Trump children prepare for war of succession
With his gleeful baiting of metropolitan elites, Don Jr is widely viewed as his father’s political heir apparent — but golden girl Ivanka may have the leverage.
During the countdown to the election, Donald Trump Jr posted a photograph of himself standing beside a huge “Don Jr 2024” sign at a live cattle auction in Nevada.
“This will make the lib heads explode,” wrote Donald Trump’s eldest, brashest son on Instagram. “To whomever made that thanks for the compliment … but let’s get through 2020 with a big win first!!!!”
Now that the president has been sacked from the White House, there is speculation about where his four adult children – Donald Jr, Ivanka, Eric and Tiffany – will catapult themselves next.
With his supreme self-confidence and gleeful baiting of metropolitan elites, Donald Jr, a divorced father of five, is widely viewed as the natural political successor.
“There’s no question that Donald Jr wants to have a future in the Republican Party and sees himself as the heir apparent,” said McKay Coppins, a political writer at The Atlantic magazine.
“He’s the one who’s inherited a lot of Trump’s MAGA [Make America great again] base, who speaks Trump’s language.”
Andrea Catsimatidis, chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party and the daughter of a billionaire grocery magnate, is friends with the 42-year-old Donald Jr and argues that he is a powerful political contender.
“He has this unbelievable ability to connect with people and he’s so passionate,” she said last week. “He’s not afraid to stand up for the right thing and doesn’t get bullied into backing down.”
As he is an avid hunter, there have been discussions about launching his political career in an outdoorsy state such as Montana.
Catsimatidis, who spent election night at the White House with the first family, would happily see all of Trump’s grown-up offspring in politics: “They’re some of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met.”
The three eldest siblings, from Trump’s first marriage to the Czech model Ivana, were close growing up but an old-fashioned succession battle is likely to exacerbate rivalries. “We were sort of bred to be competitive,” Ivanka once said. “Dad encourages it.”
Certainly, Donald Jr’s main threat is Ivanka, the golden child who left her gilded life in Manhattan to work as an adviser to her father. Her husband, Jared Kushner, was crowned “secretary of everything” – tackling peace deals in the Middle East, America’s opioid epidemic and, later, leading (disastrously) a coronavirus taskforce.
How far the first daughter’s Washington aspirations truly stretch is unclear. “Her political ambitions probably amount to a desire for continued status and VIP treatment in various sectors of American society,” said Coppins. “She and Jared have built their rolodexes with heads of states around the world, Silicon Valley executives and high-powered finance types, and they’re going to look for ways to leverage those contacts.”
Others suggest that her social media photographs – pictures of herself with military personnel, blue-collar workers, women and people from ethnic minorities — are evidence that Ivanka, or “Baby” as her father has sometimes referred to her in White House meetings, is contemplating a 2024 run.
“You see someone who’s very careful to surround herself with the kind of imagery which could be the basis for a political campaign some time in the future,” said Andrea Bernstein, the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power.
“She’s in every way like her father except that she’s incredibly disciplined in her messaging. I can certainly envisage a scenario where she runs as the Trump without the rough edges.”
While Trump, 74, has described Donald Jr as “not the sharpest knife in the drawer”, he has said that Ivanka would be “very, very hard to beat” if she ever wanted to run for president.
However, insiders suggest there is a limited appetite for an Ivanka presidential bid. Critics in the West Wing dubbed her “Habi” – Home of All Bad Ideas.
“Whether she was or not, she was always supposed to be the ‘moderating influence’ [on her father], which doesn’t make you very popular with the average Republican voter,” said Coppins.
“There are not a lot of people calling out for Ivanka to run.”
If Kushner and Ivanka, both 39, leave their rented $7.6m Washington mansion, would they dare attempt to slip back into their old New York lives of Met galas and canape fundraisers?
They might struggle. “Javanka” would be heckled out of the swanky art galleries that used to welcome them with air kisses, gossipers told Artnet News, the art market website.
In Manhattan, it is a “feather in your cap” to have cut off your friendship with Ivanka, according to Vanessa Grigoriadis, who writes for the liberal bibles Vanity Fair and New York Magazine.
“I know people who’ve been to school with her and they want to say: ‘We would never talk to her again.’ That’s a cool thing to say in Manhattan. But in Florida, in the golf and country club set, it’s a really different situation,” said Grigoriadis, adding her belief that Ivanka would “love to be a Florida senator”.
Those who have studied Ivanka agree that she is hardworking and ambitious. Her widely panned 2017 self-help book, Women Who Work, furthered that image.
“She’s like a moth to a flame with power and, much like her dad, she’s very thin-skinned. She doesn’t like criticism and doesn’t respond well to it,” added Grigoriadis, who hosted the podcast Tabloid: The Making of Ivanka Trump.
