Tiffany Trump Isn't 'Just A Typical Law Student' -- Yeah, No Kidding

This article sets out to paint Tiffany Trump as failing to integrate to law school. It only succeeds in making the law school look bad.

(Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

This morning, the Washington Post’s Style page devoted a tortured 1700 words to informing its readers that, despite her best efforts, Tiffany Trump isn’t successfully integrating into the normal life of a Georgetown Law student. Could it have anything to do with being the daughter of the most powerful middling golfer? That’s certainly part of it. Yet the article, despite its effort to paint the young Trump as failing to integrate into the law school community, unintentionally accomplishes something much more interesting with its breezy incognizance of the law school snobbery that surrounds her.

“Word spread like wildfire that she was there. People were following her around with cameras, and it looked really uncomfortable,” said a student who attended the event and like most of Trump’s classmates requested anonymity to discuss a fellow student. “She left within 10 minutes.”

Yes, that would be uncomfortable. And alienating. Perhaps this is why she’s allegedly not fitting in? And, before we go any further, it’s worth pointing out that this article may not provide an accurate cross-section of the GULC student body. There may well be a silent majority out there who aren’t putting Tiffany on a creepy pedestal for either her wealth, political affiliations, or both. But it sure seems like there are a lot of students out there who are for a variety of different reasons.

When she gets coffee from the campus cafe, it’s noticed. “I’m in a What’sApp group chat, and we all share our Tiffany sightings,” one student said. “She gets gossiped about — what she’s wearing, that kind of thing.”

Law students are going to be vicious gossips anyway — at least I was — but in the normal law school experience that gets evenly distributed across the class. Tiffany’s presence at Georgetown has, if this article is to be believed, concentrated all of that energy on one, isolated figure. Another student interviewed in the piece notes that Tiffany, when approached, is “warm and welcoming” but that’s apparently not nearly as interesting to the GULC crew as Snapchatting about her shoes.

Members of Tiffany’s Secret Service detail dress down in plain clothes but still stick out. “Law students don’t wear ball caps” in class, said another student.

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What kind of pretentious bulls**t is this? “Oh, law students don’t wear sports ball stuff!” I refuse to believe this is true, and if it is, it’s the most damning indictment of GULC since it fell out of the T14.

One wonders if this article went through some wild editing. With brief forays into the “mean girls” mentality of law students and the isolating influence of an overzealous Secret Service tossed into the piece before being trampled down by the more reader-friendly narrative of “Tiffany Trump as wealthy party girl.” In discussing her Instagram account:

But she mostly posts the same kind of glossy, filtered images it had long before she came to Washington: Tiffany on a rooftop in Las Vegas in a sequined minidress; Tiffany on a posh balcony overlooking Los Angeles.

I have picture of Bob Ambrogi and myself on that exact same roof, but I grant that most people think of Above the Law writers as inaccessible bon vivants anyway. Seriously, she went to Las Vegas and hung out in a hotel bar… what law student would possibly do that?!?!?

As Georgetown students by and large protest the constitutional mockery of this administration, the article notes, Tiffany seems to be nowhere around. That’s… not shocking. Given everything else in this article about the enhanced scrutiny she receives from law students, participation in political events — and she’s not exactly leading the Federalist Society either — would only further strip her of any semblance of humanity as she becomes nothing but an avatar to some cause, however noble.

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“Some of them say that the sins of the father shouldn’t be visited on the children — but I think that, look, none of us are children,” [Greyson] Wallis said. “She is a grown woman with an Ivy education who has elected to be silent and thereby complicit, like her sister.”

Exactly. She’s an empty signifier to people who just want her to pick a side to fulfill their moral prescriptions for her. Personally, I’d like her to protest too, but just staying out of the mix while the rest of her family actively cheerleads or whitewashes every abomnible act of the administration is a political act.

She spent her summer working with Shon Hopwood, who has written for Above the Law in the past and seems to be making some headway with the administration on sentencing reform, which just might be the only worthwhile thing the White House has even breathed upon. It may not be as visible as some of the work campus activists are doing, but if she’s helping at all in the struggle against oversentencing, that’s a pretty good contribution for a mere 2L.

Her Instagram narration of the past three months has been a catalogue of designer clothes and envy-inducing locales. In late July, she was photographed partying with Lindsay Lohan at the actress’s nightclub in Mykonos. The pairing prompted tabloid headlines and rumors that Trump would be appearing on Lohan’s upcoming MTV reality TV show.

You know, just like your typical law student.

She went to Europe with her mom. Yeah, she has more money than the average law student, but she’s seemingly not a complete tool about it. Just let this woman go to class and eke out her life under the crushing weight of having to stay out of the path of destruction that the father she may not even like is wrecking.

If Tiffany Trump wants to be just another Georgetown Law student, her plan isn’t working [Washington Post]


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.