Where’s Jared? Where’s Ivanka? Molly Jong Fast at the Daily Beast catches us up with the spawn:
The family that held the entire Republican Party in their death grips for the last four years is now doing what all formerly famous people do, signing autographs and being sort of pathetic.
Their father may not have power anymore, but the kids have even less. Remember when Donnie Junior could control a news cycle with a tweet? Remember when Ivanka Trump could command a sea of news stories with a “sources close to” leak about how she was “working hard behind the scenes”? Remember when Mitch McConnell had to take calls from the former president’s completely unqualified son-in-law? Remember when the president’s dimwitted spawns held court at Daddy’s hotel and cast shadows that extended across MAGA Washington?Advertisement
Well, that time is over. The baby Trumps and their lousy spouses are drifting off into the weird political afterlife of people who used to matter.
Remember when Don Junior posed with a “Don Jr 2024” banner at the Fallon Nevada Livestock Auction? That was in October, or, as I think of it, a lifetime ago. Since then junior has been a busy bee, making apparently false statements in a deposition and maybe being investigated by Manhattan Attorney General Cy Vance’s office for his role in the family crimi—oops, real-estate business.
But that’s not all Donnie has been up to. He spends his days “blasting the liberal media” on Twitter, doing reply videos on something called Rumble, and being enraged that people don’t pay enough attention to Hunter Biden’s malfeasances. Don flipped his Bridgehampton home for double what he paid for it in a year, which is not at all suspicious. But despite this real-estate win, the former president’s eldest son still has joined other luminaries like Sarah Palin, Mama June, and a dog called “tuna melts my heart” on Cameo, a service where you can get down on your luck celebrities to make personalized videos for your friends. Junior is listed on the site under the category of “activist,” and is charging fans $500 a video with some undisclosed part of that being donated to the Shadow Warriors Project that supports not wounded service members but wounded military contractors and is run by right-wing celebrity Mark “Benghazi” Geist.
And then there’s Eric’s wife Lara, who looks like a bootleg version of Eric’s big sister. Lara was toying with a run for the North Carolina Senate but at Trump’s speech last weekend she told the crowd, “I’m saying no for now, not no forever.” But here’s the thing, if her father-in-law doesn’t run again, now will become forever soon enough as she remains someone who used to be someone, like poor gummy Eric who I guess runs his dad’s chain of failing hotels and shitty condos? Speaking of that, the Associated Press reports that, “Bargain hunters are swooping in to take advantage of prices in Trump buildings that have dropped to levels not seen in over a decade, a crash brokers attribute to a combination of the former president’s polarizing image and the coronavirus pandemic.” Oh well.
Remember Ivanka, the future of the GOP? Well, she’s been in the witness protection program, not really but sort of. Since buying a $30 million empty parcel of land in Miami, the political genius has spent her time “focusing on family time,” walking her tiny white dog on the beach and wearing hideous peach-colored athleisure. She’s not going to primary Lil’ Marco for the Florida Senate. She hardly has time with all the beach walks and decorating.
And then there’s Pop. The former president has spent the winter months in Palm Beach being a baffling uninvited guest at the occasional memorial service and wedding. The rest of the time, senior has spent lined up at the omelet station and pretty much behaving like a retiree, which was sort of how he behaved when he was president. Now Trump is planning a series of “live conversations” (is there any other kind?) with the only person who has more sexual harassment allegations than he does, Bill O’Reilly. What a pair! Women hide your daughters and mothers and yourselves. It’s gonna be like Frost/Nixon except with morons.
Look, there’s a chance, a horrible, miserable chance, that Trump does get re-elected in 2024 and democracy dies, and the Trump kids go back to using our tax dollars to promote themselves as members of government who govern with lots of meaningless initiatives. After 2016, I know better than to say that couldn’t happen. But if it does not, the baby Trumps have let their moment escape them. Junior could have won a congressional seat, and Eric’s horrible wife could have at least grifted a lot of money running for the Senate in North Carolina.
How are the kids going to pay for all their lawyers’ bills if they can’t grift campaign donations like their dad? Never mind, I don’t care.
And what about Jared? Well, he’s spending time walking on the beach and boogie boarding with Ivanka and pretending that he’s backing out of the Trump dynasty building:
With Father’s Day 2021 on the horizon, Jared Kushner has been doing some thinking about the dads in his life. Not about his own, i.e. ex-felon Charles Kushner, to whom Kushner the Younger has remained steadfastly devoted despite the time Charlie got revenge on his brother-in-law for cooperating with the Feds by setting him up with a sex worker, filming the encounter, and then sending the video to his own sister, a move Jared reportedly maintains law enforcement had no business sticking its nose in. No, that’s obviously a perfectly normal father-son relationship that requires no reflection or analysis whatsoever. Instead, Jared has reportedly been thinking about his relationship with his wife Ivanka Trump’s dad, his father-in-law, Donald Trump.
You see, while many a son-in-law/father-in-law relationship involves the odd game of golf here or there, Jared and Donald’s, for the approximate period between 2016 and 2020, centered around a slightly different pursuit: destroying the country. Kushner, of course, helped Trump get elected in 2016, and from there it was off to the races. Did Kushner have any business in the White House? No! Was he even able to obtain a top secret security clearance without his father-in-law overriding the concerns of the intelligence officials who assess such things? No again! But Kushner, obviously, didn’t let any of those things stop him. Instead, he had a hand in virtually all presidential business, from shutting down the government in an attempt to get Nancy Pelosi to fund the wall, to letting autocrats get away with grisly bone-saw murders, to so badly screwing up the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis that hundreds of thousands of people died.
But, like we said, Kushner’s been thinking. And what he’s apparently decided is that while all of that was fun, he’d rather his relationship with Trump— currently possibly planning a coup of the U.S. government— transition to the sort where they see each other on holidays and the awkward moments between them simply concern the wildly creepy things the ex-president has said about his oldest daughter. Per Business Insider:
Kushner, the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump and a former White House senior adviser, has reportedly told some of Trump’s closest advisers that he wants “a simpler relationship” with the former president, according to The New York Times. While former Trump campaign managers Bill Stepien and Brad Parscale are still tied into Trumpworld, Kushner, who is married to the former president’s oldest daughter, Ivanka, has stepped back. According to the Times, Kushner “wants to focus on writing his book and establishing a simpler relationship” with the former president.
With Kushner out of the spotlight, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, has become the most politically-active member of the family in the former president’s orbit at the moment. The news would confirm a new trajectory for Kushner, who was intimately involved in a myriad of legislative and political initiatives in the Trump years, from engaging in peace talks in the Middle East to aiding the president’s reelection campaign.
As an aside, those Middle East peace talks obviously didn‘t go as well as Kushner would have had people believe, but, uh, never mind that. The Times report seemingly confirms one from CNN last March that Kushner had “tapped out” of Trump’s political comings and goings and wanted “a fresh start, one that doesn’t include advising his father-in-law on a daily basis.”
The article goes on to point out that it’s ludicrous to think that Kushner won’t be back in the fold once Trump announces his revenge campaign. He’ll be back. The lure of power and a possible return to throne is much too tempting.