by Howard Kurtz
The president took a swipe at Dickerson early on: “I love your show. I call it Deface the Nation. But, you know, your show is sometimes not exactly correct.”
It was toward the end of the interview, when Trump was discussing Obama and what had happened with “surveillance,” that Dickerson asked why he had called the former president a “bad” and “sick” man in the initial tweet about wiretapping. Did he stand by that charge?
“I don’t stand by anything. You can take it the way you want,” Trump said.
Dickerson kept pressing, again and again, and Trump kept deflecting: “I have my own opinions. You can have your own opinions.”
With that, the president abruptly ended the interview: “Okay, that’s enough, thank you.” He walked back to his desk.
But his flash of anger faded once the cameras were off. Trump spent part of the day with Dickerson and they had dinner. The president was personally fond of some journalists, but not of their work. He felt so badly mistreated by the press that, in public at least, he always had his fists up.
The Dickerson incident triggered a much nastier blow. Stephen Colbert, in the guise of defending his CBS colleague, fired off a series of rapid-fire insults on the Late Show, including this one: “The only thing your mouth is good for is as Putin’s cock holster.” That CBS allowed the airing of the bleeped joke, which was scripted for the taped show, was stunning, as was the fact that a talk show host as talented as Colbert would stoop to that level. But when he was criticized for the line, Colbert offered only a lame non-apology.
“I don’t regret that,” Colbert told viewers. While he would “change a few words that were cruder than they needed to be,” he would do it again. The core of Colbert’s audience disliked Trump—he had obviously written off conservative viewers—and he did not want to appear to be backing down. What’s more, these were not just jokes. Colbert, like his mentor Jon Stewart, had long ago fused satire and serious political commentary.
If Colbert had gone low, comedian Kathy Griffin was willing to go lower with grotesque photos of her holding a severed head resembling that of Donald Trump. The D-list comedian apparently thought this would be amusing—in an age of ISIS beheadings—because Hollywood haters of Trump seemed to reap nothing but praise for any attack on the president, no matter how vile. But this time, CNN, after initially hesitating, fired Griffin from the New Year’s Eve show she co-hosted with Anderson Cooper. The president tweeted that she was “sick” and that the image had upset his eleven-year-old son Barron.
Griffin made a video apology, saying “the image is too disturbing. I understand how it offends people.…I beg your forgiveness.”
But within days she held a tearful news conference in which she attacked Trump. “A sitting president of the United States and his grown children and the first lady are personally, I feel, personally trying to ruin my life forever,” she said.
Griffin also accused Trump of retaliating against her because she was a woman. “I don’t think I will have a career after this,” she said. “I have to be honest, he broke me.”
Griffin, who owned a $10-million California home, was casting herself as the victim after behavior that she herself had described as offensive. The brief statements by the first family were not the reason she was losing her gig at CNN and was deemed too gross for her sponsor Squatty Potty. A national wave of revulsion, on the left as well as the right, had finally determined there was a line of human decency that no one should cross, even when it came to Trump.
And yet that line kept getting lowered. Actor Johnny Depp thought it was amusing to tell a crowd at a film screening, “Can you bring Trump here.…When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” He later apologized for his “bad joke.”
In a perversion of Shakespeare, New York’s Public Theater produced Julius Caesar with a Trump figure, complete with orangey hair and a red tie, stabbed to death on stage by a gang of senators next to an American flag. Delta and Bank of America were so offended by this bastardization of the bard and celebration of anti-Trump violence that they yanked their funding.
But not the New York Times, which continued to support the production as an affirmation of free speech in the arts. The Times ran a front-page story on the controversy that did not mention its financial role, which was relegated to the twenty-seventh paragraph of a twenty-eight-paragraph sidebar. Its corporate association with this ugliness was barely news fit to print.
CHAPTER 15
JARED AND IVANKA FIGHT BACK
It read like a political obituary for Reince Priebus.
Filled with embarrassing details leaked by his colleagues and rivals, the New York Times story painted a devastating portrait: The chief of staff’s job “often seemed to overwhelm him.” He was “a would-be gatekeeper desperately in search of a gate.” He had finally “cut back on his stalking-butler tendency to hover over the president,” realizing that Trump “had grown resentful of his constant companionship.”
And the killer quote, attributed to Trump at a recent meeting around his desk: “What are you doing in here? Don’t you have health care to take care of?”
What rendered the long piece by Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman remarkable was that it was published on May 5, the morning after Trump pushed the House into approving a bill to revamp Obamacare. And it was Priebus who played the vital role in reviving the effort after the devastating failure six weeks earlier that appeared to bury health care reform.
His reward? The Times verdict that this was “less a victory” than “a reprieve” for him, that a loss would “probably have been an unrecoverable blow to an already weakened Mr. Priebus.”
The story dug into the endless infighting, saying Priebus was often “elbowed out” by Jared Kushner and other West Wing aides, that he was trying to curb Steve Bannon’s agenda and felt that Bannon was using Breitbart and other outlets to wage a “hidden war” against him.
