talk

Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread.

This week’s second caption reads:

NANTWICH, ENGLAND – MAY 24: A general view inside the former RAF Hack Green secret nuclear bunker on May 24, 2023 in Nantwich, England. Hack Green played a central role in the defence of Britain for almost sixty years. It was chosen during WW2 to protect the land between Birmingham and Liverpool from hostile attack and as a location for the new RADAR equipment. The bunker went on to be used for shelter and protection during the Cold War. As relations between East and West thawed many of the UK’s nuclear bunkers were sold off. The Secret Bunker is now privately owned by the Siebert family and is run as a museum trust. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Also, a reminder:

Prime Directives!

• If you want to talk politics, do so respectfully and know that there’s always somebody that isn’t going to agree with you. 
• If you have political differences, hash it out respectfully, stick to the facts, and no childish name-calling or personal attacks of any kind. If you can’t handle yourself in that manner, then please, discuss virtually anything else.
• No drive-by garbage political memes. No conspiracy theory rants. Links to crackpot sites will be axed, too. Trolling and shitposting will not be tolerated. No obsessive behavior about other users. Just don’t interact with folks you don’t like. 
• Do not be a sucker and feed trolls! That’s as much on you as on them. Use the mute button if you don’t like what you see.  
• So unless you have something of quality to say, know how to treat people with respect, understand that everyone isn’t going to subscribe to your exact same worldview, and have come to terms with the reality that there is no perfect solution when it comes to moderation of a community like this, it’s probably best to just move on. 
• Finally, as always, report offenders, please. This doesn’t mean reporting people who don’t share your political views, but we really need your help in this regard.

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is running for a second term in the pivotal battleground state after a first term that put him on the Democratic Party’s radar as a potential presidential contender in 2028.

He made the formal announcement Thursday at an event at a carpenters’ union hall in Pittsburgh and, later, at a similar event in Philadelphia. Shapiro’s announcement demonstrated a unified party behind him — including introductions by the state party chair, labor leaders and top local Democratic officials — as he ticked off his accomplishments during a nearly 30-minute speech.

Shapiro warned that his opponents promise “darkness and division and extremism,” and — without mentioning President Trump by name — he slammed the “chaos and toxicity” emanating from Washington, D.C., that he said threatened livelihoods, rights and freedoms.

“Every step of the way, I’ve stood up for my fellow Pennsylvanians, sometimes in a court of law and other times simply refusing to back down, refusing to cast certain Pennsylvanians aside and always by speaking truth to power,” Shapiro said.

He added, “I will not let anyone mess with Pennsylvania and I will always have your backs.”

Although Shapiro hasn’t disclosed any ambitions for higher office, his reelection effort will be closely watched as another test of whether he’s White House material.

Ever since he won the governor’s office in a near-landslide victory in 2022, Shapiro has been mentioned alongside Democratic contemporaries like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and others as someone who could lead a national ticket.

Shapiro, 52, has already made rounds outside Pennsylvania. Last year, he campaigned for Democrats running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, and he’s a frequent guest on Sunday talk shows that can shape the country’s political conversation.

He was also considered as a potential running mate for Kamala Harris in 2024. She chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz instead.

A pivotal first term as governor

Shapiro’s first term repeatedly put him in the spotlight.

He was governor when Pennsylvania was the site of the first attempted assassination of Trump; the capture of Luigi Mangione in the killing of United Healthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson; and the murder of three police officers in the state’s deadliest day for law enforcement since 2009.

Last year, an arsonist tried to kill Shapiro by setting the governor’s official residence on fire in the middle of the night. Shapiro had to flee with his wife, children and members of his extended family, and the attack made him a sought-out voice on the nation’s recent spate of political violence.

As Shapiro settled into the governor’s office, he shed his buttoned-down public demeanor and became more plain-spoken.

He pushed to quickly reopen a collapsed section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, debuting his new and profane governing slogan — “get s— done” — at a ceremony for the completed project.

He crossed the partisan divide over school choice to support a Republican-backed voucher program, causing friction with Democratic lawmakers and allies in the state.

Shapiro regularly plays up the need for bipartisanship in a state with a politically divided Legislature, and positions himself as a moderate on energy issues in a state that produces the most natural gas after Texas.

