Because Jared Kushner is Donald Trump’s son-in-law, conventional wisdom holds that he is the Trump administration’s one untouchable figure—and that Trump’s chief political adviser, Steve Bannon, has set himself up for failure by getting crosswise with Kushner. “It’s not hard to handicap that one,” National Review editor Rich Lowry said Sunday on Meet the Press, “because there is only one person who can’t be fired in that equation.”

When the internecine fight between the two broke into public view, complete with an explosion of anti-Semitic internet vitriol directed at Kushner, speculation mounted that Bannon would either lose his job or come to heel. Heads Kushner wins, tails Bannon loses. The fact that writers at Bannon’s old haunt Breitbart have been told to lay off Kushner, after criticizing him repeatedly last week, is at least consistent with the view that Bannon’s predicament is hopeless.

But it is only hopeless if Trump’s loyalty to family outweighs any other consideration, which may not be a foregone conclusion. Bannon still has some leverage: Trump could have fired him outright; instead he demanded that Bannon and Kushner resolve their differences. Bannon is also almost certainly right about a key question dividing the White House: whether Trump can reverse his fortunes by transferring power from the nationalist “America first” wing of the administration to its plutocratic, relatively centrist wing.

In a way, Trump made Bannon his indispensable adviser by becoming a creature of the Breitbartian right himself. Bannon may be deluded about many things, but one thing he does not misapprehend is the extent to which the white ethnonationalist politics he and his boss practice have no crossover appeal.



“He has argued that Mr. Kushner’s efforts to pull his father-in-law more to the center on issues like immigration would poison him with the conservative base,” according to the New York Times, “a hopeless position to be in because Mr. Bannon believes so few Democrats would ever consider supporting Mr. Trump.”