Ivanka, Go Home!
An entire nation speaks out to protect a cherished island from the Trump family.
“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”
That’s how President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, described how she and her husband, Jared Kushner, “discovered” Sazan Island, which sits in the Adriatic off the coast of Albania, during the summer of 2021.
The “friend’s boat” belonged to Nathaniel Rothschild, a British financier and billionaire from the prominent Rothschild banking family.
The island Ivanka referred to as an “unbelievable, beautiful 1,400-hectare private island” is not private. It is public land, a nature preserve belonging to the people of Albania, a national treasure, not a playground for the rich and famous.
For the next several years, Ivanka and Jared returned to Albania for meetings with Prime Minister Rama, pursuing their designs to turn the island into an international luxury resort with $1.5 billion in funding from Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners.
The luxury project has two components: a coastal development in the Narta Lagoon area, which is a wildlife reserve, and a smaller resort on the nearby uninhabited island of Sazan.
In late April of this year, heavy construction machinery, bulldozers, and excavators rolled directly onto the protected land without any environmental permits or public warning.
They immediately began destroying coastal pine forests, flattening pristine sand dunes, and carving access roads through untouched wetland wilderness. At the same time, Ivanka and Jared’s developers erected miles of barbed wire fencing, locking out local fishermen and villagers from public beaches.
THE FLAMINGO REVOLUTION
Infuriated by the sight of active earth-movers destroying the habitats of the region’s famous pink flamingos and other highly protected wildlife, local activists and residents gathered on May 23rd last month for the very first rally at the site, dubbing their protest the “Flamingo Revolution.”
Then came a bombshell: Prime Minister Edi Rama was also on board the Rothschild yacht that day in 2021 with Ivanka and Jared when they went to Sazan Island.
Rama had been privately coordinating with them from the very beginning, rewriting environmental protection laws tailored specifically for Ivanka and Jared, granting them “special investor” status, spending years quietly laying the legal groundwork to strip away conservation statuses for foreign billionaires.
PUBLIC OUTRAGE EXPLODED, TRIGGERING A MASSIVE POLITICAL UPRISING ACROSS THE NATION.
Over the past weekend, 250,000 people in this small country of less than 3 million citizens flooded Tirana, the nation’s capital, demanding Rama’s immediate resignation, criminal prosecution, and early national elections. Albanian state police have actively deployed riot tactics against demonstrators, using water cannons and blocking city streets to disperse crowds.
During protests at the coastal preserve, a local landowner was assaulted, handcuffed, and violently dragged over rocky terrain by private security guards hired by the resort developers to keep the public off the beach. State Police officers reportedly stood by, watched, and refused to intervene.
The assault triggered such severe public fury that Prime Minister Rama was forced to fire the local police chief, revoke the private security companies’ licenses, and dismantle the fence around the project in an attempt to quell the uprising.
Yet Rama remains adamant in his support of Ivanka and Jared, dismissing the protesters’ concerns as nothing more than “fake news,” vowing, “there is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop as long as I am here.”
The demonstrations are now in their fourth consecutive week, with Albanians taking to the streets daily in what has become a full-scale anti-government revolt.
Along with demanding Rama's immediate resignation, the protesters are calling for the dissolution of the resort deal and a restoration of the environmental protections that were altered without transparency or public debate.
They resoundingly denounce Ivanka and Jared as “cold-blooded billionaires who only want to colonize” Albania’s natural heritage and the “global 1-percent” acting above the law.
Many of the young men and women spearheading the protests were born after 1992, when communism finally fell in Albania. They are the first generation to grow up with the European horizon in view, and refuse to accept decisions made without transparency, especially when they smack of corruption and are designed to benefit a modern oligarchy of American influence and privilege.
One young student demonstrator told journalists, "Who is really benefiting from this development today? No Albanian citizen. It’s as if this country isn’t ours anymore."
Another demonstrator noted, “This protest should push the whole world to take to the streets against the global elite. For peace, justice, and respect for human beings.”
Postscript:
This isn’t a first for Jared Kushner, whose investment firm, Affinity Partners, received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund shortly after he left the White House in 2021.
In November of last year, Serbia’s Parliament passed a special law to enable Affinity Partners to build a luxury complex in the capital, Belgrade.
The following month, Serbia’s prosecutor for organized crime charged four people, including a government minister, with abuse of office and falsification of documents to help pave the way for the development.
Within hours after the criminal indictments were announced on December 15, 2025, Kushner’s firm officially scrapped the project.
Resources:
Luxury Kushner Project Collides With Albanian Discontent NYT
‘We want a new Albania’: protests against Jared Kushner-backed resort turn anger on government ~ The Guardian
Albanian protests over Kushner-linked resort project grow into anti-government rallies ~ MS Now
How Jared Kushner Sparked a Political Crisis in Albania ~ The Nation
As bulldozers roll, ‘flamingo revolution’ erupts in Albania against Kushner-Trump luxury resort ~ CNS
A look at the Albanian island where a Kushner-Trump resort plan has sparked protests ~ PBS
What to know about opposition in Albania to a Trump family-linked resort development ~ ABC
Jared Kushner defends controversial $2bn Saudi investment ~ BBC
Serbia passes bill enabling Jared Kushner to build luxury compound despite opposition ~ PBS
Good for the Albanians!
Shine the light of truth, Brad!