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Ivanka and Jared 2: Tarnished Gold


samurai_sarah

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On 3/8/2018 at 10:37 AM, AmazonGrace said:

This is Jared. Jared is very busy.  Jared will fix the US-Mexico relationship.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/08/politics/jared-kushner-enrique-pea-nieto/index.html

 

He's not fixing anything. He's looking for opportunities to make money for himself. Because he's broke. And really bad at business. Anything he "fixes" will be a disaster for the country financially and diplomatically. Exhibit A: 666 5th Avenue.

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"‘Where is Ivanka?’ First daughter seeks control in dual role as White House aide"

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Ivanka Trump tried to travel to South Korea as the president’s envoy — but she could not escape also being his celebrity daughter.

She peppered National Security Council experts in advance with questions, not just about the nuclear threat, but also about South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his wife’s hobbies. Flying over the Pacific bound for the Winter Olympic Games last month, she pored over a research dossier for hours. And she and her team choreographed many of the possible encounters she might have, including acting out what she would do if a North Korean official tried to shake her hand.

“I don’t like to leave a lot up to fate,” President Trump’s 36-year-old daughter, also a senior White House adviser, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Ivanka Trump likes to be in complete control — over-prepared and deliberate — in contrast to her freewheeling and impulsive father. 

But at the moment, Ivanka — whose first name has become a brand identity — controls increasingly little of the world in which she inhabits. The White House is careening from crisis to crisis. Her colleagues are leaking damaging anecdotes about her and husband Jared Kushner. Tensions between the couple and chief of staff John F. Kelly are intensifying. And all the while, the dark legal cloud hanging over her family is threatening to unleash a downpour.

By many accounts, her trip to South Korea was a success and arguably helped lay the groundwork for her father’s surprise decision Thursday to talk with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But she ran into trouble for her response to a question by NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander about whether she believes the accusations of sexual misdeeds against her father from more than a dozen women — first saying it was “inappropriate” to ask because she is the president’s daughter, then ultimately answering that she did not believe them.

Ivanka’s response, and the ensuing scrutiny, illustrated how she attempts to navigate her dual role as both daughter and senior adviser. It also served as a fresh reminder of the control she relinquished when she shifted from principal — running her own apparel business and shaping her own brand — to West Wing staffer carrying the public messages of an administration with which she does not always agree.

“I am the daughter of the president. I am also an adviser to the president,” she said. “And I respect that in that role I must work incredibly diligently to follow protocol as any other staffer would.”

This portrait of Ivanka after a year in the White House comes from interviews with more than a dozen administration officials, lawmakers and outside confidants, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a more candid assessment. Ivanka also sat down with The Post in her office on the West Wing’s second floor — a tucked-away modernist oasis of bright white and clean lines — for two interviews on back-to-back days in late February, portions of which were off the record.

Ivanka, a business executive and mother of three, entered the administration as a floating adviser. In her first year, she worked to help secure congressional votes and public support for the Republican tax plan — including pushing for expansion of the childhood tax credit — and has championed paid family leave, science and technology education, and other issues.

But in recent months, the strain between her and Kelly has deepened, White House officials said. Kelly — who Ivanka and her husband, also a senior adviser, initially pushed for chief of staff — has grown frustrated with what he views as the duo’s desire to have it both ways: behaving as West Wing officials in one moment, family members the next. He has griped to colleagues about what he views as her “freelancing” on “pet projects” as opposed to the administration’s stated top priorities.

Ivanka argues that every issue she has championed is also a policy her father campaigned on and pushed in office. Paid family leave, for instance, is far from a Republican rallying cry, but it is something Trump mentioned on the campaign trail and in both of his addresses to Congress. 

Last year, she invited female senators to the White House for personal huddles on the issue.

“She spent an hour meeting with me, going over the studies, making the case,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said. “She had a couple of staffers, but she really ran the discussion. I was impressed with how smart she was and how informed she was and how passionate she was about a cause that is not closely associated with Republican leaders. I just really liked her, right off the bat.” 

The president himself has exacerbated the tensions between his chief of staff and his family. He has mused to Kelly that he thinks Ivanka and her husband should perhaps return to New York, where they would be protected from the blood sport of Washington and less of a target for negative media attention, White House officials said. In the president’s eyes, “Ivanka’s still his little girl,” as one confidant put it.

But Trump has at other times urged Ivanka and Kushner to remain in Washington, telling them he relies on their counsel in the West Wing. Others say he values her singular role as an ambassador for both his presidency and the family brand.

“Everybody loves and respects Ivanka,” the president said in a statement. “She works very hard and always gets the job done in a first class manner. She was crucial to our success in achieving historic tax cuts and reforms and served as my envoy in South Korea, where she was incredibly well received. Her work on behalf of American families has made a real impact.”

Ivanka’s last name creates an aura of invincibility around her within the White House. In private, some aides criticize and share unflattering details about her — and, more acutely, Kushner — but are loathe to do so publicly and risk the president’s wrath. 

Ivanka and Kushner have become known simply as “Javanka,” a nickname that they view as disparaging and that they speculate was coined in the early stage of the presidency by rivals, such as then-chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, to undermine them. Ivanka resents that she and her husband are seen as a single unit, in part because their work portfolios are different. (Kushner’s declared portfolio includes brokering Middle East peace, the U.S. relationship with Mexico and domestic prison restructuring.)

Ivanka’s desire for individuality comes as Kushner is ensnared in the wide-ranging Russia investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and as his mixing of his family’s real estate business and his government work draws public scrutiny.

Last month, Kelly instituted a new policy on security clearances that effectively stripped Kushner of his access to the nation’s top secrets. The downgrade was a public embarrassment for the presidential son-in-law and was widely interpreted as a power play by Kelly, who other White House officials say has clashed with Kushner on several fronts. Ivanka’s security clearance status is unclear.

Some close to her say Ivanka remains miffed at Kelly’s frustrations with her. Though she and her father speak multiple times a day — sometimes in unscheduled calls when the president spontaneously dials her — she says she honors Kelly’s demand that she inform him and other officials about any policy-related discussions the two have.

Kelly declined to be interviewed about his relationship with the president’s daughter, but emailed a statement through a spokesman: “Ivanka is a great asset to this Administration and has done a terrific job helping to advance the president’s agenda including the passage of historic tax reform and most recently led a tremendously successful trip to the Olympics in South Korea.”

Addressing the tensions between her and her husband and Kelly, Ivanka said, “One of the first things he said is, ‘You are family. You are part of the reason the president is here.’ He understands the role of family. He is a very family-oriented person and made it clear he doesn’t want to get in the way of that. But he also needs to make sure that in our role as advisers, we go through the process, and we respect that and have embraced that.”

