It's Don Jr.'s World Now

He's not just the First Large Adult Son. He's the unrestrained id of the re-empowered MAGA movement.

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When Donald Trump took office in 2016, one of the first things he did was appoint his eldest daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner to his administration. As Trump’s first term progressed, it quickly became clear that Ivanka’s main role in the administration was to present the single-ply thinnest veneer of professionalism and temperance to her father’s constant bigotry and chaos. That she utterly failed is beside the point. What mattered is that, for his first foray into political life, Trump was at least trying to pretend like that stuff mattered.

Fast forward eight years. This time around, Ivanka has been conspicuously absent from her father’s inner political circle. Gone is the patina of whatever the hell she was supposed to bring to her father’s table. Instead, Trump has embraced a differently rotted fruit of his withered, septic loins: Donald Trump Jr., who has replaced his sister as their dad’s familial sycophant of choice. If the face Ivanka offered for her father’s administration was one of Very Serious Concern™, then Don Jr. brings a perpetual smirk — the kind best suited for a villain in some mid-2000s teenage sex comedy as he teabags some hapless passed-out schmo at a raucous house party while Sum 41 plays in the background.

And we are all about to live in the world Don Jr wants.