CNN Bites on Jared and Ivanka’s Latest Attempt to Restore Their Image But Almost No One Else Does … Including CNN’s Jim Acosta

Joe DePaoloJun 24th, 2021, 11:00 am
 
Senior adviser and daughter Ivanka Trump (L), and senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner (R) attend a summit at the East Room of the White House May 18, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Javanka)

Alex Wong/Getty Images

It’s become a staple of DC political journalism. Every so often, a piece magically appears in which Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are portrayed as the secret heroes of former President Donald Trump’s White House. They tried to stop all the bad stuff from going down, you see. But there was just no one who could stand in the former president’s way. Jared and Ivanka, who held senior posts throughout the Trump presidency, were innocent bystanders — to hear their camps tell it.

The latest entry in this ever-growing canon was published Tuesday by CNN. Writers Kate Bennett and Gabby Orr report, citing a dozen unnamed sources, that the First Daughter and her husband have spent the months after the 2020 election distancing themselves from the former president. Further, a source identified as a Kushner associate claimed that Jared’s recent deal with Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins, reached seven figures — and that the ex-president is “jealous” of his son-in-law. (To be fair, Trump is surely not alone. In all candor, that massive contract makes this reporter want to contact Broadside with a proposition of his own. After all, any outfit paying more than $1 million for a Jared Kushner book thinking it is anything other than a Quibian investment would surely be interested in purchasing a bridge.)

This passage in particular was a standout:

In Bedminster, the Kushner cottage and the Trump cottage are separated by mere tens of feet, about as close as the families have been for an extended period since the White House. Kushner’s allies say that won’t be a problem for him, as the two men are “not at odds,” as one describes their relationship. Another friend of Kushner’s says the men have a “good relationship, but [Kushner] is not anywhere near his political orbit.”

Indeed, the idea of the Kushners living tens of feet away from Trump but not being anywhere near his political orbit seems pretty hard to fathom.

The CNN article had plenty of skeptics. In fact, a CNN anchor was perhaps the most vocal of them all. Appearing on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer Wednesday, Jim Acosta dismissed the notion that the Kushners are innocents.

“This sounds like a rehab tour on the part of Jared and Ivanka,” Acosta said. “They want to rehabilitate their image somewhat, because as you and I both know, they’re just not as welcome in polite society as they once were.”

Molly Jong-Fast, in a Daily Beast column, likewise threw cold water on the clearly transparent efforts of Jared and Ivanka to restore their good names.

“All of this ‘distancing’ is a last-ditch effort for the royal couple that spent four years selling ‘Jared and Ivanka are doing their best behind the scenes’ stories to back away from the throne and its far right worshippers and inch back into the mainstream,” Jong-Fast wrote. “The book news came amid a wave of news reporters with sources—guess who!—talking about how Jared wanted to do something about Covid-19 but no one would listen to him, and Jared wanted to do something about policing and race in America after George Floyd’s murder but no one would listen to him.”

Other observers were equally unmoved:

Bottom line: What Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have done behind-the-scenes is as irrelevant as it is unverifiable. And the stories chronicling their closed-door actions are, frankly, as newsworthy as they are believable.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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Joe DePaolo - Senior Editor

Joe DePaolo is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Email him here: joed@mediaite.com Follow him on Twitter: @joe_depaolo