Almost as soon as Ivanka arrived in Washington, she began reaching out to lawmakers from both parties, visiting them in their Capitol Hill offices and hosting small private salons at her and Kushner’s Kalorama home. Some of her West Wing colleagues were initially uncomfortable with her unofficial role as a Trump interlocutor, but under Kelly’s watch, they say, she has been more diligent about coordinating with the White House Office of Legislative Affairs and other teams. 

“The fact that she has her own relationships with members on the Hill enables us to accomplish more, and anytime she’s engaging in conversations, she’s checking in with us on how she can be helpful and getting our advice on what we need,” said Marc Short, White House director of legislative affairs. “She would say, ‘I’m intending to go have a meeting today but I want to make sure your office is comfortable with it and what are the White House priorities I can help with.’ ” 

Ivanka, however, has at times struggled to navigate her twin roles as family and staff. Most recently, a high-profile gaffe came during the NBC interview in PyeongChang, where she bristled at Alexander’s question about whether she believes her father’s accusers.

“I think it’s a pretty inappropriate question to ask a daughter if she believes the accusers of her father, when he’s affirmatively stated there’s no truth to that,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a question you would ask many other daughters.” 

But Ivanka did proceed to answer the question: “I believe my father, I know my father. I think I have that right as a daughter.”

(Ivanka declined to address the accusations against her father on the record in her interviews with The Post.)

This was not the only uncomfortable subject of the NBC interview, which aides said Ivanka knew going in would likely be less friendly than the soft sit-downs she was accustomed to with Fox News. Alexander also asked Ivanka to weigh in on Mueller’s probe of possible Russian collusion (she defended the Trump campaign), as well as on the president’s proposal to arm some schoolteachers (she demurred).

Occupying two roles has opened her up to sharp criticism. Democrats, as well as some mainstream Republicans, had expected her to exert a moderating influence on her father. Ivanka has disappointed them by failing to halt some hard-line policies, like the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, or by not publicly standing up to what they see as racist, sexist and anti-Semitic remarks and actions by the president.

Ivanka also has come under sustained criticism for her eponymous fashion line, which she still controls and which relies exclusively on foreign factories in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, where low-wage laborers — many of them women and children — have limited ability to advocate for themselves. Many critics see such practices as deeply hypocritical given her father’s railing against outsourcing and her stated interest in advancing the rights of working women.

Ivanka argues her critics hold her to an unfair standard, and fundamentally misunderstand the way any White House works when they expect her to publicly contradict an administration policy. She does not see herself as a talking head and refuses to promote policies with which she personally disagrees; for instance, she was notably silent on last year’s Republican health-care plan, and has said little recently about her father’s guns agenda.

“When people say, ‘Where is Ivanka and why is she silent on X, Y, Z?,’ they don’t understand how any White House works,” Ivanka said. “No West Wing staffer should tweet things that are inconsistent with the policy of the White House.”

Rather, Ivanka says she tries to use her voice to amplify the issues she most cares about — such as workforce development, infrastructure and women’s entrepreneurship in the months ahead.

“Let’s face it, when someone is the daughter of a president, people know that and it elevates her ability to be effective,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said. “But she also is well prepared, and so the double role that she plays also accrues to her benefit.”

In some television appearances, Ivanka seems to present a simulacrum of herself — a for-public-consumption version that is at once both poised and guarded, complete with a breathy, unplaceable accent. In private, her voice sounds an octave deeper. She can be by turns lighthearted and defiant, down-to-earth and supremely confident. And like both her husband and her father, Ivanka sprinkles her conversation with the occasional curse word.

On a small table in her well-appointed office sit several pictures of her kids, a framed copy of Trump’s typed “Remarks Regarding the Capitol of Israel” — signed “To Ivanka, Love Dad” in the president’s oversized Sharpie scribble — and the lyrics to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” handwritten to her by one of the songwriters. Unlike in the rest of the West Wing, including in the president’s private study, no big-screen televisions blare; she said she has little patience for cable news. 

Ivanka has privately said she was naive when she first came to Washington. She was unprepared for the palace infighting that has so shaped the White House power dynamics. It was not until the hiring of White House spokesman Josh Raffel last April that she and Kushner aggressively moved to protect their reputations.

She also has lamented to friends that she is sometimes “weaponized” — unwittingly invoked by other officials as a high-profile surrogate for their personal grievances, knowing that if Ivanka is said to be frustrated about something, it is likely to get draw more attention. 

On tax legislation, Ivanka made especially good use of her skill set, administration officials and lawmakers said. She could speak confidently and in depth about the issue and became the administration’s point person for some skeptical lawmakers.

The South Korea trip leading the presidential delegation for the Olympic closing ceremony in late February was another proving ground for Ivanka. But her role was not merely that of a goodwill ambassador. With PyeongChang roughly 40 miles from the North Korean border, her trip was weighted with diplomatic import.

Ivanka came bearing a private national security message from her father to Moon. And for the ceremony, she sat in the same VIP box as North Korean general Kim Yong Chol, who is believed to be responsible for, among other acts, a torpedo that killed 46 South Korean sailors in 2010. 

“This was not an uncomplicated situation — a balance of reaffirming and creating good will, within the eyes of the South Korean public, being happy, celebrating America, but also being inches away from a man who’s killed many people,” Ivanka said.

Ivanka said she was determined to forge a warm rapport with Moon, a progressive who has a somewhat cool relationship with her father. When South Korea’s first couple hosted the traveling Americans for a dinner of bibimbap with marinated tofu at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, Ivanka knew from her research how to strike up a conversation with first lady Kim Jung-sook. They chatted about their shared interest in K-pop, a distinct musical style originating on the peninsula.

“She 100 percent carried the conversation of the dinner,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a member of the visiting U.S. delegation. “She and Moon instantly had a good connection and she and the first lady had really good chemistry.”

National security adviser H.R. McMaster said in a statement, “Ivanka ably represented our country and advanced our diplomatic goals in the region.”

Even abroad, though, her special status as presidential daughter followed her like so much glistening snow. One morning, she attended the men’s snowboard big air final to cheer on the American athletes.

But as the snowboarders flipped in the air, performing gravity-defying tricks, many of the cameras were instead facing the stands, trained squarely on the willowy blonde in the red ski suit and Team USA beanie. 

Amid all the action, there was Ivanka. 

I like how Dumpy says, "everyone loves Ivanka". Um, no. Just no.

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49 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Ivanka resents that she and her husband are seen as a single unit, in part because their work portfolios are different.

Nope. Both of you are focused on raising your profiles and reputations as "effective negotiators"(bureaucrats) so you can climb the governmental ladder and make money.

