The Hamptons season was in full, humid swing when Ivanka Trump went missing at its most important geezer party. Each Fourth of July weekend, Lally Weymouth, the 76-year-old daughter of the Washington Post’s former owners, celebrates her birthday with an event that’s like a “D.C.–New York–glitterati bar mitzvah,” says Anthony Scaramucci, a guest at the seated dinner for hundreds in a striped tent on her estate, where a microphone is set up on a stage for speeches attesting to her grit and longevity.
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Weymouth’s crowd is the mix of politicos, media personalities, and financiers that drives Americans crazy — they’re supposed to hate each other, not party together — from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to Democratic fund-raiser Alan Patricof to ex-titans like former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. It’s also notable for the considerably advanced age of the attendees. “If you’re under 50, you’re under threat of Lally seating you at a kids’ table,” says a friend of Ivanka’s who’d had a fight with her husband earlier that day about accompanying her to the party. “He said he didn’t want to be there when someone had a heart attack on the dance floor.”
This is the scene Ivanka liked before she arrived at the White House, a scene that occasionally tolerated her father but more often excluded him — real power brokers, kingmakers, people who knew the way the world worked instead of simply sliding down the surface of it — though she wasn’t a Hamptons person in particular. When she was young, Donald and her mother, Ivana, rented a cottage on the ocean for a couple of summers; she’d play in the surf while a bodyguard stood next to a limo idling in the driveway, her father stalking around inside talking about how much he had to do in the city and how much the houses out here sucked. One time, when she was a toddler and Ivana was pregnant with baby Eric, they drove through a roller coaster of the beach’s sand dunes (a not-unheard-of practice in the pre-climate-change ’80s), and afterward Ivana almost had a miscarriage, lying on the floor, shaking, her bottom half mottled with blood.
As a teenager, Ivanka came to the Hamptons intermittently as the guest of friends. She did the party-girl thing: chatted up hot Argentine polo players at Saturday-afternoon games, danced at nightclubs in potato fields with models who may not have been able to drink legally — that blasphemous Jeffrey Epstein scene.
Then, over the course of the past decade, Ivanka transformed. Everyone knew she wasn’t rolling in dough, what with Donald’s bankruptcies and general miserly nature — and even Jared Kushner, her dreamboat billionaire husband who once seemed like such a good match, had thrown part of his father’s fortune down the drain. But she craved being in the mix. And in the vortex of inherited wealth swirling around the Hamptons like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, she and Jared struck the rich octogenarian set as a cut above: polite, Ivy-educated, compulsively groomed, tall as poplars, and more respectful than other ungrateful millennial heirs (beloved grandsons and granddaughters excluded).
But this year Ivanka didn’t go to Lally’s to kiss the ring. Did she think her role as adviser to the president meant she was better than them, this crowd whose members travel here from midtown helipads, own four or five houses, and have their names emblazoned in fine stainless-steel letters on cancer wings? Was she off someplace else with more-significant people, people who move world markets and control armies, some of whom also take endangered animals as pets? At the party, as guests chose their entrées and the Motown band pumped out tunes, there were further questions about Ivanka’s absence: Was it a snub, because she was flying closer to the sun and didn’t need this crowd anymore, or was she simply not here because she was embarrassed to show her face? The latter explanation, in part, would have been the legacy of a few years spent in her father’s never-ending rage war, a mutual excommunication period in which Ivanka and the New York society she’d spent her 20s cozying up to got more and more disgusted with each other, seemingly by the day. Getting Lally Weymouth to proclaim Ivanka the next Jackie O. was always going to be a hard sell, but now that whole fantasy of becoming the city’s most glamorous grande dame just seemed preposterous. Things had only gotten more humiliating, it seemed, in just the past few days, when she became the world’s laughingstock at the G20 in Japan. There she was, trying to drop some knowledge about women and the global economy, when French cameras caught her being dissed by IMF chief Christine Lagarde and leaders of the Western world’s most important countries, all the while flapping her hands around like a baby seal with its flippers.