KUSHNER REFUSES TO SAY THAT TRUMP IS NOT A RACIST

…Jared Kushner, and wife, Ivanka Trump

Jared Kushner never directly answers any questions.

I was amazed that a president’s top adviser and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, agreed to an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, and that it was aired the next night on HBO.

Kushner was just as dull as he usually is, and he non-answered the questions from Jonathan, as was expected. Here is an example from that interview:

• SWAN: Have you ever seen him [Trump] say or do anything that you would describe as racist or bigoted?

• KUSHNER: So, the answer is un -- uh, no. Absolutely not. You can’t not be a racist for 69 years, then run for president and be a racist.

What I’ll say is that, when a lot of the Democrats call the president a racist,

I think they’re doing a disservice to people who suffer because of real racism in this 

country.

• SWAN: Was Trump's birtherism racist?

• KUSHNER: Um, look I wasn’t really involved in that.

• SWAN: I know you weren’t. But, was it racist?

• KUSHNER: Like I said, I wasn’t involved in that.

• SWAN: I know you weren’t. But was it racist?

• KUSHNER: I know who the president is, and I have not seen anything in him that is racist. But again, I was not involved in that.

• SWAN: Did you wish he didn’t do that?

• KUSHNER: Like I said, I was not involved in that. That was a long time ago.

Jared Kushner has always never answered those questions and he always deflects when asked if he disapproves of Donald Trump's promotion of birtherism, always saying he wasn't involved with it.

I other words, he refuses to say that Trump is or isn’t a racist.

Jared Kushner is sure that he thinks his father-in-law, is not a racist. But as for whether Trump launched his political career on a racist premise?  Well. . . Jared refuses to say.

I find it interesting that instead of just lying and saying, “No, he isn’t!”, for some reason Jared just deflects away from the question.  Could it be that he does feel that Trump is a racist, but knows that he is better off to deflect…?

That’s the obvious takeaway from Kushner’s interview with Axios.  Kushner was given multiple chances to weigh in on whether the birther campaign that questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, a campaign that Trump had led, was a racist one.  And Kushner’s answer was decidedly not a resounding, “No!”

So, Jared’s interview answers were exactly four instances in which Kushner made it clear that he hadn’t participated in Trump’s effort to question the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president.  But there were zero instances in which he actually denied that the entire effort was racist.

Kushner’s insistence that this “was a long time ago” is also a very stupid answer.  For those of you who might have forgotten the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s birtherism charge made a very big comeback, and stayed around for weeks, before Trump eventually backed off….er, kinda.

So, this isn’t some long-ago historical fact with no bearing on where we are today.  One could make a compelling case that we probably wouldn’t have a President Trump today if not for his birther campaign.

Michelle Obama reserved some of the harshest words in her 2018 book for this saga. “The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed,” she said. “But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wing-nuts and kooks.”

That last part is key. Trump certainly relies upon support from the extreme elements of the Republican Party base these days.  However, back when he was pushing birtherism and launching his 2016 campaign, that was his launching pad.  At the time, only around half of all Republicans actually liked him, and most everybody else didn’t. He was a remarkably unpopular new entry into the presidential field, and those early poll numbers gave people like yours truly, a license to write him off.  How could a guy whom everyone knows, but only 49% of Republicans like, even win the Republican primary?

Donald Trump now agrees that Obama was born in America.   But Trump falsely blames Clinton for starting the birther rumor…..??? 

By going directly at his base, that’s how Trump’s presidency has been a series of transparent plays for his base.  He has gone further than most any other politician would dare in catering to that base, and it’s kept him relevant as an unpopular president.  He has instilled the fear of God in fellow Republican politicians who would dare to cross him.

And in many ways, the birther campaign was the first real testing ground for Trump’s strategy, (if he even has one). He showed the GOP base, much of which embraced his bogus theory, that he was willing to stick by a birther campaign that riled them up and drove the establishment crazy.  It was the first big conspiracy theory of his conspiracy-theory-laden-political-career.

So, for Kushner to dismiss this issue as trivial is the perfect example of Kushner burying his own head in the sand.  Kushner would not be the senior White House adviser without his treating birtherism as trivial.

But of course, Kushner didn’t actually dismiss birtherism, he just actively sought to distance himself from it.

And his deflection from all those issues pretty much says it all.

Copyright G.Ater 2019