Ivanka Trump and Kai Trump Are Telling Us Something Online. It’s Just Not What You Think It Is.

Online Well, That Was One Way for Ivanka Trump and Her Niece to Spend the Weekend By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Heather Schwedel? Sept 08, 20266:12 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Screenshots via Kai Trump/YouTube and Ivanka Trump/X. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. This Labor Day weekend, not one but two Trump decendents managed to earn the internet’s ire, in suspiciously similar ways. Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, presumably taking a short break from her project of transforming Albania into a luxury tourist destination, posted a video to social media of her daughter riding a horse on a gorgeous beach, which she made that much more cinematic by soundtracking it to a Coldplay song (“Viva La Vida,” in case you were wondering). Elsewhere, her brother Donald Jr.’s eldest daughter, Kai Trump, shared a vlog that featured a tour of her new digs, a very un-dorm-like luxury apartment where she’s hanging her hat (and golf clubs) as a freshman at the University of Miami. In both cases, the backlash arrived swiftly, with people online and critics complaining that the Trump family lives lavishly while the rest of the country can barely afford the necessities. These objections are nothing Ivanka and Kai haven’t heard before—in fact, they’re utterly predictable at this point. So you have to wonder why they persist in posting things they can expect to lead to another round of outrage. In other words: Have the Trump children and grandchildren discovered rage-bait? The possibility is actually a compliment to the Trump women in a way, to assume a level of thought and consideration behind their content that frankly isn’t there. Ivanka didn’t share that video of her daughter having an idyllic sunset horse ride for any other reason than that she wanted to. And though Coldplay may seem like a tell to some of us, a choice so corny it must be trolling, that’s simply not how most of the world regards Coldplay. We may hear less about Ivanka these days than we did in the first Trump administration, but the truth is she never stopped sharing immaculate photos of herself and her family, and there’s little chance she ever will. All that happened is that Gavin Newsom and other prominent people online happened to notice this time and had something to say about it. Kai Trump, similarly, has been posting videos that piss people off for months now, going back to her passage to the chi-chi Los Angeles grocery store Erewhon earlier this year. There’s no reason to assume any of the criticism about that video got to her, considering she has continued to make videos in the same vein since. We are simply not going to bully her out of living her life as a proud Trump grandchild who plays golf at the University of Miami. And in Kai’s defense, sort of, her apartment isn’t even that crazy: Yes, it’s absurd that she has her own “office” (read: a second bedroom) as a college student when some of her peers don’t even have their own bedrooms, but luxury apartments are common on many college campuses, and given Kai’s probable security needs, it makes a certain amount of sense for her to live off-campus. I wouldn’t expect the Trump family to stop showing off how good they have it anytime soon. Wild horses couldn’t drag them away from posting photos of themselves riding wild horses wherever they want to. Florida Instagram Internet Ivanka Trump