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NEW YORK—Will the American media ever face a reckoning for its fake Russia collusion and anti-Trump hysteria that lasted close to four years and was the main weapon of the lefty media against the Donald? Yes, if you believe in Santa Claus, as in Claus von Bulow, but otherwise not on your life. The left lies nonstop and when it gets caught it lies some more. Do not expect the Bagel Times to ever apologize or even correct its lies. But more about the media’s lies later.

Last week in the Bagel I had dinner with Michael Wolff, whose Too Famous collection has just hit the bookshops. Unfortunately, at the table next to us two females with horrendously high-pitched, annoying voices made it impossible to hear ourselves, but this is Noo Yawk, and our neighbors sure were Noo Yawkers. I had read Michael’s piece about The Sextator, as wannabes once upon a time used to call The Spectator, but had not seen the one about “President Jared.” Boy, what a creep-survivor the Donald’s son-in-law turns out to be. According to Michael, Kushner emerges as a person with totally false values, looking out solely for No. 1, the national interest be damned. Kushner I first heard of when he bought a Bagel paper called The Observer, one that gave him a personal platform for his social climb, although it was an expensive one at 11 million big ones, as Wolff wrote, “11 million more than it was worth.” I had known his wife-to-be Ivanka when she and my son were friends as children. She had good manners and was a polite little girl. She then married Kushner and…ugh!

Kushner showed early on his preternatural gift for placing himself alongside people with power. He may have been unprepossessing and an obvious climber, but he managed to marginalize a three-star Marine general like John Kelly and my old buddy Steve Bannon. Chiefs of staff who followed Kelly were also put on notice: Play ball with Jared Kushner or you’re out. Not bad for a callow social climber whose greatest achievement until then had been to plunge his family’s fortune into looming bankruptcy by way overpaying for a literally white elephant at 666 Fifth Avenue. (He got out of trouble once in the White House by making a deal with a Gulf-states-backed, Toronto-based company.) What’s the use of being in the White House if one can’t do a little business on the side?

The one I liked the best is when someone asked Kushner what his choices would be for advisers in the incoming Trump administration. “Billionaires,” was the single-word answer. Mind you, the billionaires I happen to know I, too, would go to for advice. I’ve listed some of them in previous columns so I will spare them this time. But there are billionaires and there are billionaires, and I suspect those I would ask advise from are different from those Jared would, but I have to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

The Saudis, the UAE, and the Qataris all sought out Kushner. Thus the Kushner family’s business interests were secured as far as future contacts were concerned. What appalls me is the lack of grandeur exhibited once inside the White House. One would think that having been swept to power on the coattails of the Donald, Kushner would do everything he could in improving the good old US of A. Not in the slightest. Like a small-time hustler he sought future contacts for his miserable real estate business. Jared should read up on history. People like Metternich, Talleyrand, Castlereagh, Curzon, Cabot Lodge, Marshall, and Dulles all worked their you-know-whats off not for those who appointed them, or in order to enhance their reputation, but for the common good. Kissing Saudi arse does not benefit Peoria, or anyone else, for that matter.

But I digress. Perhaps I’m being too hard on the Donald’s son-in-law. I am basing my opinions on having read Michael Wolff’s opus. Two nights after finishing it, I went upstairs in my building for dinner chez Louise Grunwald, the widow of Henry Grunwald, Time’s editor-in-chief when the weekly counted and was still conservative. (Now it’s a lefty joke.) Henry was also U.S. ambassador to Austria. At dinner I was seated next to Susan Hess, wife of John Hess, as in Hess Oil. She and her husband are friendly, attractive, and nice as hell. They are not exactly starving. Susan Hess had only nice things to say about Jared and Ivanka, and she did not give me the impression that she gets things wrong.

So, whom to believe? At the end of the day, as bores often say, it doesn’t really make a difference, does it? What does make a difference is the totally dishonest American media that has somehow failed to mention the fact that the Russian collusion brouhaha that made headlines for three of the four Trump years was all a fake, the most egregious journalistic error in history. The media frenzy over a totally made-up scandal in order to sink Trump makes anything that Jared did or did not do a mere bagatelle. Voilà, mes amis.