Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, and Vanilla Ice, the pop-rapper of “Ice Ice Baby” fame, are both denying that they are collaborating with a MAGA super-fan in Florida on a $1-billion scheme to transform a Palm Beach County trailer park into the eventual Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.
This is not a game of Mad Libs, somehow.
“Don hasn’t spoken to anyone about building a presidential library and has never even met Vanilla Ice,” a spokesman for Trump Jr. told The Daily Beast on Monday in a brief statement.
ADVERTISEMENT
On Saturday, Vanilla Ice had indeed tweeted, “I don’t know Donald Trump Junior., don’t understand why they said that? but if they want me to build a library In Palm Beach on the ocean, I’m in. #VanillaIceProject.”
Both of them were referring to a Palm Beach Post story that published on Friday, that detailed a pitch by Briny Breezes denizen James Arena, a real-estate broker who wants to convince President Trump to spend a cool billion dollars to purchase Briny Breezes, a 43-acre trailer-park town, and erect his future presidential library there.
The president and First Lady Melania Trump recently had paperwork filed to formally switch primary residence from Manhattan—formerly the Trumps’ longtime home, in a state and city that now largely despises them—to Palm Beach, where Trump’s private club Mar-a-Lago is situated.
In his interview with The Palm Beach Post, Arena claimed he was friends with the rapper, also a Palm Beach County resident, and that “Vanilla Ice ran it by Donald Jr.” Arena added that Vanilla Ice “called me back and said, ‘Man, I think they’re really into it.’”
The spokesman for the president’s son said on Monday that the claim in “The Palm Beach Post story was bizarre fiction.”
In June, NBC host Chuck Todd asked Trump if he’s given much thought to his library, the president responded, “I have a lot of [possible] locations, actually. The nice part, I don’t have to worry about buying a location.”
The president continued, “I’ve been treated so great in Florida. You know, the [2016 election] win in Florida.”