Poor Ivana Trump: even in death she hasn’t been able to escape her ex-husband’s drama. After being found dead at the bottom of her stairs in July, Donald Trump’s first wife suffered the ignominy of being laid to rest near the first hole of Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. Burying someone on a golf course is weird – even for a Trump – and theories immediately began to swirl. New Jersey exempts cemetery land from taxes, so was this a creepy form of tax avoidance? (Short answer: possibly, but it doesn’t make much business sense and seems unlikely.)
The Ivana conspiracy theories did not go gentle into that good night. Instead, they grew stranger and stranger, stoked by the feverish imaginations of #ResistanceTwitter: a collection of liberal activists who have built large social media followings by tweeting obsessively about Donald Trump. When the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago home to recover classified documents, #ResistanceTwitter went into overdrive trying to find connections between Ivana’s death and Trump’s legal troubles. There is zero evidence that Ivana was cremated, but many high-profile #ResistanceTwitter accounts suddenly decided she definitely had been and, from there, concluded that Ivana’s casket must have been stuffed with classified documents. Jon Cooper, a Joe Biden superfan who has 1.1 million Twitter followers and whom Politico once described as “prone to outlandish statements that rack up retweets”, bears much responsibility for spreading this theory. “Seriously, is else anyone [sic) wondering – just a bit – what other stuff may be buried inside Ivana’s casket …?” Cooper tweeted on 9 August.
