Mike Allen, who runs the center-left yet still excellent, news site Axios, did some hosting thing with President Trump's favorite child, Ivanka Trump, putting on an interview with her in a live event, talk show host-style.

Trump stated her usual pleasantries, nothing seriously new in them, so it was the lead in Allen's piece about it that drew my attention.  Look:

In my 12 years of hosting onstage newsmaker conversations, Ivanka Trump broke all the records yesterday with a standing-room-only crowd in the Newseum's largest theater, including many young women who waited around the block to get in to hear her advice about getting ahead in the new workplace[.]

That's the real news from it.

What we have here is a disconnect between the swamp press and its nonstop demonization of the utterly innocuous Ivanka and the reality Allen saw with his wide open eyes.  Like pretty much most of any president's family members, she is popular with the public.

The press has done an amazing job of trying to demonize her.  Think of now-Atlantic Monthly writer Julia Ioffe's bad tweet about Trump – this one, which got her fired from Politico:

...which was an example of someone getting carried away (she apologized) based on her loathing of Trump.

After that, Ivanka was demonized in the now shriveled New York Daily News with garbage like this:

They actually tried to blame her for crazed Palestinians whipping themselves into some kind of suicide-terrorist violence to draw attention to their cause.  This wasn't even fake news; this was dishonest news, a grotesque conflation of two unrelated stories.

Then they got busy mother-shaming Ivanka.  You just know she had to be a bad mother if her last name was ever Trump.  They blamed her for Democratic policies on family separations of apprehended illegal aliens because, well, they had to blame her for something.

After that, they've tried to paint Ivanka as some sort of dishonest financial manipulator, using President Trump's office to make money in stories like this, and worse, and never mind that she has shut her successful business empire to avoid conflict of interest claims.

Now, it's not unusual for bad stories and reportage to follow presidential children.  We have seen it happen a lot with the Bush kids (who, it turns out, were left-wing all along), and we have seen it happen with Nixon's; Carter's; and yes, be fair, Clinton's and Obama's kids.  But never has it been as bad as with President Trump's kids, who have been painted as monsters, and not just by the most partisan elements of the press, but by pretty much all of the mainstream press.

So now Allen interviews the lady, finds her normal, and...the one takeaway for him is that he stares, bug-eyed, at how popular she really is, more popular than anyone else he's interviewed in many years of interviewing.

Somehow, this is rather amusing.  Ivanka wins one, and since Allen is an honest guy, he reported it rather than concealed it.  What it truly shows is that for all of the press's efforts to demonize Ivanka with ever more baroque and fantastic charges, it's...not working.

Image credit: Marc Levin via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.