Ivana Trump is buried near the first tee at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Allegedly cremated, then interred in a solitary grave close enough to the clubhouse that golfers do not see it on their way to the first swing. The New York Post photographed it in 2022. It is small. It is not overrun. It is, by the available record, quietly maintained.
What is not maintained is the explanation for why she is there at all. New Jersey exempts cemetery land from property tax, income tax, and sales tax, with no minimum number of remains required to qualify. Trump had been shopping local officials a burial concept for that property since 2007, at various points proposing a family mausoleum and, at another point, a thousand-plot commercial cemetery open to club members for purchase. His actual family plot, the one with his parents and grandparents in it, already exists in Queens. He did not choose that one.
So here is the thought experiment, and it requires no conspiracy, no missing autopsy, no unmarked field of anonymous graves. Just the plain mechanics of a man who has spent his whole life treating every asset, every relationship, every piece of leverage as a line item, applied one more time to the disposition of the mother of his children.
A body is not just a body to a man who has spent seventy years converting everything he touches into value. It is a property designation. Bury one person on a golf course and the golf course becomes a cemetery, and a cemetery does not pay tax. The love, the grief, the funeral, the front-row seat at the service: all real, presumably, and also, simultaneously, a line on a filing.
You do not need to imagine other bodies to find that disturbing. You only need to notice that the same mind capable of looking at a wife’s cremated remains and seeing, even partially, a tax instrument, is the mind currently deciding what else in this country counts as an asset, a resource, a thing to be repurposed for the deduction. The golf course did not need more bodies to make the point. It needed exactly one, in exactly the right filing category, and it got her.
That is the whole thought experiment. Not what else is buried out there. What kind of mind buries what it loved and remembers, first, the zoning.
I wonder how Trump explained that to her children? I wonder if they questioned his decision at all? I wonder how they all live with themselves. I wonder if there is any human decency left in any of them?
I honestly think that their children are so crooked that they think this is just fine. I taste bile just thinking that. I wouldn’t put anything past this family.