“Surreal”: How the Royal Trumps Are Trying to Conquer July Fourth and Everything Else

President Trump is taking over the National Mall with tanks while Prince Jared and Princess Ivanka, fresh from global star turns, are invading the Hamptons—with not a word about the border.

The Sherman tanks that rolled into Washington, D.C., earlier this week—some of which arrived by rail from Fort Stewart in Georgia—had not been used by the U.S. military in more than 60 years, since the end of the Second World War. That changes this week under President Donald Trump, who has been dreaming for months—years, really, ever since he took in the Bastille Day celebration in Paris in 2017—of staging a display of military might in the nation’s capital. Initially he had wanted a lavish, military pageant to celebrate the country—and himself—to honor Veterans Day, though he himself, of course, never served in the military. That plan was stymied after the costs shot up into the tens of millions of dollars along with outrage over the sticker price.
This go-around the president is getting his way, with what he is calling a “Salute to America.” Along with the tanks, Blue Angels, a B-2 stealth bomber, and F-18 fighter jets, Air Force One will zigzag across the sky over Washington, D.C., before a fireworks display lights it up. Trump will make a speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, for which the White House has been handing out premium tickets to important donors and members of the political class. There were reportedly even talks with National Park Service officials about projecting an image of Apollo 11 onto the Washington Monument for the evening—which would expressly go against federal policies meant to preserve and honor the monument’s original form.
For all the pomp and personal planning the president put into his pet project, the president’s children seem to be heading elsewhere. According to several people familiar with the family’s plans, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are spending the holiday weekend in the Hamptons, on Long Island, where they are expected to make an appearance at Lally Weymouth’s annual party, which they have attended in the past. Don Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, will also be in the Hamptons, according to these people, rather than beside Trump as he Salutes America.

It is a slight break for the Trump family who, in the past month, has spent a significant amount of time together and in the public eye, taking on ceremonial and political roles on historic foreign trips and in diplomatic meetings that have been widely criticized as inappropriate. Last week Ivanka and Kushner traveled to Japan and South Korea with President Trump, while first lady Melania Trump opted to stay home. Trump had requested that his daughter join him at several events during the G20 summit in Osaka. Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, who had invited Ivanka to Japan to speak about female entrepreneurship in 2017, asked her to deliver an opening address at one event last week. She posed for photographs alongside her father and other world leaders, including Abe and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. She delivered a readout of a meeting she had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and posted a well-lit video to her Instagram in which she detailed the “great success” of an initiative launched by G20 members to expand women’s access to capital, explaining that she was “very excited to talk about the deliverables of this important initiative.”
That was before the French published a video in which Ivanka appeared as if she was trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to enter a conversation between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Theresa May, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and IMF chief Christine Lagarde, who blinked a couple of times in Ivanka’s general direction with little other acknowledgement. (A person close to Ivanka told me that the video has been misconstrued; that those who were part of the conversation were at the event because they were invited to hear her speak; that she was not intruding in their conversation, but, rather, that she had been invited as the keynote speaker, and they were in the room because she invited them.) On Sunday she and Kushner appeared alongside her father and Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, as he stepped over into the Demilitarized Zone in North Korea, making him the first sitting American commander in chief in history to do so. Reporters caught her as she walked out of the building where negotiations were taking place. “Surreal,” she told them of the experience.

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