The Shady Side Of Lara Trump

Some of Lara Trump's controversial past behavior started getting dredged up when she decided to quit standing in the shade of her in-laws and make a power grab of her own. While campaigning to become co-chair of the Republican National Committee, she did something far worse than throwing a little shade at all Republican candidates whose last names aren't Trump — she vowed to curse them with a financial blackout.

Lara, who is the wife of Donald Trump's son Eric Trump, revealed that she's willing to let the coffers of Republicans running for office nationwide run dry to get her father-in-law back in the White House. During an appearance on "Rob Schmitt Tonight" (shared by DNC War Room on X), Lara shared her plans for how the RNC's cash would be distributed under her watch. "Every single penny will go to the number one and the only job of the RNC, that is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States," she promised. 

According to Reuters, Lara also said that some of the funds might go toward paying Donald's ballooning legal expenses for his various court cases. One of Donald's opponents in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley, slammed the Trumps' plan to gain more control over the Republican party — and its finances. "We don't have kings in this country," she said on Fox News (via Republican Accountability on X).

Lara's remarks reminded some users on X, formerly known as Twitter, of another monetary controversy that she was once embroiled in. 

Lara Trump is such a die-hard supporter of her father-in-law that even her dogs have MAGA merch. In a video on X, she showed off the pups' political leashes and described herself as a "Crazy Dog Lady." But she's been accused of depriving some canines of cash that could have gone toward helping them instead of enriching a man with a gilded Manhattan penthouse and his own passenger plane. 

When the news broke that Lara might gain access to the RNC's money and send every cent of it her father-in-law's way, Mrs. Betty Bowers tweeted, "The RNC is very brave to hand over its checkbook to Lara Trump, who famously used her dog rescue 'charity' to funnel over $2,000,000 to Mar-a-Lago." The tweet referred to a 2021 HuffPost report about the Big Dog Ranch Rescue, of which Lara is a chairwoman. The outlet found that the rescue had been spending money at Trump properties for years and was about to drop a whopping $225,000 to hold a single charity event at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago beach club. By then, it had reportedly paid Donald almost $1.9 million for past events.

Big Dog Ranch Rescue was still using Mar-a-Lago for its fundraisers as of 2023. On Instagram, Lara shared a video of herself participating in one of its fashion shows and captioned it, "Somebody (@bigdogranchrescue) let me pretend to be a model again today."

In 2020, the family of late rocker Tom Petty tweeted that Donald Trump's use of the musician's 1989 classic "I Won't Back Down" was not authorized by his estate. "Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate," they tweeted. They also revealed that they had slapped Trump with a cease and desist order. Conversely, when Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Petty's family tweeted their approval of Biden's campaign playing the song during their celebrations.

Fast forward to 2023. After recording a cover of "I Won't Back Down," Lara Trump appeared on "Hannity" to claim that her take on the song was being "shadow-banned" (via Acyn on X). She complained, "They wouldn't put my song on the radio because it was too political." It could be heard on X, however, and many users were not fans. "Anyone wanna join my class action lawsuit for pain and suffering?" read one reaction to it. On "The Late Show," Stephen Colbert roasted the cover using some of its lyrics. "I've never been to the gates of hell but now I'm pretty sure I know what they sound like," he joked.

But Lara didn't back down from trying to mold herself into a MAGA musician. In response to a video of Lara singing the song live at Mar-a-Lago in 2024, "Star Wars" actor Mark Hamill tweeted, "I weep for Tom Petty."

During a 2020 Women for Trump campaign event, Lara Trump appeared to mock Joe Biden for having a stutter. "I feel kind of sad for Joe Biden," she said (via Adam Brewster on X). "I'm supposed to want him to fail at every turn, but every time he comes on stage or they turn to him I'm like, 'Joe, can you get it out? Let's get the words out, Joe.'"

Since she was campaigning for Donald Trump, Lara probably should have known about his Democratic opposition having a speech impediment. After all, it's something Biden has spoken about before on numerous occasions. In 2019, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even issued an apology to Biden after making fun of the way he speaks in a since-deleted tweet. Biden responded to her taunt by writing, "I've worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it's my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It's called empathy. Look it up."

Lara did not apologize for what she said when CNN's Jake Tapper called her out for it on "State of the Union." Instead, she claimed that she was unaware of Biden's stutter and said that she was actually trying to joke about his mental state. "I think what we see onstage with Joe Biden, Jake, is very clearly a cognitive decline. That's what I'm referring to," she said. In response, Tapper scolded Lara for playing armchair physician.

Lara Trump has come under fire more than once for sharing videos of her children looking unhappy while she remains unbothered and records them. In 2021, she posted an Instagram video of her then-five-year-old son, Luke, crying while he rode a toy front loader down a residential street. She was seemingly shooting somewhere near their home in Jupiter, Florida. The state was taking a pounding from Hurricane Ian, and raindrops were washing away poor Luke's tears. His mom, meanwhile, laughed as she fixed her phone on him and commented on how hard the rain was coming down. "Thought we had a clear window, turns out we did some character building instead," Trump captioned the video.

On X, critics reacted to the post by deeming Trump heartless, calling her a terrible parent, and decrying the video as exploitative. "The issue with Lara Trump's child is not that he's out in the rain. It's the fact that she exploited and humiliated him for a vanity project. Instead of consoling him, she filmed him," one person wrote.

Trump had previously drawn the ire of X users by tweeting a video of herself sipping a glass of wine while ignoring the wails of her daughter, Carolina. After briefly turning the camera on the sobbing little girl, she showed her viewers that she was drinking Trump brand wine. "That poor baby. It's like she already knows who her parents are," read one response to her tweet.

According to Omarosa Manigault Newman, Lara Trump tried to work some of her father-in-law's "art of the deal" magic on her. However, Omarosa had learned some Trumpian tricks herself when she appeared alongside Donald Trump on "The Apprentice." Donald later hired her to be the director of African American outreach for his campaign, and when he won the presidency, she became his communications director for the Office of Public Liaison. When Omarosa lost that gig, it wasn't her former reality show boss who told her "You're fired!" again, but former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Apparently, Donald later realized that cutting Omarosa loose was a bad business move, as Lara reached out to her with a new job offer to work for his reelection campaign.

Omarosa secretly recorded a conversation that she and Lara had about the gig and the $15,000 a month she would get paid for it. Speaking to MSNBC, Omarosa said that it amounted to "hush money," and she dropped the receipts to back up this characterization. In the recording, Lara says, "It sounds a little like, obviously, that there are some things you've got in the back pocket to pull out. Clearly, if you come on board the campaign, like, we can't have, we got to ... 'Everything, everybody, positive,' right?" In response to Omarosa sharing the conversation with the media, Lara admitted no wrongdoing and instead released a statement (per The Hill) accusing Omarosa of betraying her.