Re-naming her Daddy's Fantasy Barbie.

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Because she's so eminently qualified.

South Korean minister to meet Ivanka after Tillerson was fired

Quote

Ivanka Trump will meet with South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha when she visits the U.S. following the abrupt ousting of secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Foreign Ministry Spokesman Noh Kyu-duk confirmed Thursday that Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser, would meet with Kang, KBS World Radio reported.

The purpose and exact date of the meeting are not yet clear.

Kang is also expected to meet with deputy secretary of State John Sullivan and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) during her visit.

It was previously reported that Kang would meet with Tillerson to discuss talks with North Korea, among other issues, but Tillerson was ousted earlier this week from his role.

Trump said earlier this week he made the decision to oust Tillerson on his own and that Tillerson would be "much happier now."

Trump replaced Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo. Trump said he and Pompeo are "always on the same wavelength."

 

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More of the Kushner's crooked dealings. 

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"Kushner Companies confirms meeting with Qatar on financing"

Spoiler

Jared Kushner’s father met with Qatar’s finance minister three months after President Trump’s inauguration, a New York City session at which funding for a financially troubled real estate project was discussed, the company acknowledged Sunday.

However, Charles Kushner said he turned down possible funding to avoid questions of a conflict of interest for his son, who had run the family company until he became Trump’s senior adviser. The elder Kushner said that the Qataris had asked for the meeting, and that he told them he couldn’t accept sovereign funds.

“I was invited to a meeting,” he said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Before the meeting, Kushner Companies had decided that it was not going to accept sovereign wealth fund investments. We informed the Qatar representatives of our decision and they agreed. Even if they were there ready to wire the money, we would not have taken it.”

The company said Kushner agreed to the meeting as a courtesy.

A spokesman for the Qatari Embassy in Washington said his government had no comment.

Kushner told The Post in a January interview that he would have refused the money if it been offered, but the comment was not on the record, and he did not disclose that he had met with the Qataris after the inauguration. Kushner put the comment on the record Sunday and added details about the circumstances of the meeting.

The April 2017 meeting at the St. Regis Hotel between the top Qatari official and Charles Kushner came as Jared Kushner was deeply immersed in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, a central part of his portfolio as a top aide to the president.

One of his top priorities at the time was preparing for Trump’s maiden overseas trip, to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe in late May, and in developing a new peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians. While in Riyadh, Trump forged a close bond with Saudi King Salman, while Jared Kushner solidified his relationship with Salman’s son and heir apparent, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Days after the summit, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, with Trump’s public support, revived their long-standing charges that Qatar was funding international terrorism, broke relations with the neighboring country and instituted an economic boycott.

The meeting between Charles Kushner and Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif al-Emadi was reported earlier this month by the online publication the Intercept. It said the meeting had been requested by Kushner. At the time, Kushner Companies said in response that “we did not meet with anyone from the Qatari Government to solicit sovereign funds for any of our projects. To suggest otherwise, is inaccurate and false.”

The statement did not address whether a meeting took place, however, and the company declined to respond to follow-up questions at the time. Kushner’s statement to The Post marks the first time he has confirmed the meeting took place.

Jared Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, had relinquished control of his family’s real estate business upon joining the administration. That left his father to continue the search for financing for a major project considered an important part of the company’s health.

In an interview with Bloomberg Television during his April visit, Emadi said investments by his country’s sovereign wealth fund were “purely commercial driven . . . we go where we think we’re going to have value. We like what we see here” in the United States, he said.

Kushner Companies’ need for a cash infusion stemmed from Jared Kushner’s decision in 2007 to sell off many of its New Jersey apartments to buy the nation’s most expensive building, a 41-story tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Shortly after the purchase for $1.8 billion, the real estate market crashed, and Kushner refinanced the property, leaving the company with a $1.2 billion loan that comes due in early 2019.

With the building losing money, Kushner and his company came up with a plan to redevelop the tower and double its size. That required significant amounts of cash. Kushner looked at potential sources around the world, and Qatar emerged as one of the leading candidates.

The Kushners had earlier sought money from Qatar, working from 2014 until at least 2016 to obtain funding from a private investment fund run by Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, a wealthy former prime minister.

A tentative deal for $500 million fell through because Qatar sought to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest after Jared Kushner was named senior White House adviser, according to Tom Barrack, a Trump friend who had suggested Hamad look at investing with the Kushners.

Others have said that Hamad pulled out because his funding was contingent on separate financing with the Chinese insurance fund Anbang, which fell through.

Barrack told The Post that Charles Kushner was “crushed” when the deal fell through.

 

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36 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Kushner Companies confirms meeting with Qatar on financing"

  Reveal hidden contents

Jared Kushner’s father met with Qatar’s finance minister three months after President Trump’s inauguration, a New York City session at which funding for a financially troubled real estate project was discussed, the company acknowledged Sunday.

However, Charles Kushner said he turned down possible funding to avoid questions of a conflict of interest for his son, who had run the family company until he became Trump’s senior adviser. The elder Kushner said that the Qataris had asked for the meeting, and that he told them he couldn’t accept sovereign funds.

“I was invited to a meeting,” he said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Before the meeting, Kushner Companies had decided that it was not going to accept sovereign wealth fund investments. We informed the Qatar representatives of our decision and they agreed. Even if they were there ready to wire the money, we would not have taken it.”

The company said Kushner agreed to the meeting as a courtesy.

A spokesman for the Qatari Embassy in Washington said his government had no comment.

Kushner told The Post in a January interview that he would have refused the money if it been offered, but the comment was not on the record, and he did not disclose that he had met with the Qataris after the inauguration. Kushner put the comment on the record Sunday and added details about the circumstances of the meeting.

The April 2017 meeting at the St. Regis Hotel between the top Qatari official and Charles Kushner came as Jared Kushner was deeply immersed in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, a central part of his portfolio as a top aide to the president.

One of his top priorities at the time was preparing for Trump’s maiden overseas trip, to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe in late May, and in developing a new peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians. While in Riyadh, Trump forged a close bond with Saudi King Salman, while Jared Kushner solidified his relationship with Salman’s son and heir apparent, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Days after the summit, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, with Trump’s public support, revived their long-standing charges that Qatar was funding international terrorism, broke relations with the neighboring country and instituted an economic boycott.

The meeting between Charles Kushner and Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif al-Emadi was reported earlier this month by the online publication the Intercept. It said the meeting had been requested by Kushner. At the time, Kushner Companies said in response that “we did not meet with anyone from the Qatari Government to solicit sovereign funds for any of our projects. To suggest otherwise, is inaccurate and false.”