He’s rubbed elbows with corporate executives who are interested in Pennsylvania as a data center destination and thrust Pennsylvania into competition for billions of dollars being spent on energy, manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

A repeat winner in competitive territory

Shapiro has enjoyed robust public approval ratings and carries a reputation as a disciplined messenger and powerhouse fundraiser. For 2026, Pennsylvania’s Republican Party endorsed Stacy Garrity, the twice-elected state treasurer, to challenge Shapiro.

Garrity has campaigned around Pennsylvania and spoken at numerous Trump rallies in the battleground state, but she is untested as a fundraiser and will have to contend with her relatively low profile as compared with Shapiro.

Shapiro, meanwhile, keeps a busy public schedule and has gone out of his way to appear at high-profile, nonpolitical events like football games, a NASCAR race and onstage at a Roots concert in Philadelphia.

He is a regular on TV political shows, podcasts and local sports radio shows, and became a leading pro-Israel voice among Democrats and Jewish politicians amid the Israel-Hamas war, confronting divisions within the Democratic Party over the war.

He has tempered it with calls for more aid for Gaza’s residents and criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war, but some activists argued against him being the party’s nominee for vice president in 2024.

Harris, in her recent book, wrote that she passed on Shapiro after determining that he wouldn’t be a good fit for the role.

Shapiro, she wrote, “mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision,” and she “had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.” Shapiro disputed the characterization.

An audition on the 2026 campaign trail

In a September appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” the host, Kristen Welker, asked him whether he’d commit to serving a full second term as governor and whether he’d rule out running for president in 2028.

“I’m focused on doing my work here,” he said, sidestepping the questions.

His supposed White House aspirations — which he’s never actually admitted to in public — are also mentioned frequently by Garrity.

“We need somebody that is more interested in Pennsylvania and not on Pennsylvania Avenue,” Garrity said recently on a radio show in Philadelphia. On Thursday, the Republican Governors Assocn. accused Shapiro of being “more focused on his political ambitions” than leading Pennsylvania.

For his part, Shapiro criticizes Garrity as too eager to get Trump’s endorsement to be an effective advocate for Pennsylvania.

In any case, the campaign trail could afford Shapiro an opportunity to audition for a White House run.

For one thing, Shapiro has been unafraid to criticize Trump, even in a swing state won by Trump in 2024. As governor, Shapiro has joined or filed more than a dozen lawsuits against Trump’s administration, primarily for holding up funding to states.

He has lambasted Trump’s tariffs as “reckless” and “dangerous,” Trump’s threats to revoke TV broadcast licenses as an “attempt to stifle dissent” and Trump’s equivocation on political violence as failing the “leadership test” and “making everyone less safe.”

Many of Shapiro’s would-be competitors in a Democratic primary won’t have to run for office before then.

Newsom is term-limited, for instance. Others — like ex-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — aren’t in public office. A couple of other governors in the 2028 conversation — Moore and Pritzker — are running for reelection this year.

Levy writes for the Associated Press.

JuJu Watkins is returning to Sierra Canyon High on Friday, the place where she was a high school basketball All-American.

The school will hold a ceremony retiring her jersey at halftime of the boys’ basketball game between Sierra Canyon and Sherman Oaks Notre Dame.

She will be presented with a framed jersey.

Watkins is sitting out this season at USC while recovering from a knee injury.

Sierra Canyon girls’ basketball coach Alicia Komaki said, “She raised our standards, which was hard to do because we had won four state championships. She was an incredibly talented player.”

Watkins was also making a huge impact in the college game until her injury last season during the NCAA playoffs.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.

Jan. 4 (UPI) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in interviews on Sunday that it is “premature” to discuss elections in Venezuela because higher priorities, including reinvigorating the country’s oil industry, must be addressed first.

In interviews with ABC, CBS and NBC, Rubio said that the United States will continue to strike drug boats and detain oil tankers as the Trump administration moves to stabilize and “run” Venezuela after the apprehension of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday.

The Trump administration plans to keep its “quarantine” of Venezuelan oil in place as it pressures the remainders of Maduro’s government to end their cooperation with South American drug gangs, as well as stop selling oil to the United States’ adversaries, Rubio said.

“As we move forward here, we’ll set the conditions so that we no longer have in our hemisphere a Venezuela that’s the crossroads for many of our adversaries around the world, including Iran and Hezbollah,” Rubio said on ABC News’ “This Week.”

