Welcome to our wedding weekend! It’s going to be a beautiful occasion, followed by an intimate gathering of family, dear friends, and one Russian oligarch nobody knows who will be handed the bill afterward. The bride will wear white, the groom will wear white, and the Russian oligarch nobody knows will wear camouflage in case someone tries to take a picture of him and ProPublica finds out. We will try to pass him off as a tropical plant, or suggest that he was doing close-up magic. In a sense, he was. That whole celebration was magic!
To be clear, there is no ethical concern involving the Russian oligarch (part of Vladimir Putin’s recent delegation to China) sponsoring this lavish event. This was not actually a wedding after-party; it was a fun weekend that had been planned long in advance of the wedding, which our guests also happened to attend right after we got married. Totally different!
To those who say, “I still don’t know if a friend of Putin should be paying for this,” we say, “Who can truly say who is friends with another person?” This man paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for our three-day post-wedding celebration, but Eric Trump says he has “absolutely no clue who this person is,” nor has he ever heard his name. Probably Putin feels the same way.
A dear friend? A total stranger? Doesn’t matter. What’s most important is: money. The Supreme Court says money is speech, and we’ve taken that to heart. Money is just how people speak to us. Fifty dollars means “Hello.” Five hundred thousand dollars means “I want to hang out with Donald Trump Jr. in an unmarked Georgetown basement.” Footing most of the bill for a three-day island extravaganza is just “Congratulations to the happy couple!”
To those worried that the president might owe special favors to people present for his offspring’s wedding day, relax! This is not like The Godfather. In The Godfather, his daughter was getting married. Totally different. The president doesn’t have to grant any favors you ask on his son’s wedding day. In fact, it’s bad luck to ask for favors at a son’s wedding! Let alone his second one.
Also, the attorney general, Todd Blanche, says there’s nothing sketchy here to investigate. Everyone knows that it is only corruption when it comes from the Biden family. Anyways, having an oligarch of unclear provenance at your most intimate celebrations (sorry, the after-party for your most intimate celebrations) is a very normal thing, we think. These are the little details that make every wedding: the bridesmaids, getting their hair and makeup done; the best man, rushing to finish his toast; and the oligarch, handing over fistfuls of unmarked bills to all of the entertainers.
Every American can relate to this! Remember Ross’s wedding on Friends, when Monica and Chandler couldn’t find Ross’s oligarch, and everybody thought the wedding couldn’t go forward? Remember the morning of your own wedding, when you were scrambling to make sure you had something borrowed, something blue, and somebody’s oligarch paying for you? (The oligarch has nothing to do with something borrowed, because that implies we’ll be paying him back somehow; this is just a gift from the kindness of his heart.)
You may be wondering what to bring us! No gifts, please. Unless you are the Russian oligarch. Then we also accept $TRUMP coin.
The post Pay No Attention to the Russian Oligarch Standing Behind the Wedding Party appeared first on The Atlantic.