The statement did not address whether a meeting took place, however, and the company declined to respond to follow-up questions at the time. Kushner’s statement to The Post marks the first time he has confirmed the meeting took place.

Jared Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, had relinquished control of his family’s real estate business upon joining the administration. That left his father to continue the search for financing for a major project considered an important part of the company’s health.

In an interview with Bloomberg Television during his April visit, Emadi said investments by his country’s sovereign wealth fund were “purely commercial driven . . . we go where we think we’re going to have value. We like what we see here” in the United States, he said.

Kushner Companies’ need for a cash infusion stemmed from Jared Kushner’s decision in 2007 to sell off many of its New Jersey apartments to buy the nation’s most expensive building, a 41-story tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Shortly after the purchase for $1.8 billion, the real estate market crashed, and Kushner refinanced the property, leaving the company with a $1.2 billion loan that comes due in early 2019.

With the building losing money, Kushner and his company came up with a plan to redevelop the tower and double its size. That required significant amounts of cash. Kushner looked at potential sources around the world, and Qatar emerged as one of the leading candidates.

The Kushners had earlier sought money from Qatar, working from 2014 until at least 2016 to obtain funding from a private investment fund run by Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, a wealthy former prime minister.

A tentative deal for $500 million fell through because Qatar sought to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest after Jared Kushner was named senior White House adviser, according to Tom Barrack, a Trump friend who had suggested Hamad look at investing with the Kushners.

Others have said that Hamad pulled out because his funding was contingent on separate financing with the Chinese insurance fund Anbang, which fell through.

Barrack told The Post that Charles Kushner was “crushed” when the deal fell through.

 

Kushner is a slumlord in Baltimore and Westminster, Maryland. Oh how I wish our the States's Attorney for our fair state would go after him.

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This is Ivanka. Ivanka has a lab coat. Ivanka is a Science Barbie.

 

Edited by AmazonGrace
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2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

This is Ivanka. Ivanka has a lab coat. Ivanka is a Science Barbie.

 

I always thought she was Treason Barbie. The Treason Barbie  comes complete with a washing machine stuffed with 100 dollar bills, Jared on a leash, and a bag of fake passports.

ETA: The handbag is of course costs 10 grand and is made a seven year old in India who gets a whopping 50 Rupees a month. I looked it up and t hat is about 77 cents.

Edited by onekidanddone
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"Jared Kushner 'admitted Donald Trump lies to his base because he thinks they're stupid'"

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Donald Trump lied to his Republican base and thought they were so stupid they would believe it, according to Jared Kushner.

Mr Kushner, a property developer who is both President Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law, reportedly made the remarks after he was challenged about Mr Trump’s prolonged interrogation over whether Barack Obama was born in the US.

During Mr Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and throughout his presidency, multiple theories emerged falsely claiming he was not a natural-born American US citizen and it was therefore unconstitutional for him to become US President. Mr Trump was among those who pushed the “birther” conspiracy theory and consistently questioned former President Obama’s birthplace of Hawaii.

The former New York Observer editor has now claimed that Mr Kushner, the former publisher of the paper, informed her that Mr Trump did not believe the “birther” lies he was peddling.

“When I was the editor of the New York Observer, Kushner and I were going back and forth about how the paper should cover him,” Elizabeth Spiers wrote in a post on Twitter.

“I told Jared that I was particularly appalled by his father-in-law’s birtherism stance, which I viewed as cynical and racist.

“He rolled his eyes and said ‘He doesn’t really believe it, Elizabeth. He just knows Republicans are stupid and they’ll buy it’”.

Ms Spiers, who served as the editor of the publication from early 2011 to late 2012, made the alleged revelation in order to prove to a right-wing blogger that Mr Trump was a “notorious liar”.

“Let's be clear he was talking about you, Doug,” she says. “Trump did not con Democrats; he conned – and is still conning – his base. So you have every right to your gullibility and I won’t try to deprive you of it, but personally, I’d rather know what the hell is going on”.

Ms Spiers, who is also the founder of Gawker, also claimed that a friend of the mogul-turned-politico once told her Mr Trump would “lie to you about what time of day it is, just for the practice”.

But she is not the only person to argue that President Trump is a liar. It has been asserted by a number of politicians and commentators, with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders branding Mr Trump a “pathological liar”.

“What do you do when you have a President-elect, soon to be President, who – and I say this not happily but I think most people who observe him would agree – is a pathological liar who changes his mind every single day?” the Democrat, who challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, said at the end of last year.

Comedian John Oliver has also called the President a “pathological liar”. What’s more, at the beginning of the month, Quinnipiac University asked Americans for the first word which springs to mind when they think of President Trump. The answer given more times than any other was “idiot,” followed by “incompetent” and then “liar.”

 

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1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The answer given more times than any other was “idiot,” followed by “incompetent” and then “liar.”

Sociopath, racist, evil, pathological liar, racist, racist, Klan supporter, rapist, racist..... 

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"“Their Names Are Their Downfall”: After a Year in Washington, Ivanka and Jared Are Isolated on Kushner Island"

Spoiler

For Ivanka Trump, the evening of November 28 was supposed to be the culmination of nearly six months of careful planning, both political and personal. In late June, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had flown to Washington, D.C., for an official state visit with President Donald Trump that included a meet-and-greet with American C.E.O.s, a tour of the Indian-American diaspora in northern Virginia, and a wide-ranging White House conversation that touched on immigration, Pakistan, defense alliances, the changing locus of power in the Indo-Pacific region, and various pleasantries and vagaries surrounding their countries’ strategic relationship. “The two leaders will look to outline a common vision for the partnership that’s worthy of India’s 1.6 billion citizens,” noted Sean Spicer, then the White House press secretary, incorrectly inflating the country’s actual population by nearly 300 million people. Trump and Modi’s meeting was consummated by a gropy man hug. And, as if to further seal their union, before he had even returned to New Delhi, Modi invited Ivanka Trump, 36, to speak at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Hyderabad that winter.

Modi, it seemed, was following an emerging playbook for dealing with the Trump administration. Given the nearly indecipherable actor occupying the West Wing, various foreign dignitaries—German chancellor Angela Merkel, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe—have demonstrated their support for the United States government not only by meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower, or humoring his affinity for large-scale billboard imagery of himself, but also through lavish displays of flattery directed at his favorite child, who also happens to be among his top advisers. The Hyderabad invitation would be Ivanka Trump’s third solo trip abroad on behalf of the administration since she officially took a governmental position as a special assistant to her dad, last March, one year ago. “The sun rises and sets with Ivanka,” one person close to the White House told me recently. “These guys saw it clear as day, and whether they thought it would help them better understand the guy, or get them in good with him, they were right.”

