Meet Lara Trump, Donald’s daughter-in-law tipped for power
At first, he made fun of her looks. Now the former president has put forward his middle son’s wife to become co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
When Lara Yunaska spotted Eric Trump across a crowded room at a New York party, she knew he was a catch. Donald Trump’s second son stands at 195cm and Lara is 180cm.
“I was wearing heels out one night and ... I just scanned around the room and the guy that was taller than I was caught my eye,” she told Sky News Australia. “I said this could work out because I could wear all the heels I have.”
Yet few in the Trump clan agreed. Lara, from near Wilmington on the North Carolina coast and a graduate in communications from North Carolina State University, did not look like a Trump wife should.
“First and foremost, Donald didn’t even like her for many, many years,” said former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
“He didn’t want Eric to even marry her – he had found somebody else that was working at the Trump Organisation that he wanted Eric to marry. And of course, not only did Donald make fun of her looks,” Cohen told the Political Beatdown podcast last week, but so did Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka. “They just didn’t like her at all.”
That has all changed. Now the wife of Trump’s middle son is the family’s rising star being pushed forward as part of her father-in-law’s takeover of the Republican movement to help run the party and cement her ascendancy in the dynasty.
Lara, 41, has benefited from the gap left in the inner circle by the withdrawal from politics of Trump’s favourite child, Ivanka, who was his senior adviser in the White House. Trump’s proposal last week to elevate Lara to co-chair of the Republican National Committee, along with a fellow loyalist, Michael Whatley, the RNC general counsel and party chairman in North Carolina, has been seen as a brazen move to subsume the party and its funds into his campaign. Trump also proposed senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita as RNC chief operating officer.
Nikki Haley, Trump’s only remaining rival for the Republican nomination, was aghast, saying: “Are we gonna let him just take over the party that’s gonna control the convention, too? At what point do we not see the problem? We don’t have kings in this country.”
Lara Trump was quick to show just how the party machinery would operate if she were confirmed in the role, telling her internet broadcast: “There’s no way Nikki Haley becomes the Republican nominee for president of the United States and at this point if she ever wanted to be considered for possibly vice-president, man, you hurt your chances. I think that jig is up as well, Nikki ... time to get on the Trump train.”
Six years after meeting at the New York party, Lara and Eric married in 2014 at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and club, and Lara soon threw herself into her father-in-law’s first presidential campaign as organiser of the “Trump-Pence Women’s Empowerment Tour”. She worked as a fundraiser during the first term and was a paid campaign speaker in 2020, including on the morning of January 6, 2021, when she urged the crowd in Washington to vote against Republicans who refused to reject the election result.
Much to the surprise of North Carolinians, Lara considered running for a US Senate seat in her native state in 2022 even though she had not lived there for the best part of two decades. She eventually dropped the idea.
“She has no meaningful public profile in this state,” says Steve Greene, professor of political science at North Carolina State University.
He said Trump’s proposal of his daughter-in-law for RNC co-chair followed a pattern. “Donald Trump is absolutely a politician who has time and time again placed family members in positions that they did not seem qualified for simply by right of them being his family members.”
David Cay Johnston, author of The Making of Donald Trump, said: “Putting Lara Trump in as head of the RNC, who has no experience in that kind of organisation ... is yet another sign that Donald Trump is seeking dictatorial powers and has no interest in accountability.”
Johnston said Lara had risen in the Trump pecking order by displaying utter loyalty as Ivanka disengaged. Lara and Eric were among the handful of family members who attended Trump’s campaign launch in November 2022. Ivanka also skipped her father’s past two New Year’s Eve parties, unlike Lara.
“Ivanka has withdrawn herself from all of this, she’s clearly trying to separate herself from her father,” he said. “Donald likes to promote women who will do his bidding, he wants women who he can control and Lara fits that role. Don Jr and Eric’s experience would not lead anyone, including their father, to think that they have the skill to run a national political party.”
The Times
