Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, appears to have been put in charge of... nearly everything, despite the fact that his only real work experience is in real estate and ruining newspapers. Today, Kushner is in Iraq with Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for meetings with Iraqi leaders and coalition officials “to receive an update on the status of the counter-ISIS campaign in Iraq and Syria.” In addition to defeating ISIS, he’s also busy solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, negotiating trade deals, and reorganizing the government.
Can you imagine? Truly, can you imagine possessing the bizarre degree of blind arrogance one would need to willingly take over the most important duties of the most powerful man on earth with absolutely no clue how to actually do those things? It is hard to put myself in that headspace, because I recently whispered “Ooh, sorry” to a car on my way to work, but here are some things I might do if my brain looked more like Jared Kushner’s:
- Lock my knees for an entire subway ride even though one time I did that during an a cappella concert in college and couldn’t walk for a month.
- Stand up in the middle of a Gizmodo Media Group all-hands meeting, walk to the front of the room, and try to explain to my colleagues how to set up a PGP fingerprint.
- Stand up in the middle of a Gizmodo Media Group all-hands meeting, walk to the front of the room, scream, and leave to get a manicure.
- Quit my job at Gizmodo Media Group in order to focus full-time on running for mayor.
- Pitch a book on the behavioral patterns of elephants in Sri Lanka, where coincidentally I have always wanted to visit; the peg is that elephants live in a matriarchal society, and what can we learn from them in the age of Trump?
- Start an extremely successful YouTube channel.
- Ride a bike to work.
- Send out an email to friends and colleagues announcing that I will be teaching a three-hour class on the Khoisan click language, pricing at $250 a head.
- Go to the hair salon and ask them to make me look like Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta.
- Change my Tinder bio to “hand-gliding, snowboarding free spirit who can take shot after shot and never puke!!”
- Throw my glasses in the trash because I look better without them and basically know my way around.
- Go to Staten Island and start hitting people with water balloons.
- Join a pickup rugby game.
- Instead of singing The Four Questions at this year’s Passover seder, stand up, throw my Haggadah on the ground, shout “Let’s shake it up a little, guys!” and perform a cheerleading routine I kind of remember from 6th grade.
- Set up an interview with Riz Ahmed, pull out one boob, say nothing.