Ivanka Trump Seeks Spiritual Enlightenment By Building Giant Resort For Rich People

They paved paradise and put up a Trump hotel.

Is there a more vapid human being alive than Ivanka Trump? And we say this knowing full well that she’s married to a man so vapid that you can practically see cirrus clouds drifting out of his ears. We say this knowing she comes from a family of such mental lightweights that they need to be staked to the ground so that they don’t float off into the upper atmosphere like the old man in Up.

And yet, we sat through the first seven minutes of an interview she gave in which she discussed her project with hubby Jared Kushner to build a luxury resort on an island off the coast of Albania while only thinking three times about throwing our laptop out the window. It’s called personal growth, google it.

The island, Sazan, is a 2.2-square-mile outcropping in the Mediterranean. It’s a mostly untouched wilderness, covered by flora and fauna and military bunkers and landmines left over from when it was a Cold War outpost where Albanian soldiers watched out for the invading capitalist armies of NATO. Now that Albania is all free and whatnot, its leaders are trying to boost its tourism industry. And what better way to do that than buy the island for a reported $1.6 billion and build an ultra-luxury resort for rich people?

Two years ago, the Kushners announced a deal with the Albanian government to develop a 10,000-room resort on Sazan. Now, most of us might look at this project and think of rapacious capitalism swallowing up yet another pristine wilderness in a world that has already swallowed up enough of those.

For Ivanka, though, it is some sort of lifestyle choice that she spews in terms that would sound familiar to every goddamn Instagram influencer who has built a following by switching their kids to an all-meat diet or becoming a tradwife:

“It feels more like ... the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

Oh Lord, spare us. People increasingly want to live in an ultra-luxurious Trump-branded resort decorated in enough gold leaf to fill 10,000 tacky Russian restaurants? When Ivanka Trump looks at how “people” want to live, she means the world’s most egregiously wealthy people. The kind who have staffs to run their lives for them. What she’s building is yet one more resort where these people can lounge by the pool or take snorkeling lessons.

We have been to a couple of semi-luxury resorts. They can make for fun vacations! But Ivanka thinks she’s spending a couple of billion dollars to reinvent the wheel and fill that aching spiritual void in her chest. You’re a Trump, good luck with that.

She also told the podcast host she had just returned from “walking the land, really just trying to sort of be with it and experience it.” Who is she, David Carradine in Kung Fu?

Even the way this project came about is so, so fucking annoying:

“We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated, and it stayed with us ever since.”

Translation: we were on someone’s luxury yacht — possibly one belonging to Rupert Murdoch for those whose brains are unfortunately cursed with Ivanka and Jared’s origin story — cruising around the Mediterranean like a common Clarence and Ginni Thomas, and we just dropped anchor and swam up to another nation’s sovereign territory where luckily its military no longer hangs out. There we looked around and thought, What a wonderful, isolated paradise! How can we spoil it?

It pains us to say this, but Glenn Greenwald really pulled off the old “worst person you know makes great point” meme with this one. We will now hurl ourselves into the sun:

The Kushners are not the only ones wondering how they can spoil the island. Plenty of Albanians are wondering that as well and have been out in the streets this week protesting the deal. It seems that there has been almost no consultation with the public about the fact that the project is being built inside a nature preserve along what one source called “one of Albania’s most valuable diversity areas.” It’s a stopover for birds, including some endangered species, migrating along the Adriatic coast. Nearby areas are among the few remaining refuges for the Mediterranean monk seal, which environmentalists have been trying to save from extinction for a couple of decades.

Ivanka and Jared are just going to plow over all of this for their own aggrandizement, or because Ivanka wants people to think she hit her mid-forties and started wondering, Okay, but what have I really DONE with my life like she’s a bored Real America suburbanite approaching a midlife crisis.

Also, see if this sounds familiar:

Alarm ... had spiraled into public outrage when workmen began erecting a concrete-based, barbed wire-topped fence around the site near Zvërnec, installed a private security firm to protect it and heavy machinery started decimating ancient dunes and Mediterranean pine forests to clear the way for access roads.

A Trump project that the locals do not like nonetheless plowing ahead without possibly securing all clearances, destroying willy-nilly irreplaceable natural wonders and blocking people who yesterday had access to the land from it? It’s every Trump project ever! It’s the border wall destroying animal habitats, it’s the East Wing getting torn down with no warning to the public, it’s Donald destroying the famous Art Deco panels on the Bonwit Teller building instead of preserving them as he had promised to do when he built Trump Tower.

Also, the protests in Albania got rowdy enough for police to start using water cannons and teargas on the protesters. It sounds like something Trump-linked, all right.

So add Albanians to the list of people who are sick of the Trumps’ shit. It’s long been an absurdly long list.

[YouTube / The Guardian]

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