It was just six days after Jared Kushner announced his book deal, promising “the definitive, thorough recounting of the administration and the truth about what happened behind closed doors,” that CNN ran an article headlined “Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner distance themselves from the former President and his constant complaints.”
About that book, you’re gonna get the “truth” from Jared like you’re going to get Diet Coke from a cow or a coherent thought from Junior. And about that article, “try” is the operative word here, as the plastic duo aim to launder their reputations, but the last four years aren’t going to come out in the wash with a silly article about how they’re just regular, relatable folks trying to manage an annoying, overbearing and over-the-hill patriarch.
Wow, it’s a sham for sure but there’s no cleaning product or line of talk on the record or on background to friendly reporters that’s going to remove the stains from their reputations.
I mean, Ivanka and Jared can see which way the wind is blowing and that it’s way past time for these climbers to ditch daddy. He lost re-election, he’s off of Twitter and Facebook and his interviews barely cause a ripple as people are bored with the orange racist grandpa who mostly plays golf and waits by the omelet station hoping a wedding or a memorial service will let him say a few words.
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. 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.
For someone who gets ignored all the time, apparently Jared is nothing if not persistent. And the wretched thirstiness of him and his wife does fascinate, which is presumably how they willed into existence that CNN story with 12 sources “familiar with the situation” musing about how Ivanka was hoping “to undo the entanglements caused by the years at her father’s side in the White House, as she seeks a less complicated life for her family, according to two acquaintances. They described her as having to walk a fine line between embracing her father and distancing herself from his election lies.”
Yeah, she’s walking a fine line between collecting that up to $640 million dollars she and her terrible husband made in their last year in the White House, while doing empowerment initiatives. No one does corporate doublespeak quite like Princess Vanka.
And then there was the assertion that Jared and Ivanka rarely ever go to Mar-a-Lago, only “once every three to four weeks.” And this absolutely batshit line, “I don’t think it’s accurate to say he needed a new Jared, because Jared was always more of a policy guy inside the White House.”
Policy guy?! Jared came to the White House as the guy who’d fucked up his family’s slumlording real estate business by moving into Manhattan (remind you of anyone?) and trying to get fancy. His signature achievement as son-in-law-ain’t-chief was his own disaster of a coronavirus “rescue” program.
Even Old Man Trump, who is no genius, has started to wonder if the son in law has no clothes (or in this case brains), telling those around him that he thinks Jared may not have brought “peace in the Middle East after all.” Really? You think? Remember when Jared wrote on The Wall Street Journal opinion page that “We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
Yeah, Jared really called that one.
Remember when Jared told Michael Wolff that “The most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots?” Well, that might have been the only thing Jared Kushner was ever right about, even if he was too much of an overconfident idiot to recognize that he was talking about himself.
Jared is far from the only Trumpist with a book on the horizon. Kellyanne Conway has a book coming and Mike Pence has two. These people are all going to try and launder their terrible reputations. They are going to lie to you and tell you that they tried, that they wanted to control Trump, that they were a “moderating force.” That they stopped Trump from doing the really bad stuff.
Do not believe them. Do not give these people the benefit of the doubt. The bad stuff happened. These people didn’t prevent anything. They’re just looking to clean up and cash out after hitting the exit doors.
