On Sunday night, senior adviser to the president and haunted doll Jared Kushner appeared on Axios on HBO, where he disastrously fumbled questions from reporter Jonathan Swan about whether Donald Trump’s racist birtherism campaign against President Obama was, in fact, racist (“Um, look, I wasn’t really involved in that”), and his 2016 meeting with Russian officials in Trump Tower (“I would get about 250 emails a day and so I — I literally saw ‘show up at 4.’ I showed up at 4”). Overall, the segment was the interview equivalent of someone slipping on a banana peel and loudly splitting open the seat of their pants, except for one glowing, chillingly smooth detail: Kushner’s remarkably dewy skin.
While the words coming out of his mouth hole sounded like a wet, deflating balloon, the skin suit Kushner zipped himself into that morning beamed with the light of a thousand dying stars, or one Glossier print ad. His face and thought process appeared completely smooth, unwrinkled by concern or nuance, a shiny, flesh-colored billiard ball punctuated by two brown eyeholes.
Was this a new, youthful skin suit Kushner purchased specially for his TV appearance? Or an old one that he had been soaking in large tubs of retinol and sunscreen, while he sat in the living room and Googled “peace in the Middle East Wikihow”? Or, is the unlined, bouncy skin of a newborn baby the reward you get for triple-mortgaging your soul? Who knows, but whatever it is … it’s working.
