Soon after Donald Trump Jr. posted a glossy, heavily produced video of his Bahamas island wedding to Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson, many culturally savvy followers noted a number of striking similarities between their ceremony and a much more famous wedding that also starred the son of an American president 30 years earlier.

“Looks like you two copied-(catted Carolyn Bessette) Kennedy and John F Kennedy Jr.,” someone replied to Trump Jr.’s Instagram post, which shared behind-the-scenes footage of the night Trump Jr. “married my best friend, my love, and my forever.”

“That’s funny. I was thinking the same thing that it reminded me of their wedding,” said another person. “Down to the little chapel, her hair and gown. Why be original when you can copy … Camelot,” said yet another.

Trump Jr. and Anderson, his second wife who has since taken his last name, wed Memorial Day weekend at the luxurious Little Pipe Cay, an exclusive 38-acre private island in the Bahamas. The guest list was “intimate” and included fewer than 50 people, CNN reported. In attendance were several of Trump Jr.’s five children with his ex-wife Vanessa Trump and three of his siblings — Ivanka, Eric and Tiffany and their spouses. But as has been widely reported, Trump Jr.’s father, President Trump, stepmother, Melania Trump, and younger brother, Barron, did not make the trip.

Trump Jr.’s video, which he posted on Friday, opens with him and the new Bettina Trump taking a dip in the turquoise waters of the Bahamas in matching white, then switches to the couple individually preparing for the ceremony. It finally brings viewers into a small white chapel on the island, where Bettina walks down the aisle in a sleeveless, silky white slip dress — which is very reminiscent of the sleeveless, silky, bias-cut slip dress worn by Bessette at her Sept. 21, 1996, wedding to Kennedy Jr.

Bessette’s dress, by designer Narciso Rodriguez, is regarded as one of the most famous wedding dresses in 20th-century fashion history. A replica of the gown was recently featured in the sixth episode of the hit Hulu series “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette,” as Vogue magazine reported.

That episode focused on Kennedy Jr. and Bessette’s glamorous, but “rustic and intimate” wedding, which also took place in a small chapel on an island with only a small group of family and friends in attendance, as Vogue reported. They married on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, and Vogue reported that the historic First African Baptist Church, built by freed slaves after the Civil War, could only hold fewer than 50 people.

Among other things, this picturesque chapel had no electricity, so Kennedy Jr. and Bessette’s wedding took place by candlelight. Trump Jr.’s video shows that his wedding chapel on Little Pipe Cay also was lit by candlelight.

“It was the JFK, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette wedding 2.0,” someone wrote on the Keeping Up With The Trumps X account. Another person added: “She copied everything right down to the dress and church from the JFK Jr/ Carolyn Bessette wedding. Nothing original!” In defense of Trump Jr. and Bettina, the person who runs the Keeping Up With The Trumps account, replied: “Everyone is saying that. Super similar but I feel like all slip dresses are the same. I prefer Bettina’s veil and hair.”

Yes, Bettina Trump wore a different-styled veil and let her honey-blonde hair fall loose, while Bessette’s platinum-blonde hair was pulled back into her signature chic bun. But there were still more aesthetic similarities between between the two weddings. For example, Trump Jr.’s Instagram followers noted that the set-up for his wedding dinner toasts — around a long, candlelit table — appears similar to the dinner-table setting for Kennedy Jr. and Bessette’s rehearsal dinner at the Greyfield Inn on Cumberland Island.

One big difference between the two ceremonies is that Kennedy Jr. and Bessette married in the pre-social media era, and most images and video of their wedding have remained private until recently. Carole Radziwill, a former journalist, a “Real Housewives” alum and the wife of the late Anthony Radziwill, Kennedy Jr.’s cousin and best man, shared some of those images with CNN in 2025.

Meanwhile, Trump Jr. and his new wife are regular self-promoters on social media, and they clearly had a full production team attend their wedding. That team captured various moments of the big day and managed to quickly edit their footage into a glossy package that Trump Jr. and influencer Bettina could release as soon as possible for their millions of followers. Production-wise, the video looks suitable for sponcon or as another vehicle for self-mythologizing by the Trump family — in the vein of the Brett Ratner/Amazon MGM Studios documentary “Melania.”

Trump Jr. has sometimes been mentioned as the political heir to his father — not unlike how questions once swirled around whether Kennedy Jr. would one day follow in his father’s footsteps and run for political office. That is, before his 1999 death in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard with Bessette and her sister.

Entertainment writer Rob Shuter reported on his Naughty But Nice Substack that Trump Jr. is indeed considering a future run for the White House and views his marriage to Bettina Trump as part of a broader effort to shape a more traditional, stable public image that could improve his standing among Republican voters.

“Don Jr. thinks being married makes him look more presidential,” one insider told Shuter. “He understands the Republican base. This wasn’t just personal — politically, he sees it as an asset.”

In the past, Trump Jr. has tended to shake off such reports, as The Hill reported. In 2025, he responded to such speculation by saying, “Oh, God. No, no, no, don’t get me into trouble.”

Meanwhile, the Camelot reference from one of Trump Jr.’s followers aligns with oft-reported efforts by members of the Trump family to style themselves as American royalty — not unlike how the Kennedy family was seen as American royalty in the popular imagination.

The Trumps have long regarded themselves “as a modern version of the Kennedys,” author Emily Jane Fox wrote in her 2018 biography of Donald Trump’s three oldest children, “Born Trump: Inside America’s First Family.”

In that book, Fox described how Ivanka Trump, in particular, seized on her father’s stunning victory in the 2016 election to turn his first inauguration into an event that could herald the Trump family’s ascendance as America’s new political and cultural royalty. She worked with a stylist on devising her inauguration day outfits because she told friends she wanted “a princess moment,” according to Fox.

“I told her it’s an inauguration, not a coronation,” one friend told Fox. “The sentiment was that Americans wanted a royal family.”

Others have noted that Ivanka Trump’s apparent Kennedy fixation extended to the names that she and her husband, Jared Kushner, gave to their two oldest children: Arabella and Joseph Frederick. As a writer for Nylon explained in 2018, Arabella is the same name as John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s first daughter, who was stillborn. Meanwhile, Joseph is a popular first name in the Kennedy family, going back to the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr. Moreover, Ivanka Trump’s son, Joseph Frederick Kushner, has the same initials as JFK. “Coincidence? Maybe!” the Nylon writer said.

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