NYT columnist Maureen Dowd told the Australian press that Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, attempted to persuade her into writing flattering pieces about Trump, The Hill reports.
“Wacky [Maureen Dowd] who hardly knows me, makes up things that I never said for her boring interviews and column. A neurotic dope!,” is what Trump wrote about the columnist, insulting her via Twitter .
Apparently, Trump felt insulted by Dowd’s remarks about him. She called him a hypocrite for criticizing former president Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs. But, according to Dowd, Jared Kushner, approached her, suggesting she could write flattering pieces about his father-in-law.
“I think you could get back in his good graces with a nice column and two nice tweets or two nice columns and a tweet,” Kushner allegedly told Dowd.
The conversation reportedly happened around the time Trump became president. Dowd, she said, refused Kushner’s offer.
While it is far from unusual for politicians to reach out to journalists, the fact that one of Donald Trump’s closest confidants approached a NYT writer comes as a surprise, considering the fact that the president has been highly critical of the news outlet.
More recently, after the New York Times published an op-ed – in which the anonymous author asserts that there exists a resistance movement within the Trump administration, undermining the president, working against him, and effectively directing American politics from the shadows – President Trump’s attacks on the outlet became even more intense.
Just yesterday, as reported by Reuters , Trump called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to probe the New York Times. Citing national security concerns, Trump said that Sessions “should be investigating who the author of that piece was.”
But, members of the Trump team reaching out to news outlets with the goal of ensuring positive coverage is nothing new. As the Inquisitr previously reported, during the 2016 presidential campaign, National Enquirer executives sent stories covering then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to his personal lawyer Michael Cohen ahead of publication. Only with a green light from Cohen would the stories be published.
NYT columnist Maureen Dowd has, as The Hill noted, written critically about Trump’s predecessors, and she has not held back with Trump in the highest office in the land. Dowd frequently criticizes the POTUS via Twitter , so, clearly, Jared Kushner’s attempts to persuade her into covering his father-in-law positively have failed.
“As great as the White House reporters are, if you put a nanny cam on Trump for two weeks and left him alone you would end up at the same place because he is so intent on self-destruction,” is how Dowd described the current President of the United States to the Australian press.
