As for any other attacks that may come Malia and Sasha’s way, well, they had backup. Former first daughters Jenna, Barbara and Chelsea being well-versed in how painful a nation’s worth of attacks can feel, they never hesitated to speak up.
Not long after a GOP congressional aide scolded the teens for wearing too-short hemlines at the all-important turkey pardoning ceremony (the woman resigned after posting her quickly recanted Facebook missive instructing them to “Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar”), Jenna turned up on Watch What Happens Live in December 2014 in Malia and Sasha’s defense.
“I’m fiercely protective of them, obviously,” Jenna said. “I don’t think that it’s easy. It’s not a job that they wanted.”
But it is one that comes with perks. When nearly a year after Barack left office a video appeared to show Malia, then a freshman at Harvard, smoking, the whole first kids squad turned out, both Ivanka Trump and Chelsea tweeting statements more or less saying, Can a girl live? As Chelsea put it, “Malia Obama’s private life, as a young woman, a college student, a private citizen, should not be your clickbait.”