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There’s a lot to complain about when it comes to the president’s granddaughter’s morally repugnant video diary of her Secret Service–chaperoned trip to a luxury supermarket, and I’ve been pleased to see that the internet has already articulated many of the biggest vectors of objection: It was spectacularly insensitive, for one thing, and a waste of our tax dollars, for another. But I’m here to add another point of criticism to the chorus: Kai Trump’s video, the thing at the center of all this outrage, was a pretty boring effort. The ability to piss people off is an important skill for an influencer to have, and she nailed that, but content-wise, she has a ways to go.
Trump is an 18-year-old high school senior and President Donald Trump’s eldest grandchild. She has been building her online following since at least 2024, when she received her first taste of the national spotlight after introducing her grandfather at that year’s Republican National Convention. Her main building block in this act of persona construction has been a series of vlogs about her life as a normal teenager who just so happens to be Donald Trump’s grandkid. Though previous videos of hers have edged into unrelatable territory—most teens don’t get to drive in NASCAR races or go to the NBA All-Star Game—she also mines more everyday experiences, like going to a homecoming dance or cooking with a friend. If a squad of Secret Service agents usually accompanies her on her adventures, she hasn’t previously led with that, the way she for some reason does on this jaunt to Erewhon.
Though everyone is right that visiting a super-fancy Los Angeles grocery store during a cost-of-living crisis makes Trump look like a modern-day Marie Antoinette, it was a bad idea for a video for another reason: Every influencer on Earth has already gone to Erewhon and made a video about it. Do you know how many videos there are on YouTube about taking a trip to the “world’s most expensive grocery store”? So many, going back years. Did anyone really need the Kai Trump spin on this tired concept? Isn’t she embarrassed to be essentially re-creating a video that dozens of more charismatic creators have already made?
Watching it, I wondered if Trump had ever been to a grocery store before, period. “We’re gonna get my favorite stuff, even supplements, whatever it may be,” she announces at the beginning. Do teenagers really care about supplements? But she does, apparently, and she spends a generous stretch of the video contemplating Erewhon’s impressive selection of collagen peptides. Is anyone else horrified that we have brainwashed our children to be interested in luxury collagen peptides?
Trump is not the clearest speaker, which is not usually something I would criticize a teenager for, but this teenager is trying to be an influencer, making her inability to articulate a stumbling block. “Weshuhhavegahabasket,” she says, wandering through the aisles—thank goodness for closed captioning . A camera operator is there to help her, asking direct questions that will give her material to later shape into a video. I started wondering about him and what his story was, this Matt. How did he end up doomed to spend so much time hanging out with a teenager? It can’t be a good sign for your content if the main subject is so boring you start to invent backstories for the side characters.
Trump goes back to her hotel room with Matt and tries some of the stuff she bought. She loves the smoothie and the cauliflower, but the sushi is disgusting, and the nitro water is just water. Earlier, she had remarked that she couldn’t believe how expensive the sweatshirts were, even though she sells her own sweatshirts that are almost as expensive. She’s going to go bankrupt from this store, ha ha ha, she declares, seemingly blissfully oblivious of her grandfather’s financial struggles. Is it mean of me to be so judgy about this poor girl’s video? If anyone’s mean, maybe we really need to look to her family, who should have stopped her from releasing footage this inane.