Priebus thought the piece was phony. Its sources were what he liked to call straphangers, people from outside the inner circle. He had talked to Thrush and Haberman, and so had Bannon and Kushner, in front of the PR people, and yet the paper still trashed him.
“You’re just getting cut up. They’re winning,” Bannon told him. The two men had actually become allies after the tension of the early months.
Priebus had complained to Trump about the endless leaks. He felt that he had laid down strict rules against leaking, but that he was being a Boy Scout while all his detractors dumped on him in the press. He had seen too many details published after meetings involving just him, Trump, and a couple of other people.
The president himself leaked to reporters as well, his aides believed, sometimes in late-night calls. And sometimes it was inadvertent: Trump would talk to so many friends and acquaintances that key information would quickly reach journalists.
Priebus also sometimes spoke to reporters on background to push back against anonymous accusations. And there were times when he placed authorized leaks, such as previewing coming announcements. Still, the porous atmosphere fostered mistrust within the administration, and Trump’s deputies were increasingly willing to use the press to undermine their colleagues rather than help the president. But Reince was wedded to the belief that that Trump’s opinion of him was the only one that mattered.
The media swiftly shifted from dutifully treating the House’s passage of a health care bill as a modest victory for the president (on a narrow, party-line vote), to highlighting how bad the bill was.
Many liberal outlets were apoplectic. The Huffington Post ran this screamer: “HOUSE VOTES TO LET ’EM DIE.” That scare-tactic banner was followed hours later by “PATIENTS FEAR: ‘THEY WANT TO KILL ME.’” The site had used a policy disagreement to brand Trump a killer, echoing some of the most extreme Democratic rhetoric.
Kellyanne Conway was disgusted. Shame on the anchors who didn’t correct their liberal guests on outlandish charges of people dying in the streets. Wasn’t it part of the media’s j
ob, she asked, to challenge such hyperbolic claims?
When the original bill failed in March, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell had announced: “It is impossible—impossible—to exaggerate the enormity of what happened to Donald Trump. His presidency effectively ended. He is a powerless president.” That prediction had not aged well.
The press did point out some legitimate problems. For one thing, the measure faced a far rougher ride in the Senate. Despite the president’s insistence that he had protected people with preexisting conditions, the bill was a convoluted compromise that allowed states to opt out of those rules, and the billions allotted to the states might not be enough to make insurance affordable for them. Journalists noted that Republicans initially tried to ram through the bill without an official “score” of how much it would cost.
But the spate of stories about people who might lose their health insurance was not accompanied by much examination of how Obamacare had faltered, how millions of patients lost their plans and their doctors and faced big premium hikes, or how most insurers had bailed out in some states.
The media, in effect, were tilting in favor of the status quo—Obamacare—against Trump’s reforms. He had finally put a win on the board, but they were, for the moment, discounting that victory.
Ivanka Trump had a golden media image—until her father won the presidency.
Then the press began tarnishing her, not because of what she said or did, but because of who she was.
With her striking looks, cool demeanor, and soft-spoken style, the businesswoman who had branded her own clothing line was part of Manhattan’s smart set. She had socially liberal views on such issues as child care, equal pay, and climate change.
And that is precisely what made her a target: Some left-leaning journalists were convinced that she should talk some sense into her crazy father.
Ivanka was stunned that so many people put their hopes and dreams at her feet, that she was supposed to ease her liberal friends’ remorse over Hillary’s loss. They somehow expected her to contradict his public positions on issue after issue, to change her dad in radical ways. But they had apparently missed the fact that not only had the country had elected him president, but that she had supported him; she did not believe it was her role to “moderate” or change him.
“I’m one of the few people in Washington who doesn’t have a hidden agenda,” Ivanka told her father. He knew where she stood. She was a senior official now. Her goal was to pursue the issues she cared most about, and on which she and her father had common ground—from supporting female entrepreneurs to larger tax credits for families with children. Ivanka was not there to fight his agenda. She realized, though, that every time her father annoyed liberals, especially on “social” issues, many in the media would blame her for failing to rein him in.
Ivanka Trump was different than her father in that she was low-key, tightly controlled, and a consensus builder. She had never experienced negative press before, and was shocked at how vicious liberal media outlets could be. They had helped her build her brand as a businesswoman. But once her father became a candidate for president, she felt that everything was viewed through this cynical prism: Oh, she’s being used as a weapon to sanitize him with women.
It’s not that criticism of the thirty-five-year-old Ivanka was somehow out of bounds. She had worked for her father’s company. And she knew she would face charges of nepotism when she took a job in the administration, relinquishing her role in her company, and working in the White House at no salary.
The media assault really intensified when she flew to Germany for a conference on female empowerment, sharing the stage with Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde. When Ivanka called her father a “tremendous champion” of women’s rights, media reports said that the audience booed (though it turned out it was just murmurs).
CNN commentator Amanda Carpenter, a former Ted Cruz aide and an anti-Trump conservative, slammed her: “When I see Ivanka taking on this role, I really see her becoming like Hillary Clinton in the worst ways. She’s sort of becoming increasingly unlikable. She’s trying to get these jobs she’s not qualified for based on family connections.”
