Lara Trump blames ‘too safe’ playgrounds for reckless spring break behaviour after Santa Barbara deck collapse

Lara Trump said over the weekend that ‘maybe we need to stop giving participation trophies and coddling the kids’

Lara Trump decided to take aim at the playground industry by drawing a shaky line between the structures being constructed nowadays and a recent incident where crowds of spring breakers overwhelmed Santa Barbara balconies to dangerous levels.

Ms Trump appeared as a contributor on the Fox News program The Big Sunday Show alongside a panel to discuss recent news stories from the week, including the war in Ukraine, carjackings in America and one particular story that caught the attention of the daughter-in-law to the former US president: a deck that was swarmed by hundreds of “out of control spring break crowds”, as the Fox chyron labelled them.

“I gotta say for a bunch of college kids … a lot these kids look pretty dumb with some of the things they’re doing,” Ms Trump began. “Like packing onto these outdoor decks, like thousands of people on there.”

The event that Ms Trump was referring to, known locally as “Deltopia”, occurs in Santa Barbara each year, but this past weekend was the first time the spring break attraction had run in the past two years due to the pandemic.

It attracted thousands of students, with videos circulating of students spilling out onto the street and clambering onto overpacked balconies and roofs leading to authorities to declare a “multi casualty incident” after several medical emergencies were phoned into the block where the party was being held.

As quickly as Ms Trump brought up the weekend party chaos, she pivoted to connect the overcrowding balconies to a study she’d read about how the construction of “too safe” playgrounds was leading to children not developing a proper sense of risk, and these structures were to blame for the reckless spring break behaviour witnessed over the weekend in California.

“So, the idea is that — you know we used to have metal slides where you’d burn yourself going down and those sort of things. That taught us a lesson. That taught us how to take risks … what was riskier behaviour,” Ms Trump began, while fellow co-host former pro-wrestler George ‘Tyrus’ Murdoch fought off giggles.

“Our kids today have been so coddled that maybe you don’t know that if you put 500 people on an outdoor deck it may collapse and these are not great ideas.”

Ms Trump went on to note that social media was also to blame for the students’ poorly executed logic when it came to assessing how many people could fit on a deck, and also went on to fault society at large for giving out too many “participation trophies”.

“Let them fall down and hurt themselves a few times and maybe they won’t hurt themselves. I don’t know. And now I’m officially old.”

Rolling Stone reported last November that Ms Trump, a former campaign official for her father-in-law, was reportedly one of the high-ranking inner circle members that organisers of the “Stop the Steal” rally communicated with to use burden phones, including her husband, Eric Trump and then chief-of-staff Mark Meadows.