How Ivana and Donald Trump’s bitter divorce changed the lives of their children
Donald and Ivana Trump’s children were still young during the bitter breakdown of their marriage. It had a lifelong effect on one of them.
Ivana Trump maintained a genuine friendship with her ex-husband, former US president Donald Trump, throughout the later years of her life, speaking to him frequently and even offering him advice during his time in the White House.
That magnanimity was quite extraordinary, particularly when you consider the bitter circumstances of their divorce, and the life-shaping impact it had on their three children, Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric.
Ivana was found unconscious and unresponsive in her New York apartment on Thursday afternoon, local time, and was pronounced dead at the age of 73. In a statement, Donald said his first wife was “a wonderful, beautiful and amazing woman” who had led “a great and inspirational life”.
The infamous public breakdown of the couple’s 15-year marriage in the early 1990s, precipitated by Donald’s affair with Marla Maples, is discussed at some length in the documentary series Trump Unprecedented, which premiered earlier this week.
It’s an uncomfortable subject, but one that provides a keen insight into the dynamics of the Trump family and the former president’s relationships with his eldest children.
The three-episode documentary is available to watch on Foxtel, Flash and BINGE.
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Playing favourites
Filmmaker Alex Holder gained exclusive access to the Trump family between September of 2020 and January of 2021, a period which included the closing weeks of Donald’s presidential election campaign against Joe Biden. He conducted multiple interviews with Donald, Don Jr, Ivanka and Eric.
There is a small but striking moment in the first episode. In separate interviews, Don Jr and Ivanka describe their attempts to check up on their father after his hospitalisation with Covid in the middle of the campaign.
Ivanka recalls her father’s attempt to comfort her by downplaying his illness.
“He was almost blase when I called him that morning, when he went to the hospital. ‘Oh I’m fine, I’m OK.’ In a way that a father, I think, would say to his daughter, not wanting her to be too afraid,” she says.
“But I heard it in his voice. I mean, I know him. So I knew right away that he was not OK.”
Don Jr, describing a more abrupt conversation, claims no such insight.
“I’m calling him to check in on him. ‘I’m fine, leave me alone. I’m busy making calls. I’ll call you later on,’” he recounts.
“I’m like, ‘I’m just trying to be a good son, checking in on you!’”
Whatever else you may think of the eldest Trump child, he has a disarmingly self-deprecating sense of humour; his retelling of the phone call is intended to provoke laughter, not sympathy.
But the two competing anecdotes subtly illustrate what those close to the Trump family have always said: Ivanka is her father’s favourite, and Don is the black sheep.
Or at least, he was.
The ‘catalysing moment’
“I think, in a lot of ways, the divorce was the catalysing event that shaped Trump’s relationship with his various children,” The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins tells Holder.
He says Ivanka has been Donald’s favourite “for pretty much her entire life”, and one key reason for that is “how she handled the divorce”.
The collapse of Ivana and Donald’s marriage was constant fodder for the New York City tabloids, and their children were not immune to the media frenzy. Reporters were known to follow them to school. And Donald’s insatiable hunger for publicity did not help.
“This was a traumatising experience, made worse, frankly, by the fact that their father was actually encouraging the story,” says Coppins.
“There was reporting later that Trump was secretly working the gossip columnists and the tabloids, and almost relished the coverage this story was getting.”
Don Jr, a young teenager at the time, was four years older than Ivanka and six years older than Eric. The two eldest children reacted very differently: Ivanka stuck by her father, while Don Jr was full of resentment.
“Ivanka seemed determined to ensure that she would remain close to her father. That effort by Ivanka shaped their relationship for the rest of their lives; she was always the favourite,” says Coppins.
“Don reacted almost in the polar opposite way. He was angry about the divorce, he was angry about how he was brought up, and it took him a while to get over that.”
The boy stopped speaking to his father.
Rebellion
The two children’s wildly different reactions to the divorce were discussed in more depth in one of the more interesting episodes of The New York Times’ podcast The Daily, which aired back in August of 2020.
“Somewhat famously, after his father and his mother divorced, Don refused to speak to his dad for a year,” reporter Jason Zengerle explained on that podcast.