The Huffington Post ran a banner headline: “Trump’s White House Family Affair Looks a Lot Like the Most Corrupt Nations in the World.”
The Guardian carried a snarky column saying that Ivanka “invoked her own impressive achievements as an example of her father’s commitment to equality.…Trump is, indeed, a wonderful example of what women can achieve with just perseverance, tenacity and millions of inherited dollars.”
Joe Scarborough defended Ivanka by noting that Bobby Kennedy had done a good job as Jack Kennedy’s attorney general. When Mika Brzezinski asked if he was really comparing Ivanka Trump to Bobby Kennedy, Scarborough said she was being “snotty” and taking a “cheap shot.”
One of Ivanka’s problems was that, like her husband Jared, she rarely spoke to the press, ceding the field to her critics. She did an interview with NBC’s Hallie Jackson, defending her father and saying she didn’t like being described as his “accomplice.” But mostly her voice was muffled.
Finally, at the beginning of May, Ivanka gave two interviews for a carefully orchestrated piece in the New York Times. She criticized the media’s about-face in reporting on her. As for the president, “maybe along the way I’ve modified a position just slightly.”
The lengthy article included some criticism, but it was a largely sympathetic profile obviously done with her side’s cooperation. The lead anecdote said that when her father refused the full-throated apology she had urged after the leaking of the Access Hollywood tape, a teary, red-faced Ivanka ran out of the room in frustration.
But whatever residue of good will the article generated was quickly wiped away. When Ivanka’s book Women Who Work, written before the election, was published, many reviewers trashed it as a collection of insipid advice by an entitled child of privilege. And columnists used it as a reason to tee off on Ivanka’s character.
Ruth Marcus asked in the Washington Post whether Ivanka could try to “imagine the needs of those who inhabit a world outside your cosseted confines, and use your Trump-whispering skills on their behalf. Say, the kinds of people who have to worry more about finding enough money to get food on the table.” Otherwise, said Marcus, there was little reason to swallow “the inherent distastefulness, if not outright brand-building griftiness, of having Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in the White House.”
The headline on Gail Collins’s New York Times column captured the media sentiment: “Where’s Ivanka When We Need Her?”
Her dad was “going to war against women.…Ivanka’s a major power in the administration, and she ought to be mobilizing support for things like easy access to contraceptives.”
This was now the narrative, that Ivanka was a fraud unless she could change the president’s policies. Actress Debra Messing addressed her rhetorically at an awards ceremony for the gay and lesbian group GLAAD: “Ivanka…girlfriend…what are you doing?…Ivanka, you can change the lives of millions of women and children just by telling your dad stories about real people who are suffering.”
Things soon took a toxic turn. Bill Maher, the uber-liberal comedian on HBO, opened with this line: “A lot of us thought, ‘Ivanka is gonna be our saving grace.’” And then he dove into the gutter: “When he’s about to nuke Finland or something, she’s gonna walk into the bedroom and—‘Daddy, Daddy. Don’t do it, Daddy.’”
And he made what most news outlets had to describe as a crude hand gesture, which amounted to an incest joke—that Ivanka could influence her dad by having sex with him. It was the same sick “humor” that former Politico writer Julia Ioffe had used when she tweeted, “Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?” Only Maher had a much larger audience.
The media reaction was mostly muted, because the entertainment culture had already condoned saying virtually anything negative about Donald Trump, no
matter how personally vicious. Now it was somehow acceptable to slime Ivanka Trump by suggesting she was an incestuous slut, simply because she was the president’s daughter.
Ivanka found the Maher joke beyond inappropriate, but she really didn’t care. After her first couple of months in Washington, she had become totally desensitized.
Ivanka’s husband didn’t have her glamorous image. In fact, he didn’t want much of an image at all—hardly a realistic option given his closeness to the leader of the free world.
While he worked in a small suite outside the Oval Office, Jared Kushner felt he wasn’t good at politics; he was good at solving problems, and it was that ability at got him slowly sucked into the campaign, as Trump called with one request after another: My schedule sucks, fix it. The pollsters are robbing me. The vendors are ripping me off. By the end, Jared was running everything.
His father-in-law would phone every morning. “Did you see the fucking New York Times?” he would say.
“Donald,” Kushner would reply, “if they mattered, you’d be at 1 percent.”
The election taught him to avoid the hysterical media voices yelling from inside their bubble. And of all the journalists and producers and commentators whose predictions were so wrong, had a single one been fired? If they were stock pickers, Kushner thought, they would have been wiped out.
Trump relied on Jared’s advice, but he had reservations. He warned his daughter and son-in-law that life in the White House might be extremely unpleasant.
“Look, it’s going to be nasty and they’re going to come after you guys,” Trump told him.
And he told Ivanka, “I know you’re doing this for the right reasons. But they’ll never let you win, because you’re with me.”
Even with Trump’s warning, Kushner was unprepared for Washington’s hostile media. But when colleagues told him that the climate was unfair, Jared objected. No, no, he said, this is the White House. This is the game. The other side is trying to kill us.
