Trump Adviser Compares Kushner to Alexander Hamilton; Does He Really Want to Go There?

Anthony Scaramucci, an informal adviser to President Trump, compared White House senior adviser Jared Kushner on Tuesday to Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary and one of the nation's Founding Fathers.

"I think he's like an Alexander Hamilton," Scaramucci said on CNN's "New Day." "He's a young man who has a tremendous amount of maturity about him."

"What do you mean he's like Alexander Hamilton?" CNN host Chris Cuomo said. "He's nothing like Alexander Hamilton."

"To you he isn't, but to me he is. I'll explain why. He's got the trust of the president. He's very, very thoughtful. He knows how to bring people in," Scaramucci said. "If you read [Ron] Chernow's book about Hamilton, that was Hamilton's great gift at a very young age. So Jared has that."

Kushner, who is also Trump's son-in-law, has emerged as one of the president's most influential aides. He has been given a sweeping policy portfolio since entering his White House post, ranging from heading a task force to reform how the government operates to exploring peace efforts in the Middle East.

If Scaramucci had read Thomas DiLorenzo's Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution--and What It Means for Americans Today, he would realize that it is not exactly flattering to compare Kushner to Hamilton.

From the blurb to DiLorenzo's book:

Two of the most influential figures in American history. Two opposing political philosophies. Two radically different visions for America.

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were without question two of the most important Founding Fathers. They were also the fiercest of rivals. Of these two political titans, it is Jefferson—–the revered author of the Declaration of Independence and our third president—–who is better remembered today. But in fact it is Hamilton’s political legacy that has triumphed—–a legacy that has subverted the Constitution and transformed the federal government into the very leviathan state that our forefathers fought against in the American Revolution.

How did we go from the Jeffersonian ideal of limited government to the bloated imperialist system of Hamilton’s design? Acclaimed economic historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo provides the troubling answer in Hamilton’s Curse.

DiLorenzo reveals how Hamilton, first as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and later as the nation’s first and most influential treasury secretary, masterfully promoted an agenda of nationalist glory and interventionist economics—–core beliefs that did not die with Hamilton in his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. Carried on through his political heirs, the Hamiltonian legacy:

• Wrested control into the hands of the federal government by inventing the myth of the Constitution’s “implied powers”
• Established the imperial presidency (Hamilton himself proposed a permanent president—–in other words, a king)
• Devised a national banking system that imposes boom-and-bust cycles on the American economy
• Saddled Americans with a massive national debt and oppressive taxation
• Inflated the role of the federal courts in order to eviscerate individual liberties and state sovereignty
• Pushed economic policies that lined the pockets of the wealthy and created a government system built on graft, spoils, and patronage
• Transformed state governments from Jeffersonian bulwarks of liberty to beggars for federal crumbs

By debunking the Hamiltonian myths perpetuated in recent admiring biographies, DiLorenzo exposes an uncomfortable truth: The American people are no longer the masters of their government but its servants. Only by restoring a system based on Jeffersonian ideals can Hamilton’s curse be lifted, at last.

So yeah, from DiLorenzo's  more accurate and deeper understanding of Hamilton, Kushner is a lot like him.They are both nationalists promoting greater federal power.

-RW