Schadenfreude, a German word meaning "pleasure derived from another person's misfortune," isn't exactly accurate when you're talking about The Trump Kids. It might have been Junior's misfortune to have Donald Trump as a father, but that's no excuse for his eagerness to meet with cutouts of a hostile foreign power promising dirt on a political opponent. Or, for that matter, his vicious public dickishness. And there's certainly no misfortune to be found in the case of Ivanka Trump, the favorite child whom the president once suggested he'd be dating if she wasn't his daughter.

Ivanka, you see, is back in the news thanks to CNN:

President Donald Trump pressured his then-chief of staff John Kelly and White House counsel Don McGahn to grant his daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump a security clearance against their recommendations, three people familiar with the matter told CNN. The President's crusade to grant clearances to his daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, rankled West Wing officials.

While Trump has the legal authority to grant clearances, most instances are left up to the White House personnel security office, which determines whether a staffer should be granted one after the FBI has conducted a background check. But after concerns were raised by the personnel office, Trump pushed Kelly and McGahn to make the decision on his daughter and son-in-law's clearances so it did not appear as if he was tainting the process to favor his family, sources told CNN. After both refused, Trump granted them their security clearances.

You might remember that just last week, her husband—the Son-in-Law-in-Chief, Jared Kushner—was also exposed along the same lines. This is, first of all, a phenomenal argument against nepotism. These people are not qualified to be senior White House advisers by any measure except that they attend Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago.

Javanka stroll the White House lawn in November. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

But it's also a national-security issue. If the FBI conducted a background check and found they are not fit to receive classified information, it's because there is something in their background that makes them a risk. Do they have financial problems that could be exploited for leverage? Do they have dark deeds in their past that could hurt them if they went public—an ideal weapon for blackmailers? The latter seems to have been the case for Rob Porter, one of the president's closest personal aides who was denied a security clearance but had access to mountains of classified information anyway. Eventually, we learned both his ex-wives had accused him of domestic violence.

Kushner meets with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the authoritarian leader of Turkey, this week. < Getty Images

And of course, Jared the Dauphin has some issues with finances. When he took the job, the distressed state of his private real-estate firm—fro which he performed a sham divestment when he took the White House gig, presenting a raging conflict-of-interest mirroring his father-in-law's—is one of the pressure points that operatives from four different foreign governments were caught chattering about by U.S. intelligence services. Officials from the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel, and Mexico hoped to exploit Kushner's weakness and diplomatic naïveté to extract the policies they desired from the United States government. Kushner was also caught communicating with foreign officials without coordinating with the National Security Council.

This is why you don't hire family to learn on the job, and you don't give them top-secret security clearances against the advice of the professionals. It's unclear for now what the worries were about getting Ivanka a clearance, but CNN reports "officials had concerns about granting Trump a clearance that were separate from those raised about her husband, according to one of the sources."

Is there a clip of Ivanka Trump denying all this less than a month ago? Why didn't you ask earlier?

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Here's Ivanka Trump earlier this month, saying that she and Jared Kushner absolutely did not get any special treatment during the security clearance process. pic.twitter.com/hZ7CuvUw44 — Caroline Orr Bueno (@RVAwonk) March 1, 2019

Maybe Ivanka legitimately did not know that her father intervened in getting her and Kushner their clearances, and was in the dark like everyone else. Or maybe, like the rest of this clan of deceitful crooks, she was lying. What do you expect from someone who waltzed into the office and became one of at least six Trump advisers to use private email for official government business, after running a campaign centered around accusing their opponent of treason for doing the same thing?

And she's not the only Trump Kid with some problematic news to contend with this morning. Junior has made his triumphant return, so soon after an appearance in The Michael Cohen Diaries:

That's right, The New York Times got hold of eight checks that the president cut to Michael Cohen to pay him back in what Cohen has stated under oath was a hush money scheme that violated campaign finance laws. (As historian Kevin Kruse pointed out on Twitter, Trump's unmistakably bad Sharpie-signature on six of them absolutely confirms his involvement in this alleged criminal enterprise.) But of course, Junior, always eager to please, had to get in on the action—signing two of the checks himself. It's another blow for DJT, after Cohen testified last week that his father frequently said "his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world."

Again, this might seem like a schadenfreude overdose until you remember Junior is a vicious bully online, reveling in his father's cruelty and Trail of Tears jokes with the very worst of them. The Trump Kids are not deserving of pity or empathy. They've shown little to anyone outside their crooked clan, and they simply have no ethics to speak of. Maybe their father deserves a share of the blame, but eventually it's time to grow up. It's no coincidence that, when Junior got in trouble for huddling with all those Russians at Trump Tower in search of dirt on Hillary Clinton, his allies said "the kid is an honest kid." Junior was 39 years old at the time.

In other news, of course, they have followed El Jefe's lead to ruthlessly monetize the presidency. Ivanka in particular is neck-deep in conflicts-of-interest and, along with her husband, made at least $82 million their first year in the White House. Meanwhile, Junior works on the outside to Dyson up cash for the Trump Organization—including in foreign lands whose governments might want something from his father. They are all shiny-suit banditos, relishing The Great American Heist. They would stuff the republic into a burlap sack if they could.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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