News & Politics

Tiffany Trump Is Back in DC (And Her New Teacher Robbed a Bank)

Second First Daughter Tiffany Trump has interrupted her steady rush of prismatically lit Instagram stories to let us know that summer is officially over. It’s dead.

Since Trump left Washington last spring at the end of her first year of law school, her feed and the feeds of her frequent taggers—Marla Maples, Snap Packer Andrew Warren—have mostly featured the sun-drenched summer mainstays of New York’s haut monde: parties at the Surf Lodge in Montauk, leaning against Soho House walls, and, why not, dinner with the mayor of Míkonos! Lindsay Lohan, Karen Shiboleth, Naomi Biden (granddaughter to Joe). It’s like flipping through a soft-edged Rich Kids of Instagram edition of Where’s Waldo? That is, it was until today.

“Georgetown University Law Center” Trump labeled a brutal photo of the stairs leading up to campus’ McDonough Hall, then put the photo through a filter so depressingly evocative of yellowed grass it could only have been Abu Dhabi. The stairs, located just up the street from where her security detail’s black Escalade is frequently seen idling, can perhaps best be understood as a metaphor. New year, new climbs.

Trump also recently updated her Instagram bio (and her Twitter bio) to include the fact that she’s a research assistant for Professor Shon Hopwood—a familiar name in DC legal circles. Hopwood is the jailhouse lawyer who had his petition for certiorari, written by him on behalf of a fellow inmate, accepted by the Supreme Court. He was in prison for bank robbery when Hopwood found his calling as a lawyer. Now, he’s a legal academic who has called the US rate of incarceration “one of the big social-justice issues of our time.” When his new RA’s dad commuted the sentence of a 63-year-old grandmother serving life-without-parole for a nonviolent drug offense in June, Hopwood told an interviewer for the Georgetown Law website that he was “greatly encouraged.”

Hopwood is also pursuing executive clemency for his client Matthew Charles, a nonviolent drug offender who served over 20 years in prison before being mistakenly released in 2016, then returned to jail this spring. A Change.org petition to the President advocating Charles’ release has over 130,000 signatures. Hopwood did not respond to emails asking what research Tiffany Trump will be assisting him with this semester, but it’s clear she’s ready to work hard.

Or, as Trump herself put it, “Summer ✔ back to ⚖.”

Contributing Editor

Amanda has contributed to Washingtonian since 2016. She has written about the right-wing media personality Britt McHenry, chronicled her night with Stormy Daniels, and come clean about owning too much stuff. She lives on H Street. She can be reached at [email protected].