Colin Kaepernick built a career out of turning his back on the country that made him rich.

Now a new book is prompting hard questions about who was working behind the scenes.

And Kaepernick just let slip something about meeting Trump that nobody saw coming.

What Kaepernick Claims Van Jones Did

According to Kaepernick’s new memoir, CNN personality Van Jones allegedly attempted to broker a sit-down meeting between Kaepernick and President Donald Trump.

Kaepernick writes that Jones reached out to try to set up the meeting, though the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback declined to pursue it.

The claim puts Jones in an awkward position — a man who built his television brand as a left-wing Trump critic now stands accused, by one of the Left’s own celebrated figures, of trying to connect that same figure to Trump.

Jones has not denied the account in any detail that contradicts the claim directly.

Whether the outreach was genuine bridge-building or something more calculated is a question the book raises without fully resolving.

Kaepernick Remains What He Always Was

Before getting too deep into the intrigue surrounding Van Jones, it’s worth being clear about who Colin Kaepernick is.

Kaepernick is the malcontent who started the anthem protest trend that turned a moment of national unity into a political circus. Kneeling for the national anthem is un-American. It insults every member of the military who fought and died under that flag. Kaepernick did not start a civil rights movement. He launched a divisive spectacle that damaged the NFL, alienated millions of fans, and gave ESPN and the sports media establishment a political cause to wrap themselves around while the ratings bled out.

Nothing that comes out of a Kaepernick memoir changes that basic reality. Whatever happened or didn’t happen between him, Van Jones, and the possibility of a Trump meeting, Kaepernick remains the figure who decided a pregame ceremony honoring the country’s military heritage was the right venue for a personal grievance.

That’s the context the memoir coverage tends to skip.

Van Jones and the Questions His Alleged Role Raises

Van Jones spent years positioning himself as one of the more emotionally expressive Trump critics on cable television. His reaction to the 2020 election outcome became one of the most-replayed moments in CNN’s recent history.

But Jones also has a track record of attempting to work across partisan lines in ways that occasionally surprised observers on both sides. He has collaborated with conservatives on criminal justice issues, and he has drawn sharp criticism from the Left before for those partnerships.

So an alleged attempt by Jones to arrange a Kaepernick-Trump meeting isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound on the surface. Whether it was sincere outreach or a self-promotional maneuver is harder to know.

What’s interesting is that Kaepernick chose to include it in the book at all. Publishing houses don’t let details like that slip in by accident. Kaepernick wanted this to be part of the story he’s telling about himself — and the story appears to be one in which he declined the overture and stayed true to his principles, or at least what he considers his principles.

But the detail lands differently depending on what you already think of Jones. For viewers who trusted Jones as an authentic voice of opposition to Trump, the image of him quietly trying to engineer a meeting between the President and one of the Left’s most prominent symbolic figures raises some uncomfortable questions about what Jones was really doing and who he was doing it for.

CNN, for its part, has not distinguished itself as an institution willing to ask those questions about its own talent.

And that’s partly what makes the claim worth examining. The same network that built years of programming around the premise that any association with Trump was morally contaminating allegedly had one of its biggest stars trying to set up exactly that kind of association — privately, without the cameras rolling.

That’s not a minor detail. It’s a window into how the media class actually operates when no one is watching.

The posture on television and the behavior behind the scenes frequently don’t match. The outrage is often performed. The access and the deal-making continue regardless.

Kaepernick presenting himself as the principled one in this situation — the man who refused the meeting — is a fairly transparent piece of image management. But in doing so, he inadvertently gave the public a clearer picture of how Van Jones operates, and what that picture suggests about the credibility of the anti-Trump brand Jones spent years selling to CNN’s audience.

Whether that damages Jones depends on whether CNN’s audience is paying close enough attention to care. Based on the network’s trajectory, that audience is shrinking fast enough that the question may answer itself.

The media establishment has spent years telling Americans that Trump was so dangerous, so beyond the pale, that any proximity to him was disqualifying. And then behind closed doors, according to Kaepernick’s own account, one of the faces of that establishment was trying to put Kaepernick in a room with the man.

People notice that kind of thing. Eventually.

Source: Mediaite, “Colin Kaepernick Claims CNN’s Van Jones Tried to Broker a Meeting Between Ex-49ers QB and Trump”