When TIME Magazine released their “100 Most Influential People” list in 2017, it stood to reason that Jared Kushner would be listed. After all, Donald Trump had brought his son-in-law into the White House and given him a broad portfolio which, as the husband of the president’s favorite daughter, made him very powerful. Kushner couldn’t be fired. But the question of whether he was up to the job was pretty well answered by the man TIME chose to write the required encomium: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It’s hard to read the late secretary’s words as anything but damning with faint praise.
Kissinger opened his short two-paragraph tribute by essentially saying that the presidential transition process is difficult and that a president who doesn’t know anything must depend on his advisers to help him through it. Then he wrote:
