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Culture
Donald Trump’s Family Is Just as Bad as Donald Trump

By Drew Magary
July 19, 2016
Image may contain Melania Trump Audience Human Crowd Person Speech Tie Accessories Accessory and Donald Trump

By now, you know that aspiring First Lady Melania Trump cribbed part of her big speech last night from current FLOTUS Michelle Obama, despite the fact that she told Matt Lauer in a pre-taped interview (conducted from the Trumps' private plane for no good reason at all) that she wrote the thing herself. And the funniest part of all this is that, as with virtually every Trump-related fuck-up, it won’t ultimately matter at all. In fact, I bet they plagiarized Obama’s speech DELIBERATELY, just so Melania could be caught, and then criticized, and then the Trump camp could piss and moan about the press being so mean to her (head goon Paul Manafort has already publicly denied the theft). There is no gaffe that Trump cannot turn into a permanent and contagious media grudge.

In fact, you can already see the presumed strategy working, even among the press itself, as evidenced here. Frankly, Melania could have drowned a box of live mice on that stage last night and come out of it a sympathetic figure, because A) She was never a public speaker and never intended to be one, B) She looked terrific, and C) The family of any politician always comes off better than the politician they purport to love.

That’s why you’re gonna see a whole lot of the Trump family here in Cleveland this week, including 22-year-old Tiffany Trump. Trump is an orange turd that needs a great deal of polishing, so what better way to do that than trot out every last member of the clan to act as a human shield from scrutiny? You’ll probably even see Barron Trump up there at some point, clad in solid gold Minecraft jammies.

This is a political strategy that’s been around forever. You bring out your family members, show them off like a living Christmas card, and get your bump in the polls. Here in Cleveland, Melania’s speech was a rousing success, with seemingly every convention attendee filing out of the Q right after she was finished so they could raise a toast to her. (Poor Joni Ernst was left to lecture a bunch of crickets in the arena.)

Political family members are usually off-limits to scrutiny because of their presumed reluctance to be in the spotlight. But, as with everything else, Trump’s case is unique. In the case of Trump, his family is his ONLY credible saving grace. Anytime he spews some bullshit about building a wall or beating ISIS in a steel cage match, he can simply point to his adoring family to dull the uproar. (The loyalty of his children has made me realize that, as a dad myself, I’m trying WAY harder than is apparently necessary.) And if you go by profiles like this one, the Trump family deserves your sympathy because his kids are caught between loving their father and having to answer for his policies. They’re victims. They get a free pass, especially Ivanka Trump, who comes off as shrewd and levelheaded, mostly because her dad is a raging prick.
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Now, I’m gonna tell you why this is all complete bullshit. With the exception of the two youngest Trump children, this entire family is complicit in Trump’s rise. The only reason they blindly support him is because they know he's a cruel man who will disown them at the first sign of disloyalty. And if you’re planning to vote for Trump, you better take a good hard look at his brood, because they tend to serve as the final gatekeepers of Trump’s nonexistent decision-making process. Remember: It was the Trump kids who helped propel Angry Dad Mike Pence to the VP slot. For all of Trump’s bluster about dealmaking, he often leaves the most important work to whoever happens to be around him, namely Melania, Ivanka and her husband, and his two older sons, Uday and Qusay.

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These are not innocent fawns. They’re part of Trump’s machine, and they don’t deserve extra credit just because you suspect that, deep down, their hearts aren’t really in this thing. It was Melania who slammed GQ’s Julia Ioffe and stoked more of the anti-Semitic death threats Ioffe received after her profile of Melania ran. It was Ivanka who was set loose as an attack dog on Trump’s fellow Republicans, castigating them for being disloyal to her old man and not showing up in Cleveland to kiss his ring. It was Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who used his own grandparents to cover for Trump’s infamous Star of David tweet. And I'm fairly certain that Eric and Donald Junior enjoy killing rare animals. You should not allow them to soften your feelings for Trump, and it’s hilarious to watch the media blindly give them a free pass, with paid babblers like Brian Williams operating on convention-coverage autopilot. Oh, look! Family members! So pretty.

If you think that’s unfair—if you think that’s going one step too far when it comes to scrutinizing Trump—then I can think of at least ONE former political family member who was not treated with kid gloves, who got an awful lot of shit because she wanted to have a prominent voice in her husband’s presidential administration. You didn’t see people going easy on her now, did you?