In a further demonstration of how living in these unprecedented times has made everyone a wee bit unstable, a conspiracy theory is circulating at a rapid clip on Resistance Twitter that something suspicious—incriminating documents, the Lindbergh baby, a piece of the True Cross, the pee tape, who knows—is buried in Ivana Trump’s casket. In the aftermath of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, the logic seemingly goes, it might be necessary to dig up Ivana Trump’s grave to see if Donald is hiding anything there. Ivana Trump died in July and was buried at her ex-husband’s golf club in New Jersey, possibly for a tax break, which seems bad enough.
Resistance Twitter is, of course, the odd phenomenon that emerged during the Trump presidency, wherein a group of very overheated public figures began writing frothing threads about the then-president’s perfidy. They were designed not so much to share accurate information about the many irregular things the Trump Administration was doing, but to build their own star power by promulgating conspiracy theories (Trump as a literal Russian agent or Manchurian candidate, for instance) and making predictions that frequently did not come true (mass arrests, the Mueller Report doing anything, you get the idea.) They also managed to take a good number of ordinary people with them, such that one began seeing normal Twitter users with very few followers tweeting like they were writing a draft of a book on collusion or had spent decades researching the emoluments clause. (The term “BlueAnon” emerged to describe the same group of people, and was put to wide use by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene who don’t have a leg to stand on, in terms of accusing other people of spreading conspiracy theories.)
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As former President Trump is embroiled in increasingly serious legal trouble—pleading the Fifth in an ongoing civil inquiry by the New York State Attorney General, getting his precious safe pawed over by the FBI as they raided Mar a Lago—Resistance Twitter power users are hopefully sniffing the breeze and tweeting weird bullshit once again. One of the grimmer things that’s begun circulating is the idea that Ivana Trump’s gold casket was suspiciously heavy, a theory promoted most notably by Jon Cooper, who Politico once politely described as prone to tweeting “outlandish statements.” (The Daily Beast went with the more incisive description “fake garbage.”)
“Seriously, is else anyone wondering—just a bit—what other stuff may be buried inside Ivana’s casket on Trump’s golf course?” Cooper tweeted on August 9, followed by an emoji of a casket and a golf course hole, just in case we didn’t understand what he was getting at.
Conspiracy theories about Ivana’s death, of course, began circulating immediately, as the medical examiner found that she died of blunt impact injuries; Trump was discovered at the bottom of the stairs in her home. The death was ruled to be accidental, but the fact that it happened just before Trump and two of his children were set to be deposed in the New York investigation, delaying their depositions, drove everyone truly, momentarily out of their minds with speculation. (There’s no evidence that there was anything suspicious whatsoever about Ivana’s death.)
Now, once again, we’re getting speculation that Ivana Trump’s shimmering gold casket looked too heavy, or that there were too many pallbearers for a slight woman of 73, or that it doesn’t make sense to bury someone who was reportedly cremated
“apparently, Trump had Ivana CREMATED… so what the hell was stuffed in that casket he had buried under his golf course?,” tweeted William LeGate, an American entrepreneur and another reliable source of tweets in partial capital letters. (People bury their cremated loved ones all the time.)
Famed soap opera actress Nancy Lee Grahn, in a tweet that got a lot of pickup, addressed, the FBI, citing her years of appearing in “implausible storylines.” “May I recommend digging up Ivana,” she wrote, adding, “Clearly it didn’t take 10 pall bearers to carry a liposuction 73 year old who methinks was in her weight in classified docs.”
This line of thinking popped up immediately after news of the raid on Mar-a-Lago, with many hundreds of small accounts responding to viral tweets about the raid suggesting that the FBI search Ivana’s grave next. It is not unusual for small accounts to tweet wild things, but in this case, the idea seems to have filtered up to the Jon Coopers and William LeGates of the world.
A search for “Ivana Trump casket” on Twitter brings up endlessly more of the same.
All of this is both hardly worth noting – a lot of these folks will be on to another unfounded theory tomorrow– and, at the same time, a perfect demonstration of the ways in which this moment in American history is making everyone a little worse. The FBI has, as you might expect, not publicly responded to calls to disinter anybody.