Rubio added that Venezuela would also no longer be “a narcotrafficking paradise for all those drugs coming out of Colombia … and toward the United States.”

Offshore armada is ‘leverage’

In a press conference on Saturday, Trump told reporters that there was a second strike planned in the case that Venezuelan forces responded to Maduro’s capture or the plan was not successful, but U.S. military commanders decided against launching it.

Trump noted Saturday, and Rubio reiterated on Sunday, that the roughly 15,000 troops offshore of Venezuela spread across more than a dozen warships would remain in the Caribbean.

Their objectives, he told CBS’ “Face The Nation,” are striking drug trafficking boats, apprehending tankers suspected to be carrying sanctioned Venezuelan oil and using the armada, as Trump has referred to it, of U.S. military ships offshore to encourage the remaining members of Maduro’s administration to comply with U.S. demands.

“What’s going to happen here is that we have a quarantine on their oil,” Rubio said. “That the means that their economy will not be able to move forward until the conditions that are in the national interest of the United States and of the Venezuelan people are met.”

“So, that leverage remains,” he added. “That leverage is ongoing. And we expect that it’s going to lead to results here.”

No elections yet

Although the Trump administration “cares about elections, we care about democracy, we care about all of that,” the priority is the U.S.’ goals of stopping the flow of drugs into the United States and U.S. “safety, security, well-being and prosperity,” Rubio told NBC News’ “Meet The Press.”

At this point, he said, considering new elections in Venezuela “is premature at this point” as Trump has tasked Rubio with “running policy” in the South American country.

In the next several months, Rubio said that the main priorities are to end entanglements between the Venezuelan government and drug gangs, as well as to prevent Iran, Russia, China and Cuba, among other nations, from investing in the country and gaining a foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

Maduro and his wife, who are in a jail in New York City awaiting trial, along with four other people in the Venezuelan government who were not arrested in Saturday’s raid, have been indicted for allegedly working with Colombian drug gangs and rebel groups to assist them in trafficking cocaine.

The quarantine on ships transporting Venezuelan oil is linked to Trump’s goal of sending U.S. oil companies to inspect and reinvigorate Venezuela’s ailing oil industry, while keeping the oil in the Americas.

While noting that the United States, which is a net oil exporter, does not need the oil, he questioned why Iran, Russia or China should need Venezuelan oil considering all three are nowhere near South America.

“They’re not even in this continent,” Rubio said. “This is where we live, and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operations for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”

Garo Ohannessian is known as a “lifer” at AGBU, an Armenian K-12 school in Canoga Park. He’s been there from the start and now he’s making a name for himself in high school basketball with his three-point shooting skills.

He set a school record making 13 threes and finishing with a career-high 45 points in a Dec. 30 win over Brawley.

He’s been a four-year varsity player and was a freshman when the team reached the Southern Section Division 2A playoff semifinals.

Coach Nareg Kopooshian has confidence in him to shoot from anywhere on the court. The 5-foot-10 senior has helped lead his team to a 13-2 record.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.

Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread.

This week’s second caption reads:

In a building called the “Blue Cube” on the military airbase, a group of Air Force officers and enlisted men montior the flight of the space shuttle. From this location the space shuttle is controlled after it is launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Typically the Air Force only monitors space flights with classified military cargo and equipment. | Location: Near San Jose, California, USA.

Also, a reminder:

Prime Directives!

• If you want to talk politics, do so respectfully and know that there’s always somebody that isn’t going to agree with you. 
• If you have political differences, hash it out respectfully, stick to the facts, and no childish name-calling or personal attacks of any kind. If you can’t handle yourself in that manner, then please, discuss virtually anything else.
• No drive-by garbage political memes. No conspiracy theory rants. Links to crackpot sites will be axed, too. Trolling and shitposting will not be tolerated. No obsessive behavior about other users. Just don’t interact with folks you don’t like. 
• Do not be a sucker and feed trolls! That’s as much on you as on them. Use the mute button if you don’t like what you see.  
• So unless you have something of quality to say, know how to treat people with respect, understand that everyone isn’t going to subscribe to your exact same worldview, and have come to terms with the reality that there is no perfect solution when it comes to moderation of a community like this, it’s probably best to just move on. 
• Finally, as always, report offenders, please. This doesn’t mean reporting people who don’t share your political views, but we really need your help in this regard.

