President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law has delivered a mind-boggling defense of a champagne-spraying White House party video that drew backlash even from MAGA figures.
Lara Trump brushed off concerns about Americans squeezed by rising prices by insisting the rules “have never really applied to this president.”
She made that argument when pressed on the clip by Harry Cole, host of Harry Cole Saves the West. The AI-generated clip was posted by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino after a Chinese state visit.
Cole laid out the scene bluntly, describing “spraying champagne around the White House, running around, jumping in swimming pools with President Xi.”
Meanwhile, he said, “the price of coffee is up 18 percent in two years, the price of ground beef’s up 17 percent.” Was there, he asked, “a bit of a disconnect” with “this sort of golden age” apparently unfolding inside the White House?
Lara Trump, who hosts My View with Lara Trump on Fox News and is married to Eric Trump, Donald Trump’s third child, replied that the president simply plays by different rules. “Anybody who tries to tell you differently has never spent much time around Donald Trump, that’s for sure,” she said.
Americans, she insisted, understand that “this is a fun thing. This is kind of tongue in cheek.” Anyone truly upset, she added, “probably needs to go on and have a little bit of fun because I think they’re a little bit stiff.”
Cole pushed back, noting that critics say the video feeds a wider narrative, and pointed to the president “demolishing the East Wing,” “building the ballroom,” and “building the helipad.” Can he really understand “the day-to-day realities of the American public who are struggling,” Cole asked, and does he still have “that political gravity-defying touch” 10 years on?
“Of course he gets it,” Lara Trump said, adding that Trump takes “the job very seriously,” before turning to who is really struggling. It is actually the Trumps, she said.
“Everyone knows, it has not been, you know, a cakewalk for any of us,” she said. “Of course, not a cakewalk for President Trump, but he does it because he really feels like he can make a big difference.”
Scavino, 50, posted the video on Instagram. It shows what appears to be him popping champagne with what seems to be his second wife, Erin Elmore, and Eric and Lara Trump, set to Pitbull’s hit “Don’t Stop the Party.” His caption read, “This is not an intended for the Dems heads to explode—Being some of the post State Dinner party has gotten out, I felt inclined to share mine as well, in complete transparency, with the American People.”
It wasn’t just Democrats who exploded. Prominent conservatives did, just as Republicans try to sharpen their message for the 2026 midterm elections, which, if polling holds, will be a disaster for the GOP at the ballot box.
Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the center-right outlet The Dispatch, wrote sarcastically, “This is precisely the midterm messaging the GOP needs from the Deputy White House Chief of Staff.”
“You really have no shame, do you? Many Americans can’t afford groceries, gas or their mortgage payment, and you post a tone deaf AI video of you and your buddies partying at the People’s House,” conservative activist Carrie Prejean Boller wrote.
Conservative commentator Meghan McCain offered an anecdote. “One of my friends couldn’t afford air conditioner this summer,” she wrote. Never-Trump Republican Sarah Longwell put it more bluntly. “Real fall of Rome sh-t,” she wrote.
Scavino appeared to acknowledge the backlash on Sunday afternoon by reposting another AI-generated video of the imagined afterparty, this time through the supposed lens of Xi Jinping’s “lost camera roll.”
“…as the typical nutters are losing their s--t over AI created content, well done! It is AI, correct?” he wrote on X.
