Pay No Attention to the Russian Oligarch Standing Behind the Wedding Party

Welcome to our wedding weekend! It’s going to be a beautiful occasion, followed by an intimate gathering of family, dear friends, and one Russian oligarch nobody knows who will be handed the bill afterward.

The bride will wear white, the groom will wear white, and the Russian oligarch nobody knows will wear camouflage in case someone tries to take a picture of him and ProPublica finds out .

We will try to pass him off as a tropical plant, or suggest that he was doing close-up magic.

In a sense, he was.

That whole celebration was magic! To be clear, there is no ethical concern involving the Russian oligarch (part of Vladimir Putin’s recent delegation to China) sponsoring this lavish event.

This was not actually a wedding after-party; it was a fun weekend that had been planned long in advance of the wedding, which our guests also happened to attend right after we got married.

Totally different! To those who say, “I still don’t know if a friend of Putin should be paying for this,” we say, “Who can truly say who is friends with another person?” This man paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for our three-day post-wedding celebration, but Eric Trump says he has “absolutely no clue who this person is,” nor has he ever heard his name.

Probably Putin feels the same way.

A dear friend? A total stranger? Doesn’t matter.

What’s most important is: money.

The Supreme Court says money is speech , and we’ve taken that to heart.

Money is just how people speak to us.

Fifty dollars means “Hello.” Five hundred thousand dollars means “I want to hang out with Donald Trump Jr. in an unmarked Georgetown basement.” Footing most of the bill for a three-day island extravaganza is just “Congratulations to the happy couple!” To those worried that the president might owe special favors to people present for his offspring’s wedding day, relax! This is not like The Godfather .

In The Godfather , his daughter was getting married.