Will Bryson III of St. Paul stuck it out for his senior basketball season even though the team lost pretty much everybody to graduation except for him.

All he can do is his best, and that’s what he has been doing, including a 68-point performance two weeks ago in Las Vegas in a triple overtime game.

The 6-foot-4 guard is averaging 33.1 points a game for St. Paul (6-9) and showing dedication in that he stayed knowing the team might not be as good as last season’s 19-11 team, but he’d be the leader entrusted to help young players develop. On Friday, he faces the state’s leading scorer, Jason Crowe Jr. of Inglewood, in a noon game at Morningside. Bryson ranks as No. 3 in the state. Crowe is averaging 43.9 points and the two have been facing off since their youth days.

Coach Patrick Roy has been raving about Bryson’s contributions.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.

Happy New Year to all our readers!

Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread.

This week’s second caption reads:

The Diefenbunker is a decommissioned military bunker (now a museum) built as an emergency shelter for the government of Canada. The facility, located in Carp (near Ottawa, Ontario), was built at the height of the Cold War and opened in 1961 by the Canadian Forces.

Also, a reminder:

Prime Directives!

• If you want to talk politics, do so respectfully and know that there’s always somebody that isn’t going to agree with you. 
• If you have political differences, hash it out respectfully, stick to the facts, and no childish name-calling or personal attacks of any kind. If you can’t handle yourself in that manner, then please, discuss virtually anything else.
• No drive-by garbage political memes. No conspiracy theory rants. Links to crackpot sites will be axed, too. Trolling and shitposting will not be tolerated. No obsessive behavior about other users. Just don’t interact with folks you don’t like. 
• Do not be a sucker and feed trolls! That’s as much on you as on them. Use the mute button if you don’t like what you see.  
• So unless you have something of quality to say, know how to treat people with respect, understand that everyone isn’t going to subscribe to your exact same worldview, and have come to terms with the reality that there is no perfect solution when it comes to moderation of a community like this, it’s probably best to just move on. 
• Finally, as always, report offenders, please. This doesn’t mean reporting people who don’t share your political views, but we really need your help in this regard.

We want to wish our commenting crew the most wonderful holiday with their families and friends! Enjoy, relax, discuss, and have a very merry Christmas!

Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread.

This week’s caption reads:

Boys at a Dr Barnardo’s home have fun in the air raid shelter they built themselves at Christmas, 17th December 1940. (Photo by David Parker/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Also a reminder:

Prime Directives!

• If you want to talk politics, do so respectfully and know that there’s always somebody that isn’t going to agree with you. 
• If you have political differences, hash it out respectfully, stick to the facts, and no childish name-calling or personal attacks of any kind. If you can’t handle yourself in that manner, then please, discuss virtually anything else.
• No drive-by garbage political memes. No conspiracy theory rants. Links to crackpot sites will be axed, too. Trolling and shitposting will not be tolerated. No obsessive behavior about other users. Just don’t interact with folks you don’t like. 
• Do not be a sucker and feed trolls! That’s as much on you as on them. Use the mute button if you don’t like what you see.  
• So unless you have something of quality to say, know how to treat people with respect, understand that everyone isn’t going to subscribe to your exact same worldview, and have come to terms with the reality that there is no perfect solution when it comes to moderation of a community like this, it’s probably best to just move on. 
• Finally, as always, report offenders, please. This doesn’t mean reporting people who don’t share your political views, but we really need your help in this regard

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump said he will be extending invitations to next year’s U.S.-hosted Group of 20 summit to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as the Republican administration looks to deepen its relationship with the Central Asian nations.

Trump announced the plan on Tuesday after holding separate phone calls with Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Uzbekistan President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

Neither country is a member of the G20, but the host country of the annual leaders’ gathering of major economies often invites non-members to attend the summit. The 2026 gathering is planned for Trump’s golf club in Doral, Fla., near Miami.

“The relationship with both Countries is spectacular,” Trump said in a social media post about the calls. Trump is currently on vacation at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

The Kazakh and Uzbek leaders visited Washington last month along with the leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan for talks with Trump.

The administration is giving greater attention to Central Asia, which holds deep reserves of minerals and produces roughly half the world’s uranium, as it intensifies the hunt for rare earth metals needed for high-tech devices, including smartphones, electric vehicles and fighter jets.

