Donald Trump might be president, but even he has to endure holiday dinners with his in-laws.
Trump, 79, spent Christmas Eve at his Mar-a-Lago estate alongside family members including First Lady Melania Trump, 55, and her father, Viktor Knavs—who is just two years the president’s senior.
The trio was seated together at an extravagant Christmas Eve dinner Wednesday night at the Palm Beach resort, which Forbes valued at $325 million in 2023. In video footage circulating online from the event, Knavs, 81, appears animated as he chats with his daughter, who leans in closely to hear him.
Trump, meanwhile, stares straight ahead, seemingly frozen out of the conversation. He sits glumly scanning the room before he notices the camera is on him, prompting a stiff, performative fist shake.
Critics of the president were quick to seize on the moment online, pointing to what they described as Melania’s lack of interest. “Could she sit any farther away?” one X user quipped. “Trump seethes with rage & embarrassment that Melania only wants to talk to her dad,” another wrote in a post viewed 1.6 million times.
Knavs and his late wife, Amalija, both worked in fashion and sales in Slovenia before relocating to the United States after their daughter married the real estate scion. They became naturalized U.S. citizens in 2018, despite their son-in-law’s hardline stance on immigration.
A fixture of the president’s family life, Knavs has appeared at events ranging from Trump’s inauguration to his Thanksgiving dinner table. When Barron Trump—the president’s youngest son and the only child he shares with the first lady—graduated from the prestigious Oxbridge Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida, in May 2024, Knavs was the only family member in attendance besides Barron’s parents, the Palm Beach Post reported.
Melania Trump and Barron Trump are both known to have close relationships with the Slovenian businessman. Melania Trump was largely absent from the now-president’s third and final campaign as she cared for her mother, Amalija Knavs, who died Jan. 9, 2024, and was laid to rest in Palm Beach, according to reports.
Barron Trump remained close to his grandfather throughout the funeral, according to reports.
In 2016, Melania Trump’s childhood friends told The New York Times that they remembered Knavs—who was a member of the elite Communist Party in what was then Yugoslavia—as a “larger-than-life personality” much like Trump himself.
At the time, Trump’s campaign denied that Melania Trump’s father was ever an “active member” of the party.
“But he was pretty successful over there,” Trump said in a 2016 interview. “It’s a different kind of success than you have here. But he was successful.”
Trump may have appeared fatigued at dinner after a jam-packed afternoon, during which he took calls from children across the United States as part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Santa tracker.
In true Trump fashion, the decades-old presidential tradition took a political turn.
“Pennsylvania is great. We won Pennsylvania, actually three times, but we won Pennsylvania. We won it in a landslide. So I love Pennsylvania,” Trump enthusiastically told a 5-year-old from the Keystone State—who was not yet alive during his first two presidential campaigns.
The president later capped off Christmas Eve with a scathing post on Truth Social, decrying what he called the “Radical Left Scum.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