Two billboards recently erected in Times Square, depicting Kushner and Ivanka displaying “indifference” to the number of Americans dying of COVID-19, provided further proof that the couple are radioactive in the Big Apple. (They have threatened to sue the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump Republicans behind the posters.)
Richard Farley, a lawyer who used to rub shoulders with the “gruesome twosome”, dismisses the idea that they would be social pariahs. “When Richard Nixon resigned, they said: ‘He’s been disgraced, he’s going to hole up in New Jersey and he’ll never show his face again,’”, Farley said.
“In six months he had the best table at [the chi-chi Manhattan restaurant] the 21 Club. The only unpardonable sin in New York society is poverty. Political passions fade quickly in this town.”
Although Kushner, heir to a billion-dollar property dynasty, kept his fingers in his family’s company while working as a White House adviser, he shunned contacts, according to Bernstein.
“The Kushner family spent decades building ties with political and civic leaders in New York and a lot of those were ruptured during Jared’s four years in the White House,” she said, predicting that he might move into the media world. (In 2006, aged 25, he bought The New York Observer and sold it to his family trust when he joined the White House.)
There is also Cadre, the property tech start-up that Kushner launched with his brother and a friend in 2014, in which he has a stake worth between $36 and $70m. The pandemic could see the Kushners’ fortune soar further. “The company has been looking to exploit the current economic misery by investing in distressed properties, particularly hotels,” reported Mother Jones magazine.
Kushner has wiggled through defeat and humiliation before. In 2005 his father, Charles Kushner, was jailed after hiring a prostitute to honey-trap his brother-in-law and sending a videotape of the encounter to his sister. Two years later, Jared Kushner spent a record-breaking $2.5bn buying 666 Fifth Avenue in mid-town Manhattan, which quickly sank the family business into debt.
“For Jared and Ivanka there’s nothing more powerful than protecting and building on the family name, that’s what drives them to do everything,” said Grigoriadis.
What about Eric Trump, 36, who has been a seatwarmer for his father at the Trump Organisation for the past four years? Although the oft-overlooked second son has loyally defended his father – saying “he doesn’t have a bad bone in his body” – and recently popped his head above the parapet to wail about alleged voter fraud, the consensus is that he will continue to focus quietly on the family’s property empire.
It is his wife who is being tipped as a potential dark horse in the race for political office. Lara Trump, 38, has hopped careers from professional baker to television producer to senior adviser on Trump’s re-election campaign.
“Lara is very personable, very articulate. She was an extraordinary star on Fox News almost on a nightly basis on behalf of the president’s agenda,” said Jack Oliver, a Republican fundraiser.
She is less flammable than some in the Trump line. “She hasn’t flown too close to the sun in the way Donald Jr has,” said Coppins. “He’s going to be such a target for scrutiny and investigations.”
The other Trump cheerleader-in-chief is Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Jr’s larger-than-life girlfriend and a former Fox News personality.
Guilfoyle, 51, is a riskier bet: she allegedly left Fox News because of sexual harassment allegations against her and would walk around naked in front of her assistant, according to The New Yorker magazine.
Then there is Tiffany, Trump’s only child with his second wife, Marla Maples. After graduating from law school, she appears to be angling for work. “Our generation is unified in facing the future in uncertain times,” she said in her speech at the Republican National Convention in August.
“As a recent graduate, I can relate to so many of you who might be looking for a job.”
Although Tiffany, 27, could always follow her father into reality television, it is Ivanka who is said to have been inundated with offers to appear on screen. She would not dream of accepting them, say Washington-watchers – but returning to hawking clothes, handbags and jewellery under her personal brand seems unlikely as well.
“Sharks only swim forwards,” quipped one New York socialite.
For Ivanka’s old childhood chums in Manhattan, who remember her as being indifferent to politics, a 2024 political campaign would be a baffling leap.
Grigoriadis recalls speaking to an old friend of Ivanka’s who frequently travelled with her and Donald Trump in their limousine in New York. “I asked: did they talk about politics?” said Grigoriadis.
“She laughed and said, ‘No, they talked about other people’s money.’”
Only one name is missing from the Trump succession stakes: Barron. The president’s youngest son, 14, is kept out of the limelight by his mother, Melania. He was said by his father to have shaken off the coronavirus “within, like, two seconds” when he caught it last month.
Looking wheyfaced and asleep on his feet during the inauguration celebrations in 2017, Barron is now easily as tall as the 6ft 2in Donald. But there are no signs, at least on his rare appearances in public, that he has inherited the other Trump gene: the obsessive need to dominate.
The Times
