We are devastated to report that Mary Trump, niece of former US president Donald Trump, has cancelled her speaking events scheduled for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in June owing to “circumstances beyond her control”.
Mary, you may remember, wrote the book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. It was a *profoundly* unauthorised biography of Donald, complete with an exquisitely unflattering cover photo of him as a young man, looking both faintly sinister and utterly goofy.
The book revealed, among other things, that she had been the anonymous source who provided The New York Times with the long sought-after Trump family tax returns. The documents formed part of an investigation that showed, contrary to Trump’s projected image as a self-made man, “he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s”. The series would go on to win a Pulitzer.
An enraged Trump would later sue Mary and the NYT for US$100 million. Mary, proving she’s a Trump through and through when it comes to rhetoric, responded, “I think he is a fucking loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can.” She was prophetic in this instance: Trump’s case was thrown out in May last year and he was ordered to pay costs.
But never fear. In her absence, we’re getting… Donald Trump Jr, hitting Australia’s shores in July and brought to you by touring company Turning Point.
Self-described as staging events that “offer a unique and unparalleled experience by allowing fans the opportunity to interact directly with the world’s leading conservative and libertarian personalities”, Turning Point Australia is Oz’s tribute act to the influential youth conservative group Turning Point USA, and has previously brought such luminaries as Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage and anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull to our shores.
General admission tickets are selling for $89 a pop, while a VIP meet-and-greet will cost you $295. For the true fans, $495 nabs you a backstage pass to the greenroom, or if you’re hungry for more, $2500 will get you a private dinner (not including booking fee).
Trumpworld was replete with the servile and palpably addled, but Jr was surely the most servile and addled of them all. What might he talk about? That time he tweeted out confirmation that he had met with a “Kremlin-backed lawyer” who offered dirt on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign? More musing on the comparative size of his dad’s junk and his own?
Perhaps he’ll go into what it’s like knowing your father never wanted you to take his name, fearing you would be a “loser”? Or he’ll tell us what it does to a 12-year-old to lose your grandfather, more present and encouraging than your father ever was, and then almost immediately have your parents go through an acrimonious and humiliatingly public divorce. The paparazzi surrounding your family home, going to school to be taunted about your father’s infidelity, details of which are splayed across the world’s front pages.
Or will he talk about whether any of that young man, so angry at his father that he would not speak to him for a year, has remained with him in the past eight years, spent crisscrossing the United States searching for crybaby lefty snowflakes to trigger — and for that same absent father’s approval?
Oh, no, wait, it’s going to be about how the “disease of woke identity politics and cancel culture … is the biggest existential threat we face in the West and is literally the decay of Western society”. To be delivered, no doubt with the same shiny-browed, wild-eyed, nose-sniffling intensity of his address at the 2020 Republican national convention. The venue is thus far withheld.
We hope to attend, but may also be busy that night attempting to drink an entire bucket of sand.
