President Trump has made his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a White House assistant with an exceptionally broad portfolio. Mr. Kushner has been charged with at least three major tasks, any one of which would be a full-time job: working on Middle East peace, preparing for a state visit by President Xi Jinping of China and overseeing a broad effort to reorganize the federal government utilizing business techniques. And on Monday, he accompanied Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on a visit to Iraq.

Offhand, I am not aware of any White House staff member in recent history who has had such an important and diverse array of responsibilities. One would have to go back to Harry Hopkins, one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest advisers, to find someone similar. But although Hopkins worked on both domestic and foreign policy, he didn’t work on them simultaneously, as Mr. Kushner appears to be doing.

I have no idea if Mr. Kushner is up to any of these various jobs, let alone all of them. He appears to be well educated — an undergraduate degree from Harvard and joint law and business degrees from New York University. Although he has worked for his father’s real estate company and been the publisher of The New York Observer, he has no government experience other than an internship with the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau.

What stands out to me, having worked in the White House for Ronald Reagan, is that Mr. Kushner is not head of any White House office. There are many such offices, some with large numbers of employees, such as the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council and the Office of the United States Trade Representative. But only a couple of dozen of the most senior staff members have coveted West Wing Offices; the bulk of them work next door in the Old Executive Office Building, some on detail from the State Department or the military.