You’ve likely heard the news by now that Donald Trump is being sued for fraud by New York’s attorney general. So are his “three adult children,” as breaking news tweets and early reports have phrased it. There’s just a tiny issue: Trump doesn’t have three adult children. He has four. Unlike her older siblings Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, Tiffany Trump—the 28-year-old daughter of Trump and his second wife, Marla Maples—is not being sued. And while reporters clearly intended to signal that Trump’s 16-year-old son Barron is not part of the lawsuit, they buried Tiffany altogether.
Two years after Donald Trump left the White House, it’s clear the ongoing campaign against Tiffany’s existence continues apace. Her erasure was a common theme during Trump’s campaign and four years as president, and in fact, it’s been going on for decades. As Trump put it in 2004 to New York magazine, “You know, I have another daughter, with Marla, named Tiffany? She’s just a beautiful, great kid also. But it’s very separate. When you have separate wives it’s sort of … separate.” As we saw today, the press and general public blithely abets the conspiracy.
I suppose we’ve now learned an upside to this: Attorneys general hardly ever sue people they forget exist. But in the Trump family, where attention and love are nearly synonymous, it must make for lonely going. Poor Tiffany—who, lest we forget, may have been doomed from the start in this regard: She was said to be named after blank space, specifically the air above the Tiffany & Co. store in Manhattan, which Trump bought the rights to in the 1980s in order to build Trump Tower. Whatever cosmic and actual justice needs to be delivered to the Trump family, why must she suffer the most?
Tiffany avoided her half-siblings’ fate because she is not involved in the family business. But what is she doing with all the free time she presumably has due to the lack of lawsuits against her? Well, she herself is a lawyer, or at least attended law school, graduating from Georgetown in 2020, though it’s not clear what, if any, legal work she’s doing at the moment. One thing she’s doing for sure is planning her wedding to businessman Michael Boulos, which is set to take place at Mar-a-Lago in November. She hasn’t updated her Instagram in months, so perhaps she has embraced a permanent role out of the limelight. I hope that on this day, she’s getting a tiny bit of satisfaction from the knowledge that for once, being the forgotten Trump paid off.