The Global Entrepreneurship Summit did not disappoint. After landing at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at three o’clock in the morning, Ivanka was ushered to her hotel by a phalanx of 17 vehicles, 10,000 members of the police, and representatives of various local media outlets, some of whom dubbed the trip a “royal visit.” Hyderabad, sometimes labeled “Cyberabad” for the specific area of the city where various technology companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) have set up offices, had spruced itself up for her 36-hour swirl: potholes were filled; roads were repaved. Ivanka’s likeness adorned billboards throughout the city. Authorities brought in closed-circuit security cameras and sniffer dogs; schools were shut down owing to the exacerbated traffic congestion. Workers placed welcoming swan statues beside roadways that the First Daughter might traverse. Hundreds of people stopped by a local market to pose for selfies next to an Ivanka mannequin.

Trump emerged from the 18-hour flight and subsequent car transport ready for the occasion. She wore hair extensions in a Drybar-style loose wave; her traveling makeup artist seemed to have amply applied highlighter on her cheekbones upon touchdown. She also made a post-flight wardrobe change into a $1,298 velvet Tory Burch jacket adorned with mother-of-pearl sequins, embroidery, and beads, in the style of traditional Indian prints. It was a sartorial nod to Hyderabad, which had historically been known as “the city of pearls.”

The summit’s theme, “Women First, Prosperity for All,” dovetailed with the narrow agenda of women’s issues that Trump had carved out for herself, first on the campaign trail and then in the administration. Her keynote speech touted a commitment to female entrepreneurs, like herself. “After my father’s election, I saw an opportunity to leave my businesses for the privilege of serving our country and empowering all Americans, including women, to succeed,” she said. “Our administration is advancing policies that enable women to pursue their careers and care for their families, policies that improve workforce development and skills training, and policies that lift government barriers and fuel entrepreneurship so that Americans can turn their dreams into their incredible legacies.” Prime Minister Modi called the event “wonderful.” And the Indian media mostly ate it up, too. One local fashion critic referred to Trump, favorably, as an “Indian Barbie doll.”

Back in the U.S., however, Trump was critiqued for her sartorial assimilation. (DailyO, an Indian opinion Web site, referred to her as a “botoxed Barbie.”) The most stinging rebuke came from a New York Times article about Trump’s decision to wear clothes made for the most part by American designers. In the piece, published the day after her departure from India, a spokesperson for Tory Burch pointed out that the brand did not work with Ivanka Trump at all. Privately, according to three people familiar with the situation, Burch had also made comments about Ivanka’s decision to wear her brand in such a public setting. (According to a spokesperson, Burch was not involved in the public comment in the Times piece.)

Much as Trump relishes her role in the White House, she still very much keeps close tabs on the group of friends that she left behind in Manhattan, which includes various moguls, heirs, power divorcées, business leaders, and fashion designers. And, as can happen in the relatively insular world of New York society, Burch’s alleged comments made their way to Trump soon after she returned to Washington, D.C.

Given the various headaches and distractions concurrently facing the Trump administration—staff upheaval, the mounting Robert Mueller investigation, another looming government shutdown, botched Obamacare-repeal efforts—the alleged Burch comments could have been disregarded as a trivial affair. But, like her father, Ivanka Trump can be sensitive about criticism, particularly of the trivial variety. She did not forget the remarks, and it got to the point where a White House official spoke about the situation with Burch, according to people close to Ivanka, who were perplexed that she cared deeply about something that no one in her position ought to care about. “These are some of the most powerful people in the world, I mean literally,” one person who knows both Ivanka and Burch told me. “And this warranted any kind of attention? You’ve got to be kidding.” (A White House official said that Ivanka wasn’t aware of the outreach until after it took place.)

For a decade since she joined the Trump Organization and began appearing on The Apprentice, Ivanka Trump has largely portrayed herself as a more palatable simulacrum of her father. It’s a role that she has tried to perfect in the White House. In public, both on trips abroad and while appearing on Fox News, or while addressing a town hall on an issue within her portfolio, Trump comes across as articulate and thoughtful. Friends describe the private Ivanka as surprisingly normal: someone who likes to gossip and swears like a sailor. But she is also susceptible to many of the weaknesses that characterize her father: Ivanka is an unabashed striver and politicker, with a preternatural talent for self-promotion and a deep conviction that many rules don’t apply to her.

For Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, her husband and fellow White House adviser, the decision to uproot their comfortable New York lives to enter the unknown of Donald Trump’s administration was always about business—about the understanding that connections forged in the swamp could benefit careers upon return to the private sector. In some ways, after all, it was a continuation of how they had both always lived their lives, leveraging their parents’ successes to further their own opportunities. “They’re used to a lot of things coming easy,” one friend noted. “It’s not that they didn’t work hard, or that they weren’t smart. But their last names have always been their thing.”

One year later, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. As Ivanka begins her second official year in D.C., she can point to successes such as her role in the administration’s tax-reform bill, her work to expand the child-care tax credit, an increasingly fat Rolodex of world leaders, and the various bipartisan dinners that she and Kushner have hosted at their Kalorama home. (According to one friend, the couple decided to host the dinners after they realized how few lawmakers in D.C. lived in actual homes.)

But these accomplishments have been subsumed by the administration’s manifold quagmires: the botched Muslim ban, Charlottesville, Twitter insults, petty nicknames, West Wing infighting, the Russia investigation. Ivanka’s integrity as a champion for women’s issues, meanwhile, has been diminished amid her father’s dismissal of his various sexual-assault accusers, alleged payoffs to a porn star and a Playmate, and his decision to stick up for a staffer who allegedly abused his former wives rather than to express sympathy for his accusers. In late February, Ivanka Trump attempted to castigate an interviewer for asking about her father’s alleged sexual transgressions under the guise that it was “inappropriate” to ask a daughter such things. Left unsaid, however, was the unavoidable point: while Trump often seems to outrun his own bad press—even his most appalling debacles—his daughter does not possess the same immunity. Many of the rules do apply to her. As a former friend put it to me, “Now their names are kind of their downfall.”

Trump and Kushner’s descent into Washington has proved far more chilling than even many of their critics anticipated. In fact, even some of their most committed supporters appear to be taking a step back. In the fall of 2017, Josh Kushner, Jared’s younger brother, was in touch with The Charlie Rose Show. Throughout the campaign, many in the media speculated about what Josh, a venture capitalist who runs Oscar, a health-care company predicated on the Affordable Care Act, might think of the fact that his brother was working in an administration that intended to dismantle Obamacare. Now Josh seemed ready to answer the question. According to people familiar with his thinking, Josh Kushner was set to sit down with Rose to come out as a Democrat (the Kushner family has long supported liberal candidates), an implicit step back from the values perpetuated by the Trump administration, which included his brother and sister-in-law. In November, however, Rose was fired after several women came forward alleging sexual harassment and workplace misconduct. Josh Kushner’s sit-down had yet to be taped.

