by Mark Harvey
There’s a video of Ivanka Trump going on breathlessly about how she and her husband, Jared Kushner, happened upon an island named Sazan in the Mediterranean while yachting with friends. In her story, they noticed the island in the middle of nowhere, swam to its shores, then hiked barefoot to the summit. She describes the whole sequence of events as if she and Kushner discovered the land a la Vasco de Gama. Then she describes their plans to develop a multi-billion-dollar resort there, but with a light touch so that people can live the way she likes to live.
If you knew nothing about Sazan, and nothing about the gaslighting genes of the Trump family—practically an annex genome—you might envision a virgin isle enshrouded in a soft mist, fairly begging to be transformed by the light touch of Ivanka.
But as with all things Trump, Ivanka’s version of the world travels through a snookering prism so bizarre that it has anyone with a marginally functioning brain hopping up and down yelling, “That’s not true.”
Ivanka’s blasé comments about developing Sazan may not be entirely responsible for tens of thousands of Albanians taking to the streets in May and June to protest what they consider to be a corrupt government and flagrant abuse of power, but the Contessa from Florida definitely added fuel to the fire, in an uprising nicknamed The Flamingo Revolution.
Sazan is a tiny Island of just two square miles and sits where the Adriatic Sea meets the Ionian Sea. It’s part of Albania and is only virgin land in the sense that the Flushing Line of the NY subway system is virgin land. In fact, Sazan shares some features with the NY Subway system in that it is riddled with more than 3,000 Cold War bunkers and 10 miles of secret tunnels. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s dictator from 1944 to 1985, went on a bunker-building spree that made the Soviets look downright Haight-Ashbury, live-and-let-live. He is said to have considered Soviet leaders like Kruschev much too soft and ultimately aligned Albania with China in an effort to find a partner more committed to Marxism-Leninism. Read more »