Central Asia’s critical mineral exports have long tilted toward China and Russia.

During last month’s visit, Tokayev announced that his Muslim-majority country will join the Abraham Accords, the Trump administration effort to strengthen ties between Israel and Arab and Muslim majority countries.

The largely symbolic move came as the administration is trying to revive an initiative that was the signature foreign policy achievement of Trump’s first term, when his administration forged diplomatic and commercial ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.

Trump last month announced that he is barring South Africa from participating in next year’s summit at his Miami-area club and will stop all payments and subsidies to the country over its treatment of a U.S. government representative at this year’s meeting.

Trump chose not to have an American government delegation attend this year’s summit hosted by South Africa, saying he did so because its white Afrikaners were being violently persecuted. It is a claim that South Africa, which was mired for decades in racial apartheid, has rejected as baseless.

Madhani writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — As the dawn rose on President Trump’s second term, one key figure from his first administration stood back, content to focus on his personal business interests and not retake a formal government role.

Now, nearly a year into Trump 2.0, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been drawn back into the foreign policy fold and is taking a greater role in delicate peace negotiations. Talks had initially been led almost solo by special envoy Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul who had no government experience before this year.

The shift reflects a sense among Trump’s inner circle that Kushner, who has diplomatic experience, complements Witkoff’s negotiating style and can bridge seemingly intractable differences to close a deal, according to several current and former administration officials who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations.

That role was on display this weekend as Kushner and Witkoff took part in a blitz of diplomacy in Miami.

On Sunday, they concluded two days of talks with Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev in Miami on the latest proposals to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The talks with Dmitriev came after they met on Friday in Florida with the Ukrainian negotiating team, led by Rustem Umerov, as well as senior British, French and German national security officials. The Ukrainians and European officials stuck around Florida for more talks with U.S. government officials facilitated by Trump’s envoys.

Witkoff and Kushner also squeezed in meetings on Friday with Turkish and Qatari officials to discuss the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas in Gaza as they look to implement the second phase of Trump’s ceasefire plan.

Kushner and Witkoff employ contrasting styles

Witkoff, a longtime pal of Trump’s, is seen by some inside the administration as an oversize character who has traveled the world for diplomatic negotiations on his private jet and does not miss an opportunity to publicly praise the president for his foreign policy acumen, the officials say.

Kushner has his own complicated business interests in the Middle East and a sometimes transactional outlook to diplomacy that has distressed some officials in European capitals, a Western diplomat said.

Still, Kushner is seen as a more credible negotiator than Witkoff, who is viewed by many Ukrainian and European officials as overly deferential to Russian interests during the war that began with Moscow’s invasion in February 2022, the diplomat said.

“Kushner has a bit more of a track record from the first administration,” said Ian Kelly, a retired career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Georgia who now teaches diplomacy at Northwestern University. Kelly stressed, however, that the jury is still out on Kushner’s intervention.

Trump views Kushner as a “trusted family member and talented adviser” who has played a pivotal role in some of his biggest foreign policy successes, said White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly.

Trump and Witkoff “often seek Mr. Kushner’s input given his experience with complex negotiations, and Mr. Kushner has been generous in lending his valuable expertise when asked,” Kelly added.

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott called Kushner “a world-class negotiator.” Pigott noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is grateful for Kushner’s “willingness to serve our country and help President Trump solve some of the world’s most complex challenges.”

In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” in October, Kushner spoke about his unconventional approach to diplomacy.

“I was trained in foreign policy really in President Trump’s first term by seeing an outsider president come into Washington with a different school of foreign policy than had been brought in place for the 20 or 30 years prior,” he said.

But some Democrats and government oversight groups have expressed skepticism about Kushner’s role in shaping the administration policies in the Middle East while he manages billions of dollars in investments, including from Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s sovereign wealth funds through his firm, Affinity Partners.

Similarly, Witkoff has faced scrutiny for his and his family’s deep business ties to Gulf nations. Witkoff last year partnered with members of Trump’s family to launch a cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, which received a $2 billion investment from a United Arab Emirates-controlled wealth fund.

“What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” said Kushner, who is not drawing a salary from the White House for his advisory role.

White House counsel David Warrington said in a statement that Kushner’s efforts for Trump “are undertaken in full compliance with the law.”