Last April, barely a month into her job, I met Ivanka Trump in a room at the Hotel InterContinental in Berlin. I was traveling among the pool of reporters on hand to cover her first trip abroad as part of the new administration—a panel appearance with Angela Merkel; Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund; and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands. It was Trump’s initial foray into international relations, and she seemed undaunted by the challenge. In a floral print Michael Kors dress and Ivanka Trump pumps, she poured herself some hot water and lamented her inability to sleep on the overnight flight. She apologized for her voice, which was hoarse. “I definitely sound more sultry,” she said, though her public voice is typically already a whisper. Having not slept much myself, I joked that she might be able to use her sotto voce to start some sort of side hustle. “You mean as a phone-sex operator,” she deadpanned.

That is what I intimated but would not have fully articulated to a First Daughter or White House official. She gamely did it for me. It was the sort of disarming rejoinder her father could have made. “That’s who she is,” the long-standing friend of Trump’s told me when I recalled the story, adding that she is largely funnier and less self-serious than most people assume.

It’s a generally unobserved point because, in part, Trump is so intently focused on her professional life. Like her father, Ivanka prefers to work with her own people, to play her own game, no matter the protocol. Soon after the couple arrived in the West Wing, Kushner would FaceTime with old friends to effectively recruit them to work in the administration. (One friend repeatedly reminded him that FaceTime was not the most secure form of communication.) They were successful in recruiting Reed Cordish, a Baltimore real-estate heir who was introduced to his wife by Ivanka, to join as an assistant to the president focused on infrastructure. The couple also brought on Josh Raffel—who years earlier had performed public-relations services alongside Hope Hicks for the companies of both Ivanka and Jared—to do their West Wing media bidding. (Both Raffel and Hicks announced in late February that they would be stepping down from their jobs.) Ivanka hired Dina Powell away from Goldman Sachs. (She resigned at the end of the year and recently announced she was returning to the investment bank.) In doing so, they effectively set up their own faction within the West Wing—a kids’-table foil to the adult day-care center run by Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and now John Kelly, among others, who, unsurprisingly, viewed them as a nuisance, if not a threat.

Washington is, by nature, a transactional place. But at times Trump’s and Kushner’s political impulses have seemed aimed more at their New York constituency than at the administration. Colleagues in the West Wing told me they were “furious” that the duo attended the annual Allen & Company media mixer in Sun Valley, where they hung out with James Murdoch and some of their Manhattan circle. The decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem was greeted with protests around the globe, but Kushner’s role in the process was cheered in certain precincts of the northeastern Modern Orthodox community. “The guy was a hero,” one person who attended the White House Hanukkah party, shortly after the decision, told me. “There were a lot of handshakes and pats on the back.” Ivanka invited some of her childhood friends and New York social pals to a separate White House holiday party, and they took a tour of the residence alongside the First Daughter, who was stopped at every turn by revelers looking for a selfie with her.

But other friends were turning away. Shortly before the Tory Burch incident, Trump and Kushner’s friends openly talked about why the couple’s names had not appeared on the final guest list for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Halloween party, co-hosted by Wendi Murdoch, a close friend. (Murdoch declined to comment.) The couple also appeared to turn insular. During the heat of Trump’s campaign, in August 2016, they decamped to the Adriatic with Wendi Murdoch aboard billionaire businessman David Geffen’s yacht. This past summer, they took a Trump Organization helicopter to Vermont for a two-day vacation. For Ivanka’s 36th birthday, in October, Jared threw a surprise dinner at the Trump Hotel in Washington attended largely by members of their immediate family and the Trump administration. “We wanted to protect them,” the old New York friend told me recently, as I’ve previously reported, referring to his admonitions to the couple before they left for D.C. “But you can’t protect people when they’re voluntarily sticking their head into the fucking guillotine.”

In truth, friends and acquaintances were already pulling back from the couple during the campaign. What was the upside of getting entangled in all the talk about Mexicans’ being rapists and the boasting about grabbing people by their genitals? Some members of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, on East 85th Street, started a petition to stop Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, who had overseen Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism, from giving a blessing before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, over the summer of 2016. (“The whole matter turned from rabbinic to political, something which was never intended,” he wrote in an e-mail to members of his community. “Politics divides people.”)

Many of the community members and friends who initially distanced themselves from the couple assumed it would be temporary; Trump wasn’t going to win the election, and soon enough they could forget that the campaign ever happened. It played out differently, of course. Temporary fractures became more permanent. In an interview with Forbes, Kushner announced his own purge of people who had dropped the couple over their politics, a process he deemed “exfoliation.” Ivanka dealt with the slights in her own way—strategically sticking to issues that dovetailed with her women-focused lifestyle brand, so that the stench of the rest of the campaign wouldn’t cling to her after the election, and tuning out all the noise in the meantime. “She has a high conviction in what she’s going to try to achieve while she’s there, and an understanding that this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” the long-standing friend of Ivanka’s recently told me. “If she can move any needle, all the other stuff falls to the wayside.”

For a brief moment, that seemed plausible. After the Trumps’ unlikely tax-reform victory, a person close to Ivanka Trump told me that she was fully emboldened. She and Jared headed to Mar-a-Lago during Christmas, feeling a renewed sense of opportunity and perhaps also relief that they had put a recent series of scandals, such as the Roy Moore fiasco, behind them. But the enthusiasm was short-lived. In early January, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury portrayed Trump as a quasi-senile Falstaff overseeing a court in open revolt. Then came renewed West Wing tensions, the Stormy Daniels controversy, Karen McDougal, Trump’s comments about arming teachers, and the decision by Rick Gates, his former campaign and transition aide, to cooperate with Robert Mueller.

For someone whose name has always been her thing, there was only one direction to pivot: home. Initially, after Charlottesville, many friends expected that Trump and Kushner would pack up and return to New York before the 2017 school year. By the fall, an idea was floated within their circle that Ivanka might soon return for an honorary job at the U.N. and Jared could assume a position on the re-election committee—a theory that was reinforced when Ivanka expressed pleasure at what they had already accomplished and Kushner ally Brad Parscale took a job on Trump’s re-election campaign. (Kushner also has urgent business to attend to. His family business is facing increasing pressure regarding 666 Fifth Avenue, its over-leveraged asset, whose $1.2 billion mortgage comes due next year.) Now the current bet is that the Trump-Kushners will stay through May or June, until school wraps up, if they can make it that far. “What are they coming home to here?” the old friend told me recently. “A bunch of people who haven’t exactly been counting down the seconds since they’ve been gone.”

