The Clintons may have retreated to Chappaqua and the Trumps to Florida, but the coattails of nepotism never leave the White House for long. And President Biden’s biggest headache may not be his troubled son, Hunter, but rather Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena.
Although the administration’s attorneys have warned Meena to back off and stop using her famous aunt’s likeness to build her brand, Meena seems keen to take the admonition as literally as possible, giving the president a headache not seen, well, since his predecessor.
Even though she technically left the company before her father’s inauguration, Ivanka Trump gave her father’s attorneys a headache for the two years of her fashion line’s continued existence. Sure, the former first daughter was no longer running the brand, but from her high-profile appearances donning her own goods and Kellyanne Conway arguably violating the Hatch Act by promoting her line on television, it seemed unethical for Ivanka to profit from her famous father’s last name while both were working in the White House.
Biden now faces a similar problem. Meena, who used to work at Uber with her stepfather, Tony West, has pivoted full-time into the constant self-promotion of “influencing.” During her aunt’s failed presidential campaign, Meena profited from merchandise branded with Harris’s likeness. Overnight, sweatshirts boasting “Vice President Aunty” and “Vote For Aunty” turned Meena from a nobody attorney to a #resistance social media star. Even today, she may still be profiting from her children’s book, Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea. (Maya is Meena’s mother, the one-time chairwoman of Harris’s presidential campaign who was crucially blamed by staff for Harris’s collapse).
“Some things can’t be undone,” an anonymous White House official told the Los Angeles Times after it warned Meena that the grift needed to go by the time her aunt finally became the first woman vice president. “That being said: Behavior needs to change.”
So far, it’s not looking promising. On Inauguration Day, Beats, the headphones line by rapper Dr. Dre, sent out special edition headphones emblazoned with “the first but not the last,” a Harris slogan, to celebrities. Meena, whose Instagram posts went from cracking barely a few hundred likes prior to her aunt’s presidential campaign to tens if not hundreds of thousands today, also modeled for Prada as a part of the virtual Milan Fashion Week.
What’s the difference between booking some lawyer from the Bay Area to model next to actual supermodels and Republicans patronizing Trump businesses or Democratic donors at NBC News hiring Chelsea Clinton as a “special correspondent” who does little actual journalism for $600,000?
But unlike the casual corruption of administrations past, the tacky celebrity of Meena Harris is so explicitly transactional, and her aunt’s boss so committed to decorum, that it’s hard to see how she gets away with it for long. Maybe Biden will let her, but if he does, the media will be right to mock his administration’s discount version of Ivanka Trump.