“He was at a terrible age for this. He was old enough to actually realise what was going on. His two siblings, Ivanka and Eric, were in some ways too young to understand. He was old enough to understand. He was old enough to get teased by his classmates. And I think it was just a searing experience for him.”
According to Zengerle, Don Jr responded by trying “to get away from it”, and by distancing himself from his famous family name. After being sent to boarding school, he “tried to forge his own distinct identity”.
He took up hobbies and interests of which his father disapproved, such as hunting.
“He got really into the outdoors in a way that his father just couldn’t understand, and just found the whole thing baffling. But Don Jr really poured himself into that.”
Later, at university, Don noticeably downplayed his famous surname. His frat brothers nicknamed him “Ron Rump”, and he appeared to appreciate the relative anonymity.
For the son of Donald Trump, whose business, TV and then political careers were all built on the weaponisation of his surname as its own brand, this was a sin. So was Don Jr’s next move after graduating. He rejected the family business.
“He had a job waiting for him at his father’s company, but he didn’t take it. He went out to Aspen for about a year-and-a-half, and he skied, and he hunted, and he fished. And he was a bartender,” Zengerle said.
The rebellion did not last. Eventually, Don Jr did join the Trump Organisation, feeling he “had to take his place”.
A son’s redemption
Real estate, it transpired to few people’s surprise, was not Don Jr’s calling.
“He’s a peripheral figure in the Trump Organisation. He’s a peripheral figure, I think, in his father’s life,” said Zengerle.
The distance between father and son persisted when Donald decided to run for president in 2015. Ivanka, still the favourite, was the one introducing Donald at marquee campaign events. She and her husband, Jared Kushner, were central figures within the campaign.
Don Jr, meanwhile, was mostly given small, relatively unimportant tasks, of the sort he “couldn’t mess up”. Going hunting in front of the media cameras, for example.
When Donald beat Hillary Clinton, he invited Ivanka and Jared to work in the White House as close advisers. Her siblings Eric and Don were sent back to run the Trump Organisation – Eric because he seemed to have more interest in business than politics anyway; Don because there was little else for him to do.
He was put in charge of the international side of the business, at a time when his father had promised it would strike no new foreign deals (to avoid the appearance of any inappropriate overseas influences).
“Not only is he not involved in his father’s presidency, he really doesn’t have anything to do at the Trump Organisation. He is just kind of left in New York, and everybody forgets about him,” said Zengerle.
Things changed when the infamous “Trump Tower meeting” story broke. It emerged that Don Jr had organised a chat with a Russian lawyer during the election campaign, believing she had dirt on his father’s opponent.
It became a monumental scandal. Behind the scenes, Donald vented to associates that his eldest son was, to put it mildly, not very clever.
Don Jr reacted in a way that surprised a great many observers. Instead of apologising or going into hiding, he sat down for an interview on national television and lashed out angrily at his critics, in true Trumpian fashion.
His aggression was a hit among Donald’s supporters, who appreciated it far more than Ivanka’s much-publicised efforts to moderate her father’s instincts.
“They love the fact that he’s aggressive and he’s a fighter, and he says politically incorrect stuff. He himself has a comfort with Red America that I think his father, in some ways, does not. Certainly Ivanka doesn’t. Trump supporters see that in him,” explained Zengerle.
“And once he finally comes out of the shadows and takes centre stage and embraces this role as his father’s most vigorous defender, it all falls into place from there.”
In the 2020 election campaign, Donald gave his son a much more prominent role, impressed by his combativeness. Don Jr became one of the most popular speakers at campaign events, perhaps surpassed only by the president.
“Don Jr, for a guy who was in the corner and no one was listening to him, it turned out he had a much better, almost instinctual understanding of what his father’s appeal was and what his father actually would be as president,” said Zengerle.
“He had no delusions that his father could be tamed in any way that Ivanka thought, you know, you could polish him.
“I think in a strange way, he turned out to be a smarter political actor than Ivanka did.”
For the first time since his parents’ divorce, the traumatic event that sent him into the wilderness, Don Jr had found a comfortable place in the Trump family.
“The family business that Don Jr rejected was real estate, right? It was the old line, legacy Trump family business,” said The Daily’s host, Michael Barbaro, summing things up.
“But the family’s business now is politics and media and cultural wars. And he’s not the black sheep of that business. He’s the star.”
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