Jared Kushner said what he said about the election. Don't act surprised when Trump listens

Tyranny does not arrive in one moment — it is incremental

Yesterday, Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser and son-in-law to President Trump, offered, in a video interview for Time 100 Talks, an extremely unsettling response to a question about the upcoming November elections in the United States.

When asked about postponements due to the pandemic, Kushner waffled. “I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other,” he said. Kushner, of course, has no authority whatsoever to determine whether or not Americans will be able to vote for their next leader this fall. But his words will hang heavy regardless. Because words matter.

On Wednesday, Kushner was already back-peddling; recognizing, it seems, the gravity of what might be at stake. November, he said, is too far in the future, and he conceded that there have been no efforts thus far to change the current course of action. Americans will vote on the first Tuesday of the month, November 3.

It’s not clear who Jared Kushner’s intended audience was. If I had to guess, I would speculate that he was putting on that performance for Trump. Although a 2004 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded that no president nor member of his staff can postpone an election, even in an emergency, this president has bucked tradition, precedent, and, indeed, law in times past. It’s not a far stretch to believe that he could be compelled to use his executive powers to do as he pleases. After all, this is the same president who has cited Article II of the Constitution as a defense of every wrong he has committed in office: “I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he said in 2019, referencing that very article. “It gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.”

What of those rights? Republicans have scoffed at the Democrats who attempted to hold Trump accountable, calling impeachment a “witch-hunt,” even though Trump’s actions as president exposed a deep disrespect for the Constitution, and an absolutism that favored power over principle. The next step in this brand of power is to chuck the Constitution out the window entirely, to tell Americans that delayed voting is in their best interest. Tyranny does not arrive in one moment; it is incremental. It always was.

And then, what a pickle we will be in, a pickle of Constitutional proportions, the result of the thoughtless words of a man who holds no more actual authority than any other ordinary citizen, sitting at his or her computer on a regular Wednesday afternoon. In a democracy, we all come to the table as equals. That’s the hope, at least — that we get to participate in this together, and that’s what separates this type of experiment from tyranny. There are nuances that define us, say, as a representative democracy. A democratic republic. The last shreds of decency march out the door the minute we cede our voting rights to the likes of Jared Kushner, even if he’s not ultimately the one who pulls the trigger.

We must see Jared Kushner’s words, then, for what they are: kerosene, stagnant now until a match ignites them. Once the Commander-in-Chief mulls around the consequences of finite power in his puny head for long enough, he’s bound to arrive at the ultimate conclusion, which is that he can do whatever he wants. No one has ever held him back, and no one ever will.

For those who will argue that it is fearful posturing to believe that President Trump will truly act upon the foolhardy impulse of postponing an election, I say this: Do not underestimate a man who thinks solely of his own best interests. In this moment — in this presidency, one navigated by greed and by power, and not by altruism — what we see is almost surely what we will get.

When Trump tells us that he believes that Article II offers him the divine right of executive power, a magic pen imbued with more authority than two equal branches of government, believe that he believes that. Because even if we fight him tooth and nail, it may already be too late. Know this now, while our election still hangs in the balance, six months away: These words are no accident, and the conflagration is preventable, but we have to expect its arrival.