Of all Ivanka Trump’s similarities to her father, perhaps the most evident is the effect of her childhood on her current disposition. Donald Trump, who grew up in Queens and attended military school, endeavored to make his name in Manhattan and has displayed an affinity for men in uniform. Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, has long shown the scars inflicted during her parents’ divorce. “Even before the divorce, Donald did nothing for the kids,” one old friend of Ivana and Donald Trump told me recently. “When they were on vacations or on summer break, he had a habit of disappearing in the morning and not coming back until night.” Another longtime associate of the family told me that he would often lament Donald Trump’s parenting to his face. “I would say, ‘Donald, would you even know if your kids were in Europe?’ And he wouldn’t, because he didn’t [know] when they were.”

Ivanka Trump’s childhood was one of lonely privilege. “Her parents essentially had very little to do with her,” one classmate from Choate Rosemary Hall told me, referring to her as a fancy “latchkey” kid. Another Choate classmate remembered that when she would stay with Ivanka in New York on weekends away from school, there was a tremendous amount of love and affection between her and the family’s nannies, the housekeepers, the elevator attendants, and her maternal grandmother. I asked if that extended to her relationship with her parents, and the classmate told me, “It was just a very different kind of love.”

In an interview with Britain’s Mail on Sunday in 2000, a 19-year-old Ivanka revealed her own adolescent fears about marriage. “I never, ever want to get divorced,” she said. “I think I’m quite good at judging what people are like, and I could never be with someone whose motives I was constantly questioning. And I certainly couldn’t stand worrying about whether he’d run off with the first blonde who came along once I got my first wrinkle.”

It’s hard to square Ivanka Trump’s insecurity with her defense of her father, given his alleged improprieties. But after covering Ivanka Trump for two years, I believe one explanation is that, like her father, she is, at her core, self-preserving. And in Kushner, Trump may have found the stability she craved. She certainly worked for it. The Kushners, who are practicing Orthodox Jews, struggled with the fact that Ivanka was not Jewish, and a year after the couple started dating, they broke up. They tell friends that it wasn’t over the religion issue, though Ivana Trump wrote in her memoir that her daughter had told her otherwise. Eventually, they re-united and Ivanka agreed to convert to Judaism under the supervision of Jared’s father, Charles Kushner. With Rabbi Lookstein, whose shul is Modern Orthodox, she studied the Torah, agreeing to observe Shabbos with Kushner’s family and committing to learn Jewish laws and traditions. “She’s such a perfectionist and takes everything, and herself, very seriously,” a former close associate told me. “So when she says she’s converting, she will read every book and learn every recipe and start participating with his family to do all the holidays.” She was reportedly gifted a Swarovski crystal-encrusted leopard-print mezuzah in celebration.

Ivanka has undoubtedly spent years protecting and defending her father publicly, but privately it is Kushner she sticks up for, even to her father directly. One campaign official recently recalled a moment from the campaign when Ivanka burst into her father’s office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower to advocate for her husband. “I need to talk to you,” this person recalled her saying. “You don’t give Jared the support he needs. He’s left his business to be a part of this. You have no idea what he’s sacrificing to be here and how hard he is working for you.” Then it became personal: Ivanka told her father that his lack of appreciation hurt her and, notably, hurt her relationship with her husband. According to this campaign official, the elder Trump caved immediately. “All right, all right, all right,” this person recalled him saying. “What does he want?”

Kushner may have provided Ivanka Trump with emotional security, but his family also offers another form of protection. Very few people have a real sense of how much Donald Trump is actually worth, an enigma reinforced by his refusal to release his tax returns. But long before he ran a presidential campaign, he ran a business into the ground a few times, reportedly borrowing $20 million from his family in order to avoid personal bankruptcy. (Trump has denied borrowing from his family.) His companies have declared bankruptcy four times. Ivanka grew up between a gilded triplex in Trump Tower and a 118-room waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, but, as one old friend of Ivanka’s described those places to me, “they’re like living in very fancy corporate housing.”

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump enjoy lavish lifestyles, to be sure. But their lives are less public and extravagant, with weekends in upstate New York or Westchester, and vacations hunting in the Canadian bush. Ivanka and Jared live on Park Avenue, go out most nights, and vacation in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. The younger Trumps are rich, certainly, but they are not the Kushners. When the latest version of the couple’s ethics disclosure was made public over the summer, it showed that they reported as much as $212 million in income since the beginning of 2016, with only about $12.6 million coming in from Ivanka, and the rest from Kushner. Their combined net worth was estimated at as much as $761 million, according to the filing, with the bulk of that coming from his holdings.

Josh Kushner’s crisis of conscience may presage the events of Ivanka’s next year in D.C. As Mueller’s investigation narrows in on Trump’s closest advisers, and closes in on answers to key questions—Was there collusion with Kremlin agents? Was there obstruction of justice?—the West Wing may soon become a zero-sum environment pitting colleagues and, perhaps, even family members against one another.

According to one longtime friend of the president, as I have previously reported, if it came down to Donald Trump saving himself or defending his son-in-law, there would be no hesitation. “If you think he’s going to tie himself to the kid, you don’t know anything,” this person said. “If it’s going to cost him his legacy, not a chance.” According to one former Trump adviser, the president is keeping Kushner around, in part, because he fears letting him out of his sight—particularly if he gets indicted. Which invites the question: If Ivanka Trump had to choose between her husband and her father, what would she do?

Global summits, ill-fated Instagram posts, sartorial mishaps, and the child tax credit: a detailed chronology of Ivanka Trump’s year in Washington:

