The funeral for Ivana Trump — failed, one-term former president Donald Trump’s first wife — was held last week, and while such occasions are naturally bittersweet, people generally use the occasion to say kind and tender things about the deceased.
Unless, of course, you happen to be a member of the Trump family, and then the entire affair turns into a surreal sendoff that must have felt more like a celebrity roast than a fond adieu.
According to Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian, the so-called eulogies given by Ivana’s two oldest children, Don Jr. and Ivanka, suggest that the level of dysfunction in the family is even more pronounced than any of us ever imagined.
Let’s start with the eldest: Donald Jr. The warm memory of his mother that he chose to recount at her funeral? The time she disciplined him so hard she had to stop from exhaustion. Once, when they were kids, said Donald Jr, his sister Ivanka accidentally destroyed an expensive chandelier. Ivanka – it will shock you to hear – lied and said it was her brother’s fault; Ivana then pulled out a wooden spoon to teach Donald Jr a lesson. He kept insisting that Ivanka was the responsible party, but, by the time he had finally convinced his mother of his innocence, she was “too tired to deal with Ivanka.”
Even stranger was what Ivanka chose to reveal about her late mother:
Ivanka’s eulogy, meanwhile? She talked about her mother telling her to wear shorter skirts. A bit odd, but not nearly as weird as the contribution from Dorothy Curry, a former nanny to Ivanka, Donald Jr and Eric. In a very dark speech, Curry talked about Ivana’s life becoming a “sinking swamp [of] parasites.”
Parasites? When you think about it, that’s the perfect description of what has been taking place inside the Trump family ever since Donald was born back in June of 1946, which suggests that when it comes time to eulogize him, the kids may just skip the event and go home to count what’s left of the Trump “empire” after daddy nearly flushed the entire thing down his gold-plated toilet.
