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It’s unclear whether Tiffany Trump has a job in the traditional sense, but the role she has served in American life for the past nine-ish years is that every so often she pops up to remind the world that she, President Donald Trump’s only child with his second wife, Marla Maples, both A) exists and B) requires that we all feel kind of bad for her. In that sense, after taking some time off to have her first child this year, Tiffany is clocking back in.
Last week, the New York Times published an article about the business dealings of Tiffany’s husband of three years, Michael Boulos, that will give you new and innovative reasons to feel bad for Trump’s most forgotten child. The Times investigation alleges that Boulos has been leveraging his connections to Trumpworld and status as Tiffany’s husband to make money. These enterprises have included overcharging his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, for a yacht (which, to be honest, we can’t altogether disapprove of on account of it being so funny) and enticing a Saudi businessman with the promise of an invitation to his wedding in exchange for cash.
The most generous interpretation of the article is to blame all the scheming on a cousin of Boulos’, Jimmy Frangi, who at the very least sounds like the sort of pain-in-the-neck relation that many people will recognize from their own family dynamics. But it also sounds like Boulos was aware of much of it, as was his bank account. When the Kushner deal seemed to be going south, he took little time to pull the Tiffany card:
When Mr. Kushner’s lawyer seemed to be slowing the deal down, for example, Mr. Boulos made his displeasure known inside the firm. “Me and Tiffany,” he wrote to associates, are “pissed off.”
As the Times article reminded readers, Boulos is the son of Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman who seems to have misrepresented himself as a billionaire for years but nonetheless served as a campaign surrogate and then adviser for President Trump.
We don’t hear much about Tiffany or what she’s up to. It was nice, though maybe unrealistic, to imagine that maybe she was somewhat removed from the Trump fray, on a steady stream of fancy vacations with her handsome husband. In April, People reported that her stepmother, first lady Melania Trump, skipped her baby shower, which was perhaps unsurprising considering Melania’s increasing reluctance to show up anywhere these days. Tiffany gave birth, to a boy named Alexander, in May, for once providing a break in the “poor Tiffany” narrative—there’s not much bad you can say about a woman having a baby, though I do wonder how it went when Donald Trump met him for the first time. In any case, now it’s back to “poor Tiffany,” and then some: It used to be that we all felt bad for her because she seemed like such an afterthought to her father, but now there’s an alleged scammer husband to contend with, a husband who may only have been drawn to her in the first place because of that alleged scammer father. In their union, the Oedipus complex meets the concept a dog attracting fleas.
And so we engage in the semiregular ritual of feeling bad for Tiffany. We don’t actually know whether she’s worth feeling bad for—maybe she knew about all of it, maybe it was even her idea to sell a yacht to Kushner for millions more than it was worth. Wouldn’t we all take the opportunity to defraud Kushner if we could? This is the cesspool Tiffany was raised in. But somehow I don’t think she signed up for this, to be used by a guy she reportedly met at Lindsey Lohan’s Beach Club in Mykonos. Still, even if she didn’t sign up for it, we’re about to find out if she’ll stand for it, and I’m guessing she will.
