They screw you, your mom and your dad. they may not want to do it, but they do. They hit you with a wooden spoon and also sarcastically emasculate you.
If you read the New York Times coverage From Ivana Trump’s funeral last week, you’ll know exactly who that revised Philip Larkin excerpt is referring to. It’s hard to feel sorry for extremely horrible and obscenely rich people, particularly in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, but I found myself feeling oddly sad for the Trumps this weekend, after reading about Ivana’s opulent but miserable sendoff. Donald Trump’s first wife, who was found dead at the bottom of her stairs this month, he had a golden casket (of course), but the speeches were the real centerpiece. Her children and a former nanny gave eulogies that were bizarre and tragic in equal measure.
Let’s start with the oldest: Donald Jr. The warm memory of his mother that he chose to tell at her funeral? The time she disciplined him so hard that she had to stop from exhaustion. Once when they were children, Donald Jr. said, his sister Ivanka accidentally destroyed an expensive chandelier. Ivanka – you’ll be surprised to hear it – lied and said it was her brother’s fault; Ivana then pulled out a wooden spoon to teach Donald Jr. a lesson. She kept insisting that Ivanka was responsible for her, but when she finally convinced her mother of her innocence, she was “too tired to try.” with Ivanka. (To be fair, he didn’t say explicitly that she hit him with her spoon; maybe she just tickled him with it.)
Then there was the time he misbehaved in a restaurant and his mother took him to the bathroom to show him “what Eastern European discipline was really all about.” After finishing showing him, he said, “And if you cry, we’re going to come back here and do this again.”
He chose these anecdotes to share in his eulogy. Was it passive-aggressive? Did he really think they were cute and funny stories? Maybe. Despite the wooden spoon, Donald Jr kept in close contact with his mother. During the tumult of her father’s presidency, Ivana called him, he said, to see if he needed to move back in with her. “That call was both the sweetest and most emasculating thing in the world… she could do that with the best of them, and it was usually on purpose.” Oh.
Ivanka’s eulogy, meanwhile? She talked about her mother telling her to wear shorter skirts. A little strange, but not as strange as the contribution of Dorothy Curry, a former babysitter for Ivanka, Donald Jr and Eric. In a very dark speech, Curry spoke of Ivana’s life becoming a “sinking swamp.” [of] parasites”.
Ivana’s funeral was not the first proof that the Trumps may not have had the most balanced family life. Who could forget the former president musing, “If Ivanka wasn’t my daughter, maybe I’d be dating her”? Ivana’s memories are also full of dysfunctional tidbits, like when Donald Sr left Donald Jr on the airport tarmac because he was five minutes late.
A former classmate of Donald Jr’s in college also once claimed in a Facebook post that he witnessed Donald Sr. slap your son in front of all his friends because he wasn’t wearing a suit; The slap was reportedly so strong that Donald Jr fell to the ground. In 2000, during a dispute over the will of his father, Donald Sr. cut health insurance for her nephew’s desperately ill baby. What a loving family.
Family dysfunction is rivaled only by Ivanka’s in-laws, the Kushners. His mother-in-law, Charles Kushner, once paid a sex worker $10,000 to seduce his brother-in-law (who was cooperating with federal authorities in a legal case against Kushner) and recorded the encounter with a hidden camera, later showing it to his sister.
I’m not saying all this because I want everyone to feel sorry for the Trump-Kushners, by the way. I just think it explains a lot of things. If these kids had gotten a few more hugs, the world might have been spared the worst of their shenanigans.