FUNNY GIRL?

How Bettina Anderson Became the Joker in the Trump Pack

The new Mrs. Don Jr. has built an online persona around borrowed jokes, recycled memes, and millennial quips.

opinion

Statuesque, bronzed, and wrinkle-free, Bettina Anderson Trump fits right in with Ivanka, Lara, and Tiffany as the latest member of the Cat Pack™. But who is she underneath the high cheekbones and highlighted hair?

Since starting a relationship with Donald Trump Jr. while he was still thought to be with then-fiancée, now-ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle, Anderson Trump has mostly avoided the press.

Instead, the 39-year-old prefers to pop up in photos. We’ve seen her sitting in the back row of the family box for the 2026 State of the Union address… ringing in the new year at Mar-a-lago… and chumming it up with Nigel Farage, the Reform party MP and accused antisemite, at a party in England to celebrate gunmakers John Rigby & Co. (Farage told MailOnline that Don Jr. was “a customer.”)

To get a better sense of Anderson Trump’s personality, I headed to where millennials reveal their innermost thoughts: Instagram. Her newly christened “BettinaTrump” profile wasn’t what I expected.

Since joining the platform in 2016, Anderson Trump has posted approximately 456 times. Ninety-eight percent of those posts feature professional fashion shots of the 39-year-old model in all her long-limbed, sometimes bikini-bottomed glory.

Still, scrolling through her feed, I noticed something that distinguishes her from her new sisters-in-law. On socials, Ivanka spews homilies about moving “forward with clarity, courage, and grace”. Tiffany gushes about her baby. Lara plugs oversized tees from the Lara Trump Collection. But Anderson Trump wants you to know that she’s not just another pretty, paralyzed face. Unlike the others, she has a sense of humor.

Anderson Trump posts genuinely funny musings next to her glam shots. Here are five examples from her feed:

1. Feeling lazier than the guy who designed the Japanese flag 🇯🇵

2. What if we pronounced Aristotle like Chipotle?

3. Dear Monday, I want to break up. I’m seeing Tuesday and dreaming about Friday. 👋🏼

4. Roses are red, pizza sauce is too.I’m making a large. And none of its for you!

5. Tres leches? En esta economia?

Anderson Trump’s captions are a grab bag of absurdist takes, millennial malaise, food-obsessed quips, and cringey dad jokes. She often uses first-person pronouns, which makes each post sound like she thought it up.

She did not.

Quick searches of her clever lines revealed that the majority were cut-and-paste jobs, pilfered from writers who receive no credit. It may not be completely her fault.

Some of the jokes probably came from an aggregator who stripped out the original writer’s name. Still, it’s odd to think of Anderson Trump scouring the web, looking for quirky jokes written by total strangers, and thinking, “Yes! That is so me.”

When she first started posting, there were times that Anderson Trump, a graduate of Columbia, cited the comedy writer. For example, in January 2021, Anderson Trump posted: “I simultaneously want to be awake for everything and asleep all the time.” -josh gondelman.

Gondelman was out walking his dog in Brooklyn when I connected with him over the phone. He was amused to learn that a Palm Beach socialite had liked his line, although he couldn’t place where the joke came from.

“It sounds like something I would say,” he conceded. “I do love to be asleep,”

I asked him about Anderson’s more typical practice of quoting comedians without attribution and Gondelman called it a “pernicious habit” that has permeated our culture.

“She clearly had a realization of like, ‘Oh, I get more credit if I don’t frame these jokes as if they’re quotes,” Gondelman said, “if I just kind of put them into the world. And, no, you can’t pee there.”

This last comment was to his dog, but it made sense in the broader context, too. Thanks to meme culture, everything belongs to everyone, which means at any given moment, your work is figuratively being peed on.

Still, Gondelman understands why it’s done: “Funny is the kind of charisma you can steal, especially online.”

Passing off someone else’s amusing remark as your own as “a nip and tuck” or “enhancement”—like filler for the soul.

And what do Anderson Trump’s choices say about her soul? I read Gondelman the five jokes above which center on her love of pizza, hatred of Mondays, and laziness.

“It feels very Garfield-coded,” he says.

Anderson Trump isn’t the only member of the moneyed crowd who is thirsty for laughs. Elon “Let that sink in” Musk emits a similar vibe. It must annoy billionaires that you can hire a decorator to buy taste… you can pay a stylist to make you fashionable…but if you’re at a cocktail party and need a witty comeback, you’re on your own.

So is Anderson Trump funny in real life? I called someone in Palm Beach who knows her to pose the question.

“No, not especially,” she told me, asking to remain anonymous.

Anderson comes across as jovial in a 2024 interview on “Sarah’s Untitled Talk Show,” a vanity project of Sarah Wetenhall, the owner and CEO of The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach.

In this 10-minute appearance, Anderson Trump smiles frequently as she chatters about a terrible blind date with a man who brought along a gun and a bag filled with sixty thousand in cash. She talks about meeting Joe Dimaggio when she was in fourth grade.

Her storytelling method seems to rely on listing facts. It’s less about weaving a narrative and more about making a series of declarative statements. Kind of like a diary entry.

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As the talk show chat wraps up, host Wetenhall asks Anderson Trump if she has any ideas about what to title the show. Anderson Trump looks around a beat, notices some potted plants, and then suggests, “I think we could do like ‘Between two palms.’ And this was pretty funny—I mean I don’t know about your other guests but, at least, I think I was pretty funny.”

Anderson Trump gets points for referencing Zach Galifianakis’s silly sketch/interview show, but even live, her instinct was to propose someone else’s good idea before pivoting to a brag about her comedy prowess.

Still, credit where credit’s due. Anderson Trump had the chance to do the funniest thing ever and she took it.

She married Don Jr. And no one will steal that joke from her.

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Nell Scovell

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