In the gaudy living room of a gold-everything penthouse, Donald Trump threw extravagant parties that never failed to generate social intrigue.
Amidst lavish displays of narcissism adorning the hallways — including several life-size portraits of himself, counterfeit Time Magazine covers featuring his face, and a poster purporting to show the average human hand with the outline of a another, bigger hand next to it claiming to be the outline of Trump’s hand — the glasses of champagne flowed their waterfalls for his friends, if you could call them that, of new money New York wannabe aristocrats tipsily spilling their drinks talking to the Epstein girls they knew looked young but no one asked.
Amid the throngs of people, one figure stood out from the rest, and though his eyes meandered from woman to woman, they always returned to her — the young, captivating Ivanka.
She was his daughter, and when she was in the room he couldn’t hide his spellbound glances at her, betraying an unmistakable passion for the results of his long-term grooming work.
He had made the perfect daughter he thought often, and dominated conversations finding out who else agreed. He’d revel in the coaxed compliments he’d all but beg them to shower upon her character, intellect, and, most of all, her physique, savoring every bit of praise as if they were compliments for him.
“Isn’t she tremendous?” he’d ask tactlessly, his voice tinged with a paternal pride veering into possessiveness. “The most beautiful woman in the room, and she’s mine.”
She was the embodiment of his descendant aspirations, a living testament to his delusions of genetic superiority even if she never thought up a cosmetic enhancement he was unenthusiastic paying for from her adolescence onward. In his mind she represented the pinnacle of feminine beauty and charm, a reflection of his own greatness that shined even greater next to his regretfully unimpressive sons, Don Jr. and Eric. If only he could go back in time, he often daydreamed, and give Don Jr. a different name so he could save his eponymous birthright for his beloved daughter, who he’d have named “Donaldina” instead of honoring his first wife Ivana with the name “Ivanka.”
“She has such great legs, doesn’t she?” he’d ask, while his guests would awkwardly shift their weight and try unsuccessfully to change the subject. “And what a chest! One of the great chests, maybe of all time. How lucky her kids were as babies. And fetuses. What a tremendous womb. What I’d pay to be able to spend a day up inside of her!”
In conversations behind his back, his guests remarked and satirized upon the inappropriate infatuation. Whispers of forbidden love and gossip grew into a mystique surrounding the Trump family, and the city socialites often debated theories of how the Trumps might behave when in the private oases of their sprawling, ostentatious penthouse properties.
The gossipers could only agree on two apparent facts: that the bond between father and daughter transcended the boundaries of societal decorum, and that Donald’s years of close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein had not made him any less of a creepy perv than he was prior to their lamentable meeting.
All this Ivanka felt, and she struggled with the public knowledge and disgust in her father’s Epsteinian debauchery, the predatory beauty pageants, the sexual assault allegations and lawsuits, and all his other scandalous misdeeds.
She played the part of obedient daughter and smiled for the cameras, but, beneath her composed exterior, she grappled with her father’s disconcerting reputation, and its effect on her social standing. Ivanka yearned always for independence from her father.
She contemplated abandoning her maiden name to forge a new legacy with her less dysfunctional — and much less damned and nationally destructive — in-law family to free herself from the nepotistic albatross that was the Trump name. Could an Ivanka Kushner buy her way back into the New York City elite milieu, and escape socially her father’s belligerent and abhorrent political career? She has $2 billion in Saudi money to try.
But, in the meantime, perhaps Donald might at last realize he has unwittingly stifled his daughter, and must cease his objectifications. Maybe in time, father and daughter will find a new balance in their relationship, built not on appearances or lust, but on respect and love. And maybe Donald will come clean about all the sex offender stuff he did with Epstein.
Or perhaps their secrets and the constraints of their world will become too much to bear, and the house of incestually ambiguous cards they labored on will come crashing down from the weight of shame and humiliation.
Either way, the story of Donald and Ivanka will forever be shrouded in speculation, a mystery that will never be fully unraveled.
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