On Monday, Donald Trump’s extended family gathered in Washington, D.C., for a packed schedule of inaugural events. Behind the scenes, though, one of them seems to have been navigating both romantic and familial strife: Donald Trump Jr. brought his new girlfriend, Bettina Anderson, to the Capitol, only to run into his ex-fiancée. He then showed up to the weekend’s most important events solo amid rumors that Trump’s inner circle doesn’t like Anderson’s vibe. By the time Trump’s children were summoned to slow-dance with their spouses at the inaugural ball, Anderson was nowhere to be seen, and Don Jr. had tapped his 17-year-old daughter, Kai — rapidly becoming a front-facing family mascot — to sub in as his date. And in Kai’s new vlog from the weekend, Don Jr. seems very eager to present himself not as a guy who probably cheated on his fiancée with a Floridian socialite who’s now being iced out of family functions but as a dad simply dying to dance with his daughter.
“I love this little Smurf so much,” Don Jr. says when Kai invites him to say a few words during some pre-ceremony downtime, gushing about a speech she’d made the day before (“She absolutely crushed it”) and adding, “Even if at her age, dads are not cool, I love her so much.” Both of them seem nervous about dancing together, which they have apparently never done. “Kai’s gonna break out some of her breakdancing moves,” Don Jr. jokes, at which point Kai demonstrates her “frat flick,” prompting her father to beg her to “please don’t do that one.”
Kai also included footage of herself practicing the slow dance with her dad in the White House right before the ball and both of them fist-punching to the “YMCA” onstage. Two of Don Jr.’s younger children, Donny and Chloe, seem to have also joined them for some of the slow-dancing — one clip shows Kai dancing with Donny, who’s two years younger than her, while Don Jr. spins 11-year-old Chloe. What a touching portrait of a guy who recently called his daughter “sexy.”