An opinion column published by Alternet argues that, aside from President Donald Trump himself, the individual most responsible for the Iran war and its calamitous consequences is his son-in-law and chief diplomatic envoy, Jared Kushner — a senior adviser in the first Trump administration — a figure the writer presents as the embodiment of what he calls the real "Trump derangement syndrome": the belief, mirroring the president's own inflated self-regard, that "only I can fix it," whatever the problem may be.

The column leans heavily on a damning new profile of Kushner in The New Yorker by Dexter Filkins, a longtime staff writer for the magazine known for his dispatches on war and foreign policy, which the author says exposes the "breathtaking arrogance" behind Kushner's failures in both Iran and Ukraine, where he and associate Steve Witkoff are described as having botched their peacemaking missions. According to the magazine, Kushner drove the United States blindly into military conflict without understanding what the Iranians were offering to prevent it.

Filkins also highlights a 2024 speech Kushner delivered at Harvard — an institution where, the column notes, his father once paid $2.5 million to secure his admission. In that address, Kushner dismissed the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran — formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which traded sanctions relief for limits on Iran's nuclear program — as "one of the dumbest agreements" ever and branded the 1993 Oslo peace accords, the Israeli-PLO agreement that established a framework for Palestinian self-rule, "a total failure." Of his own record during the first Trump administration, where his Middle East portfolio included brokering the 2020 Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab states, he said, with what the writer calls characteristic modesty: "My track record of success in the Middle East I do think is second to none over the last many years."

The columnist — who says he watched Kushner up close as he "put the New York Observer newspaper into the ground," the weekly paper Kushner bought in 2006 — writes that none of this surprised him. If "success" means pulling in billion-dollar, bribe-like transfers from the region's despotic regimes into Kushner's private fund, he adds, the boast would be hard to dispute. Meanwhile, the Iran war drags on with no exit, yielding what the author describes as nothing but shame, expense, economic hardship and pointless bloodshed for the United States and its allies.

This syndrome, the column argues, is epidemic among Trump's top appointees. The president, it says, has an unerring sense of how to choose individuals who mimic his worst qualities, with predictably bad results. A leading example is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host described as a historically underqualified military chief who insists on being called "secretary of war."

The column accuses Hegseth of mismanaging the war and of attempting to conceal its actual damage to U.S. soldiers, defense infrastructure and national security — conduct it calls a level of incompetence rarely seen even at the Pentagon. Troops in the region, the author writes, have sent clandestine images and messages exposing what Hegseth and Trump have tried to hide. That, the column suggests, may explain why House members have tabled resolutions to impeach Hegseth, prompting Speaker Mike Johnson to recess the chamber early this week so Republicans could avoid an embarrassing vote. Whether those resolutions advance when the House returns from recess is the most immediate marker to watch.

Across what the writer terms the Trump 2.0 cabinet, the same blustering, ignorant and ultimately ruinous conduct recurs, with officials recognizing no authority or expertise beyond Trump himself — "to whom they defer with a sickening sycophancy."

Among the most dangerous cases, in the author's view, is health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose tenure has seen deadly outbreaks of measles — a disease the United States had declared eliminated in 2000, until vaccination was undermined — and of cyclosporiasis, an intestinal illness caused by a parasite typically spread through contaminated food and water, which ravaged communities after cuts to the systems that control such threats. When Kennedy is not lying, "which is almost always," the column says, he utters nonsense that makes scientists blanch. It adds that he has spent years slandering Dr. Anthony Fauci, an official with genuine knowledge of infectious diseases and public health, while preferring "a mishmash of murky opinions from online weirdos profiting off snake-oil remedies" — what the writer calls the worst of the 19th century delivered at 21st-century velocity.

The list, the author continues, runs on. He cites Elon Musk, described as a presumptuous fool whose government "efficiency" drive — run through the Department of Government Efficiency — caused hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad and could still deliver a record-breaking, incurable Ebola outbreak to American shores. He points to Todd Blanche, the Justice Department's deputy attorney general, whose "jaw-jutting" approach to federal prosecutions has hollowed out the Justice Department and wrecked the criminal justice system, and to Kash Patel, the FBI director, characterized as a perk-abusing figure who has dismantled federal law enforcement and the country's counterintelligence capabilities — to the delight, the writer says, of adversaries in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Nobody who knows Kushner, Hegseth, Kennedy, Patel or Trump, the column concludes, is shocked by this performance. What remains shocking, in the author's view, is how so much of the country has come to accept the unacceptable.