The president’s kids may be their father’s favorite surrogates, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that they aren’t America’s. Their closing argument that nepotism is bad is not landing the way that they may have hoped. Yes, perhaps the Trump offspring, best known for their work in the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign, are not the best people to make the case against nepotism.
You’ll remember America as the country that was formed as a reaction to dynastic power systems or, as they’re called in England, monarchies. While Junior and Eric try to make the case that Hunter Biden’s addiction (and his old laptop) should discredit his father’s presidential race, they are actually making the opposite case. At least Hunter has a law degree from Yale, served on the board of Amtrak, and tried (admittedly with mixed success) to serve his country in its military reserves. The Trump boys have only ever worked for dad’s business and his campaign, if those even count as two separate entities.
And while Hunter has lived as a private citizen, Ivanka and Jared continue cosplaying as government officials. On Wednesday, Bob Woodward released a taped conversation from April 2020 with Slender Man Kushner boasting that his father-in-law was “getting the country back from the doctors,” and that America was now in the “beginning of the comeback phase.” Kushner added, “It was almost like Trump getting the country back from the doctors. Right? In the sense that what he now did was, you know, he's going to own the open-up.” This would of course mean that Trump, who went on to promote hydroxychloroquine and then bleach as miracle cures, does actually own the 150,000 COVID-19 deaths after April.
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Kushner, like the Trump boys, is a self-made man, one who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps after his dad paid Harvard $2.5 million to accept him and who later graduated to running the family business into a deep hole while his dad was in prison by buying an aging skyscraper for a then-record $1.8 billion just before the market crashed—a ruinous deal that Qatar eventually helped bail the by then first son-in-law out of. He brought all those accomplishments to his role running a shadow coronavirus task force for Trump, which went about as well as you’d figure.
Never one to miss an opportunity to make enormous trouble, my podcasting partner Rick Wilson and his besties at the Lincoln Project made enormous billboards featuring the coronavirus death count and Ivanka and Jared’s smiling faces. These billboards are up in Times Square as you read this. Needless to say, the Trumpies weren’t pleased. Presidential lawyer Mark Kasowitz wrote to the group that these billboards are “an outrageous and shameful libel. If these billboard ads are not immediately removed, we will sue you for what will doubtless be enormous compensatory and punitive damages.” This phrase is a common refrain from Kasowitz.
Protecting Ivanka is important to Trumpworld because the Trump campaign has decided that the white-toothed fake feminist is its last best hope to make suburban women love daddy again. Besides pretending to be a 1950s housewife, Ivanka also presents as the least overtly racist of the first wave of Trump kids, though that’s a low bar. She’s in Wisconsin, talking about how “Wisconsinites eat 21 million gallons of ice cream a year,” in Florida telling Cubans that “I bring a message from my father: America will never be a socialist country.”
And then there’s the president’s less-ready-for-primetime daughter, Tiffany Ariana Trump, who cut the T from LGBT in her painfully cringe-inducing “TrumpPride” event in Tampa. Tiffany is like Eric without the “charm.” What she lacks in charisma, perhaps she makes up for in blondeness. She is very blonde.
So they’ve got stuff competition for sure, but Uday and Qusay remain their father’s worst surrogates, even as they've each been low-key toying with their own 2024 presidential runs. I feel like if they run together as a single person, they’d have a better shot at filling the IQ requirement. Just kidding, there is no IQ requirement to run for president, as we discovered in 2016. Junior posted a picture of a “Don Jr. 2024” flag to Instagram. noting in his usual thoughtful manner that it would “make liberal heads explode.” Eric, who some say is actually dumber than his brother, liked a tweet on Saturday about “Eric Trump 2024.”
I’m not sure how the boys have decided their father’s disastrous presidency makes a case for their own candidacies, but they seem to feel they deserve to inherit the presidency the same way they inherited the heap of debt, grift, and money-laundering that is the Trump Organization.
As someone who got a boost from my own last name, I’d like to remind the Trump spawn that just because you were born on third base doesn’t mean you’ve hit a triple.
