Social media activity suggests 'trouble brewing' for Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr

Donald Trump Jr. and his sister Ivanka are behaving like they're waiting for another shoe to drop.

Former president Donald Trump's eldest children enjoyed a high profile when he served in the White House, and his namesake son has tried to stay in the spotlight on social media and by recording personalized video messages for $500 each -- which Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi flagged as suspicious.

"What gives?" she writes. "Is the former president's eldest child desperate for attention or desperate for money?"

Trump Jr. seems to be just as addicted to social media attention as his father, but Mahdawi noted that he and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle recently sold their home in the Hamptons for more than $8 million, almost double their purchase price just two years ago.

"When you are pocketing profits like that, why bother flogging yourself on online video platforms?" Mahdawi writes. "Expensive lawsuits, maybe?"

Ivanka Trump seems to have given up her aspirations to run for the U.S. Senate in Florida, as has been rumored, and stepped back from social media to focus on "family time."

Eric Trump's wife Lara has also declined to announce her own candidacy for Senate in North Carolina, as had also been rumored, and has instead remained a surrogate for the twice-impeached one-term president as a paid contributor on Fox News.

"One imagines [Lara Trump] ran a few focus groups, which told her, unequivocally, that no one wants to see another Trump in politics for a very long time," Mahdawi writes.

Those clues all add up to suggest there's "trouble brewing" for Trump's children, she says, and which matches reporting from Vanity Fair and othersources.

"For legal reasons, I should make it clear that I am in no way insinuating that the Trump family is on the verge of being bankrupted and ruined reputationally by a swathe of lawsuits," Mahdawi writes. "But I am also not not saying that."