  • JANUARY 29, 2017: Ivanka posts a photo of herself in a metallic one-shoulder gown, and her husband in a tuxedo, with his hand placed on her behind, before they attended a black-tie dinner in D.C.—the weekend her father’s so-called Muslim ban went into effect.
  • FEBRUARY 2, 2017: After months of a customer-boycott campaign and poor sales, Nordstrom announces it will drop Ivanka Trump’s eponymous brand.
  • MARCH 29, 2017: The White House officially names Ivanka an adviser to the president, with her father saying in a statement that the administration was “pleased that Ivanka Trump has chosen to take this step in her unprecedented role as First Daughter.”
  • APRIL 25, 2017: Ivanka sits on a panel with German chancellor Angela Merkel at the W20 Summit in Berlin, where she is met with groans from the audience.
  • MAY 2, 2017: Her second book, Women Who Work, is released to universal pans and unimpressive sales.
  • MAY 20, 2017: Ivanka joins her father on his 10-day trip abroad, greeting the Saudi royal family, privately praying at the Western Wall, in Jerusalem, and meeting the Pope in Rome.
  • JULY 8, 2017: Ivanka’s decision to temporarily fill her father’s seat onstage at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, alongside world leaders, is derided as a sign that the Trumps are turning America into a banana republic.
  • AUGUST 16, 2017: After the violence in Charlottesville, Jared and Ivanka fly off in a Trump Organization helicopter for a two-day golfing getaway in Vermont.
  • NOVEMBER 3, 2017: During a trip to Tokyo, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe calls Ivanka “one of the most remarkable people in the world.”
  • NOVEMBER 15, 2017: Weeks before her father endorses Roy Moore in the Alabama special election, Ivanka tells the Associated Press that “there’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children.”
  • NOVEMBER 28, 2017: She arrives in Hyderabad, India, at the prime minister’s invitation, for a women’s entrepreneurship summit—a whirlwind trip local media dub “a royal visit.”
  • DECEMBER 20, 2017: Congress passes tax-reform legislation that includes an expanded child-care tax credit that Ivanka lobbied for.
  • FEBRUARY 26, 2018: In a televised interview following her trip to the Olympics, Ivanka tells NBC’s Peter Alexander that it’s “inappropriate” for him to ask her about the sexual-abuse allegations against her father.

 

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This is Jared. Jared works in the White House. Jared has shady loans. Jared's loans are investigated by the White House.  Happy Tuesday, Jared. How is the Middle East doing, Jared?

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

"Ivanka Trump is featured on the cover of a punk band’s new ‘Complicit’ album"

Spoiler

Ivanka Trump received a truckload of derision when the president’s daughter announced in an October 2017 book she had gone through a “punk phase in the nineties.” The idea of a billionaire heiress embracing a musical genre celebrating anti-authoritarianism and outsiders sparked disbelief and head-scratching.

But this week Trump definitely earned some punk rock attention, if not as a fan then as the target of an iconic punk band.

Gang of Four, the British four-piece who changed the direction of post-punk rock with their razor wire guitars and funky bass lines in the 1980s, announced this week they’ll be releasing a new EP on April 20. It’s the band’s first new music since 2015. The mini-album is titled “Complicit,” Pitchfork reports.

If the title alone is not a clear indication Gang of Four are commenting on the current state of American politics, the cover art leaves little question: a picture of Ivanka Trump standing before American flags.

“When we think of ‘the media,’ everyone has lots of ideas about what we mean,” the band’s frontman Andy Gill said in a statement to Pitchfork.

“It could be social media, where hundreds of memes crisscross the world; informing, misinforming, beginning or reinforcing ideas that may last a lifetime and beyond,” he said. “Ideas about Jews, Muslims, or, say, the World Trade Center or perhaps, the criminality of certain American politicians. And then there is the receding traditional media with disappearing jobs like ‘journalists’ and ‘fact checkers.’ That’s the media the Trump family despise.”

The second song on the EP also draws inspiration from the White House: “Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have).”

The lead track from the album, called “Lucky” has already been released. In line with Gang of Four’s long tradition of blasting capitalistic society, the lyrics were inspired by the stock market.

“I’d been watching a serious debate on one of those financial news channels — six white men in suits arguing about the stock markets — and it set me thinking about how limited luck can be,” Gill said in a statement to Consequence of Sound.

Last April, CBS’s Gayle King, asked Trump whether she and her husband Jared Kushner were “complicit in what is happening to the White House.”

“If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit,” Trump responded. “I don’t know what it means to be — complicit — but — but, you know, I hope time will prove that I have — done a good job and much more importantly, that my father’s administration is the success that I know it will be.”

The response was widely mocked. Saturday Night Live ran a clip featuring Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump pitching an elegant new fragrance — Complicit.

According to Merriam-Webster, the dictionary — which defines the word as “helping to commit a crime or do wrong in some way” — saw visits online for “complicit” spike 11,000 percent after Trump’s CBS sit-down.

... < Merriam-Webster tweet about the definition of complicit >

The word itself then became a shorthand for talking about normalizing the president’s policies and behaviors. “I will not be complicit,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a Trump critic, said on the floor of the Senate last October.

Because of the uptick in traffic, Dictionary.com crowned “complicit” the word of the year for 2017.

“The word ‘complicit’ has sprung up in conversations this year about those who speak out against powerful figures and institutions and about those who stay silent,” the website said in an announcement, USA Today reported.

 

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On 3/22/2018 at 1:52 AM, AmazonGrace said:

New from the Kushner company: The pocket Jared action figure 

 

Here's a bit more on this.  If true, there aren't enough pardons in the world to protect Jared: 

EXCLUSIVE: Saudi crown prince bragged that Jared Kushner gave him CIA intelligence about other Saudis saying 'here are your enemies' days before 'corruption crackdown' which led to torture and death

Highlights of article: 

  • Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman met with Jared Kushner in October
  • Salman has since bragged about using classified intelligence from Kushner as part of a crackdown on 'corrupt' princes and businessmen in Saudi Arabia
  • He said the intelligence from Kushner included information on those who were disloyal to Salman and who were his 'enemies', insiders tell DailyMail 
  • Kushner's attorney's spokesman said it was 'false' that the president's son-in-law passed on secrets and that he was 'well aware of the rules'
  • The crown prince launched his crackdown on corruption in November, days after he met Kushner for talks in Riyadh
  • Hundreds were rounded up, including princes from rival parts of the Saudi royal family and some of the country's wealthiest businessmen
  • But the crackdown saw accusations of torture and at least one reported death 
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This is Ivanka. Ivanka sells clothing. Ivanka's clothing comes from China. Ivanka's dad wants a trade war with China. Trade wars are  scary. But yippee! Ivanka will be all right. What a surprise! 

 

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"Ivanka Trump’s clothing company will be spared from tariffs, thanks to her dad"

I wondered about this.  I can see this loophole from the US side of things, but I would think that China would want to inflict a little pain on the Trump family businesses on their end.  Maybe China thinks that would drive Donald to do something mischievous, like start toying with the big red button on his desk.

So many things wrong....

 

 

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They are making sure consumers will not be directly affected by these tariffs by not raising that cost of clothing and toys because his supporters are not capable of relaxing that they were indirectly affected by the tariffs.

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Blatant corruption is staring us right in the face, but we're overwhelmed by the avalanche of other crap going on. 

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This is Jared. He was broke. Now he is not broke anymore. Hurrah! 

 

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Poor Ivanka just doesn't seem to pay attention:

20180412_auntc3.PNG

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