So much for respect for law enforcement.
Jared and Ivanka Didn’t Let Their Secret Service Guards Use Their Bathroom
Secret Service agents stood guard around Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s palatial Washington, D.C., home night and day, prepared to protect the couple from shootings, bombs, and any other security threats.
They were not allowed to use the couple’s toilet.
The Washington Post reports that the tax-payer-funded security detail that guarded members of the extended first family throughout Donald Trump’s presidency was forced to use porta-potties or even, incredibly, to leave the Trump-Kushner home to go to bathrooms at the nearby homes of Michelle Obama and former president Barack Obama and Vice President Mike Pence. A solution was found when the Secret Service rented a nearby studio apartment just so that agents could go to the bathroom. The cost to the government was $3,000 a month, a grand total of over $100,000 dollars, to date.
The Kushner-Trump home, the Post notes, has more than six bathrooms. That’s more than one bathroom for each family member in the house. Two law-enforcement officials told the Post about the bathroom situation, while neighbors confirmed that a porta-potty was placed outside the Trump-Kushner home and used by the agents, and then eventually taken away. A spokesperson for the White House denied the story, claiming that the decision was made by Secret Service officials, not the Trump-Kushners. But the neighbor who ended up renting her house to the Secret Service told the paper that it all started when agents knocked on her door and asked to use the bathroom, seemingly having no other option.
This refusal to provide law enforcement officers with even the basic human necessities is at odds with Ivanka Trump's public posture. The first daughter and presidential advisor has been loudly pro-cop and dismissive of the massive movement to hold police forces accountable for killing people. The first daughter and the vice president pointedly traveled to Minneapolis to visit “Cops for Trump” groups in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. They met with officers who were “negatively impacted by crime and violent extremism”—though Ivanka apparently did not hear stories that moved her enough to allow those protecting her safety the dignity of access to a toilet.
Jared Kushner’s public comments on law enforcement have largely been limited to mocking its critics. When NBA players refused to play in August in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, Kushner commented that the players “are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work.” The agents guarding Kushner, on the other hand, were not so fortunate—before the $3,000-a-month bathroom was rented, the security detail occasionally popped into neighborhood businesses to avail themselves of the facilities.
Yet Kushner and Trump have gone out of their way to present themselves as deeply concerned with the treatment of police officers and similar authorities. Introducing her father at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Ivanka Trump declared that she stands for a country “where law enforcement is respected.” Right—so respected that they have to take their breaks in a porta-potty.
It would be kind of funny, except Trump’s habit of speaking out of both sides of her mouth as long as it benefits herself and her father’s administration has real dangerous consequences. Care for the safety of law enforcement officers only matters to Trump when it’s politically expedient. When a mob of rioters flooded the Capitol building last week, she tweeted calling the group “American patriots.” She deleted the tweet, and said that she didn’t condone violence. But that day those pro-Trump rioters, encouraged over the years by her father and continually endorsed by Ivanka Trump’s pro-Trump campaigning, reportedly beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher.
For more than four years, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have sold us on the idea that they’re the perfect American family. In reality, you wouldn’t even want to share a bathroom with them.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Jenny Singer