“Given that Jared Kushner was a critical part of the efforts leading to the historic Abraham Accords and other diplomatic successes in the first Trump Administration, the President asked Mr. Kushner to be available as the President engages in similar efforts to bring peace to the world,” Warrington said in a statement, referring to Trump’s first-term effort that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab nations. “Mr. Kushner has agreed to do so in his capacity as a private citizen.”

Kelly and other veterans of U.S. diplomatic encounters with the Russians over many years are also skeptical about Kushner’s ability to secure a Russia-Ukraine deal because Witkoff technically remains in the lead.

“I don’t see that the Witkoff approach is going to work,” Kelly said. “He doesn’t really read the Russians well. He misunderstands what they say and reports the misunderstandings back to Washington and the Europeans.”

“They seem to have this idea that the magic key is money: investment and development,” Kelly said. “But these guys don’t care about that, they are not real estate guys except in the sense that they want the land, period.”

Kushner was out of the spotlight until he wasn’t

For the first half of the year, Kushner stayed out of the spotlight, even as he pushed, unsuccessfully in some cases, to install some former associates — those with whom he worked on negotiating the Abraham Accords — into powerful roles in the new administration, according to the current and former administration officials.

Kushner had told Trump and others that while he would not be joining the second-term White House, he stood ready to offer his counsel if it was desired. That is a role he also played on a few occasions during the Biden years as the Democratic administration tried, without success, to expand the Abraham Accords.

Although Kushner remained an informal sounding board for Trump and top advisers, he resisted getting directly involved, even as the president expanded his peacemaking pursuits, until it became clear to him and others that the job might be too much for Witkoff to seal on his own, the officials said.

As Trump’s efforts to forge an agreement to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza faltered over the summer, Kushner came in, trading on his experience and contacts in negotiating the Abraham Accords to help Witkoff push Trump’s plan over the finish line.

Agreed to in late September after frantic talks surrounding the annual U.N. General Assembly, the 20-point plan is still a work in progress, but its implementation is being coordinated by Kushner and numerous members of his Abraham Accords team.

“We always bring Jared when we want to get that deal closed,” Trump told Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, shortly after the agreement. “We need that brain on occasion.”

As soon as the Gaza plan was finalized, Kushner said he was returning to his family and day job in Miami, where he heads a multibillion-dollar private equity firm. His involvement in high-stakes peacemaking was only temporary, Kushner said, joking that his wife, Ivanka, might change the locks if he did not get home soon.

“I’m gonna try to help set it up, and then I’m gonna hopefully go back to my normal life,” Kushner said in October.

But within weeks of shepherding the Gaza ceasefire, Trump turned again to his fixer-in-law to dive into the Russia-Ukraine negotiations. They had been deadlocked for months despite persistent efforts by the White House to lure both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky into an agreement.

Trump hinted then that he would continue to lean on Kushner when the stakes are highest, just as he has done.

Lee and Madhani write for the Associated Press.

Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread.

This week’s second caption reads:

Camp Shelby, Mississippi (February 3, 2023) Seabees, assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133 (NMCB 133), go to bunkers during a simulated missile strike on Camp Shelby, Mississippi, February 3, 2023. NMCB 133 is at Camp Shelby, Mississippi conducting a field training exercise operating as part of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command conducting the advanced phase of the force readiness training plan (FRTP). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Andrew Waters/Released) 

Also, a reminder:

Prime Directives!

• If you want to talk politics, do so respectfully and know that there’s always somebody that isn’t going to agree with you. 
• If you have political differences, hash it out respectfully, stick to the facts, and no childish name-calling or personal attacks of any kind. If you can’t handle yourself in that manner, then please, discuss virtually anything else.
• No drive-by garbage political memes. No conspiracy theory rants. Links to crackpot sites will be axed, too. Trolling and shitposting will not be tolerated. No obsessive behavior about other users. Just don’t interact with folks you don’t like. 
• Do not be a sucker and feed trolls! That’s as much on you as on them. Use the mute button if you don’t like what you see.  
• So unless you have something of quality to say, know how to treat people with respect, understand that everyone isn’t going to subscribe to your exact same worldview, and have come to terms with the reality that there is no perfect solution when it comes to moderation of a community like this, it’s probably best to just move on. 
• Finally, as always, report offenders, please. This doesn’t mean reporting people who don’t share your political views, but we really need your help in this regard.