needed to find that out the hard way.