In his first major act as White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner set out to repair relations between Donald Trump and Mexico, which his father-in-law had spent the better part of two years assailing on the campaign trail as a seedbed of rapists, drug dealers, and other criminal types. Within the first days of the administration, Kushner had dedicated 24 hours to brokering peace between Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, and had even considered flying to Mexico City to convince Peña Nieto to take a meeting in the White House. As my colleague Emily Jane Fox reported last year, the Mexican president ultimately agreed, giving Kushner his first diplomatic victory as a government official. Less than 12 hours later, however, Trump was exploding at Peña Nieto online, threatening to call off the meeting unless Mexico agreed to pay for his border wall. “Kushner was fucking furious,” a source familiar with the situation told Fox, after the negotiations collapsed. “I’d never once heard him say he was angry throughout the entire campaign. But he was furious.”

The episode was an early lesson for Kushner in the vicissitudes of life in the West Wing, and the limitations of his newly acquired authority under the tutelage of Donald Trump. Since then, however, Kushner has seen his powers diminished even further. His high-flying role as shadow secretary of state was curtailed with the arrival of Chief of Staff John Kelly, and his international profile has been blackened by the spotlight of the Mueller probe. More recently, he lost his close ally Josh Raffel, his personal media flack and crisis manager, and was stripped of the interim security clearance that had allowed him to pursue his farcically expansive White House portfolio, which has included overhauling the government’s information technology; reforming the criminal-justice system; fixing the V.A.; addressing the opioid crisis; leading Trump’s infrastructure plan; and securing peace in the Middle East. A series of recent reports about the Mueller investigation suggests that federal investigators are interested in whether Kushner has been a target of foreign intelligence, and whether his business ties had influenced his decisions during the transition and in the White House. In Mar-a-Lago last weekend, Trump reportedly surveyed his guests on how all of Kushner’s bad press was playing out.

It is no surprise, then, that Kushner’s Wednesday goodwill trip to Mexico appears to have been even less well received than usual. “He is very weakened, and he is going to get weaker,” Agustín Basave, a senior lawmaker in the Party of the Democratic Revolution, told Reuters. “More than anything, what he comes to say here will be contradicted by Trump the next day.” A senior U.S. official explained that the trip was meant to smooth tensions between the two countries after a dyspeptic Trump-Peña Nieto phone call had derailed yet another planned summit. But while Kushner apparently had a good meeting with Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, with whom he has a good relationship, the First Son-in-Law’s presence rankled other Mexican officials. As The New York Times reports, the trip was announced with only one day’s warning, and without any public disclosure about what would be discussed. One senior diplomat told Reuters that officials were “taken by surprise by the visit and frustrated they were not informed.”

Kushner’s meeting raised eyebrows in the U.S., too. Several observers noted that the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Roberta S. Jacobson, who has decades of experience in the country, was not invited to attend. Though Jacobson recently announced she would be resigning from her post, and does not share the Trump administration’s ad-hoc protectionist positions, it would have been prudent to have someone in the room with knowledge of Latin American politics, said Christopher Sabatini, a lecturer at Columbia University. “This is not the way foreign policy normally is, or should be, conducted,” he told the The New York Times. “The sending of the president’s son-in-law—someone with no experience in Mexican-U.S. relations—is another example of the de-professionalization and personalization of diplomacy that will hurt U.S. interests and leverage in the region.” Raúl Benítez Manaut, a professor of international relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told the Times, “This visit is just a reminder that this is a new, unstable bilateral relationship, with ups and downs, slaps, blows, talks and recovery.”