If New Grandchild A Boy, Trump Promises ‘Huge’ Circumcision

He pronounced that word as if the H were a Y, as is his custom.

New York, February 9 – GOP presidential hopeful and real estate mogul Donald Trump voiced excitement today at the upcoming birth of his next grandchild, promising that if his Jewish daughter has a boy, the circumcision will be “huge.”

Ivanka, 34, and her husband, Jared Kushner, are expecting their third child sometime in the late winter or early spring. Ivanka converted to Judaism before marrying Kushner, and they raise their children in an Orthodox home. In Jewish practice, healthy newborn boys are circumcised on the eighth day of life, and Trump assured reporters and admirers that the ceremony, called a bris in Ashkenazic Hebrew, will be “the most amazing bris, just terrific. It’ll be huge.” He pronounced that word as if the H were a Y, as is his custom.

Ivanka and Jared already have a son Joseph, in addition to their firstborn daughter, Arabella. Joseph’s bris was an elaborate affair, in keeping with both families’ financial and social standing, but Trump made no such pronouncement in advance of that earlier event. Observers attribute the difference in rhetoric to the timing, with the Republican primaries in full swing and the attendant greater media coverage of the candidates inviting more superlative rhetoric from the egomaniac billionaire.

“I can’t honestly expect the next bris to be much different from the last one,” offered journalist Brit Hume of CNN. “There might be more hype, but as we saw in Iowa, hype does not necessarily translate into success. As the date gets closer and we get a sense of the arrangements for the ritual and the feast that follows it, there might be some indication one way or the other, but it’s simply imprudent at this point to speculate.”

Others expressed outright skepticism at Trump’s prediction. “Aside from the fact that Trump’s bluster is seldom justified, there really is only so much that goes on at a Jewish circumcision,” contended polling expert Nate Silver. “Is the mohel going to bring larger clamps than usual? A bigger scalpel? Doubtful. He’ll do the same thing he always does: clamp the foreskin above the tip of the member, slice it off with a scalpel, remove the slide clamp, make any additional cuts as necessary for aesthetic purposes, apply some suction, and then dress the wound. There’s nothing ‘huge’ about it.”

In response to a male journalist crossing his legs protectively as Silver spoke, the expert assured him there was a slightly greater statistical likelihood the baby would be a girl anyway.