Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding scandal with Bettina Anderson only gets stranger when you read their response.

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When it came out that Donald Trump Jr.’s recent wedding was secretly paid for by a Russian oligarch, I had a completely rational, normal response, which was this: I guess Taylor Swift has been vindicated once again. You’ll recall that when Swift got married earlier this year, people were quick to call it the tackiest wedding of the year, maybe ever. Swift is not not an oligarch in her own right, but you know what’s definitely tackier than getting married at Madison Square Garden? Getting one of Putin’s cronies to foot your wedding bills.

For this and other revelations, we can thank the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica, which on Monday broke the news that a wealthy Russian man named Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Trump Jr.’s May wedding to Bettina Anderson. Arrangements included the rental of a private island, a fireworks display, and female dancers dressed in sailor outfits. Kremlev is the head of the controversy-steeped International Boxing Association and an associate of Vladimir Putin’s who, as ProPublica reported, has not known Trump Jr. long, despite Trump elsewhere saying that he invited only close friends to the wedding weekend. For his part, Trump’s brother, Eric Trump, told the news outlet that he had “absolutely no clue” who Kremlev is.

Anderson and Trump, in an Instagram caption accompanying a slideshow of wedding weekend photos that communicated how little shame they feel, sort of confirmed and sort of denied the allegations. According to the post, their “dear friend” Kremlev wasn’t even at their actual wedding in the Bahamas on Friday, May 22, because just family attended that (though one important family member was notably absent). Trump and Anderson just so happened to be spending a weekend with friends immediately following the wedding, at which point Kremlev “generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations” for them, Anderson wrote. “Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.”

Let me see if I have that straight: Anderson seems to concede that it would be a problem if Kremlev paid for their wedding, but she doesn’t see why it’s a problem that he paid for several events right after their wedding during which their friends and families celebrated their marriage and Anderson wore white, events that just about any reasonable person would describe as wedding parties. It strikes me as strange that Anderson’s bothering to qualify anything. Sure, accepting such a lavish gift from a Russian oligarch is brazenly corrupt, but is it beyond the Trump family’s usual level of corrupt? Do these people have a line, and if so, where is it? As the ProPublica story pointed out, Trump is worth a reported $300 million and could have afforded the wedding, so accepting blood money was less about financials than about corruption for corruption’s sake.

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While reading the ProPublica piece, I was reminded of a story involving another Trump child, Tiffany Trump, her husband, and the promise of an invitation to their wedding in exchange for cash, a deal that never actually materialized. I figured that story must have been from years ago, but I looked up the dates, and lo and behold, it was only about one year ago that it was reported by the New York Times, about nine months after Tiffany’s December 2024 wedding. Have we really come this far in so short an amount of time, from whispers of maybe accepting a bribe for a wedding invitation but never actually going through with it to fully letting an oligarch pay for a wedding? I don’t think any of this would have happened during the first Trump administration. I hesitate to think what these people will think they can get away with a year from now.

At their own perfectly reasonable wedding, Swift and Kelce ordered custom handkerchiefs for their party, featuring their wedding logo and a line from one of Swift’s songs, “Blank Space,” embroidered onto them: “So it’s gonna be forever …” At the time, I called using this particular quote “ominous,” which I stand by. But it really didn’t seem so bad after all once I saw Anderson and Trump’s wedding napkins (in their slideshow/defense), which featured a quote by ominousness personified, Edgar Allan Poe: More than love? Now we know: Hundreds of thousands of dollars more, at least.