by Doug Wead
President Trump walked away from the Saigon summit rather than play a weak hand. In his book The Art of the Deal Donald Trump wrote, “Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.”25
There is an interesting postscript to this story.
Michael Cohen, the president’s attorney turned accuser, was asked when and why he had changed his mind about his old friend Donald Trump. Cohen told Congress that it had happened after the president’s words following events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and after the Helsinki summit with Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin. In fact, after both of those events, Michael Cohen was still very positive about Donald Trump. He had actually presented a proposal to a number of publishers, including mine.26 Cohen’s book would have been called “Trump Revolution: From the Tower to the White House.” It would have been an enthusiastic endorsement of his old client, which, many would say, makes Cohen’s second testimony to Congress also patently false.
NOTES
1. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-updates-everything-president-trump-calls-kim-jong-un-little-rocket-1512093131-htmlstory.html
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/opinion/the-north-korea-trump-nightmare.html
3. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/trump-kim-korea-success/563012/
4. https://www.history.com/news/kennedy-krushchev-vienna-summit-meeting-1961
5. http://www.josephloconte.com/commentary/the-weekly-standard-fdr-stalin-and-the-tragedy-of-yalta/
6. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/03/newser-kim-jong-un-uncle-execution/4303319/
7. https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/asia/kim-jong-nam-north-korea-killed/index.html
8. https://www.mercycorps.org/articles/north-korea/food-north-koreas-families
9. https://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-starving-nuclear-missiles-641188
10. https://www.aol.com/article/entertainment/2019/02/18/donald-trump-melania-trump-at-oscars-a-brief-history/23672046
11. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/02/13/is-the-sound-of-clicking-cameras-at-the-white-house-nearing-extinction/
12. https://grabien.com/story.php?id=132091
13. https://abc.go.com/shows/this-week-with-george-stephanopoulos/episode-guide/2017-12/31-123117-us-closer-nuclear-war-north-korea-than-ever-before-former-joint-chiefs-staff-head
14. https://grabien.com/story.php?id=170957
15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=23&v=4WGa1_TiT3o
16. https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2017/10/23/brzezinski-trump-wants-to-use-nukes-hes-excited-about-the-concept/
17. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/10/05/nobel-peace-prize-donald-trump/1508304002/
18. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/strategic-patience-has-become-strategic-passivity/
19. https://www.tmz.com/2018/06/12/dan-rather-trump-kim-jong-un-winner-summit/
20. https://pjmedia.com/trending/study-media-devotes-0-7-percent-of-coverage-to-booming-trump-economy/
21. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trumps-tweets-wont-stop-a-bloodbath-in-syria/2018/09/06/03af3c06-b13d-11e8-aed9-001309990777_story.html
22. https://www.businessinsider.com/melania-trump-asks-white-house-kitchen-staff-to-make-healthier-meals-for-president-2018-8
23. Interview with Jared Kushner, January 2019.
24. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/393402-trump-media-coverage-of-north-korea-summit-is-almost-treasonous
25. Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1987), 28.
26. https://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-michael-cohen-book-20180822-story.html
3
IVANKA’S WEST WING OFFICE
“He had the vision to cross over the bridge.”
—IVANKA TRUMP1
On March 29, 2017, only weeks after the inauguration, the media broke the story that Ivanka Trump would be serving on the White House’s senior staff.2 She would be an unpaid assistant to the president. She would have her own office in the West Wing. Immediately, television pundits and bloggers bombarded the airwaves with wild commentary.3 Critics of the new administration insisted that such a thing had ever happened before. This was outrageous.
In fact, when Donald Trump named Ivanka Trump to his White House staff, she became the nineteenth son or daughter of a president to serve his or her father. No less than George Washington had written his successor, urging him to appoint his own son to high office. “If my wishes be of any avail they should go to you in a strong hope that you will not withhold merited promotion from Mr. John Adams simply because he is your son.”4 America’s second president duly appointed John Quincy Adams as minister to Prussia.
I had studied and written about presidential children for thirty years. I had met or interviewed twenty-four presidential sons and daughters and had written the book All the Presidents’ Children. It wasn’t long before I started getting calls from reporters, but what I said could hardly stem the tide. The journalists had mostly written their stories before they found me. When the New York Times called, I made an attempt to tap down the widespread fallacious analysis. Nevertheless, their article read, “While relying on family members for advice is hardly unusual for a president, giving them a formal role has few precedents.”5 Really?
Other journalists insisted that it was breaking precedent because Ivanka was a woman, which seemed an odd criticism for a modern, liberal-minded media to be making. In fact, Susan Ford, the daughter of President Ford, had been on staff, serving as a White House photographer. And Anna Roosevelt was practically running the White House in FDR’s last year in office.
“No, it is not unusual,” I patiently told the BBC. “This happens over and over throughout American history. Anna Roosevelt, the president’s daughter, planned and ran the Yalta Conference. It just hasn’t happened as much recently.”
“But why?” the BBC wanted to know. “Why would Donald Trump want to appoint his own son or daughter?”
“Because very soon the president will learn that, in the White House, the most important quality in a staffer is loyalty. Nothing else even comes close. And because a son or a daughter will offer continuity for the sake of ongoing policy. The chiefs of staff will come and go, but a daughter will always be a daughter. And she will always have a seat at the dinner table on holidays.”
Ivana Marie Trump, or “Ivanka,” was born October 30, 1981. It was easy to understand why the president wanted her at his side. Since Ivanka joined him in business as an adult, Donald Trump had counted on her to get things done. They would walk into a room, and even before they were seated at a conference table she would have gotten an agreement. She was a legend within her own family. Her father loved to tell stories about her.
Donald Trump had asked Ivanka to introduce him when he ran for president. He had asked her to introduce him as the nominee at the Republican National Convention. In the White House, she got things done, quietly and efficiently. Obviously, she has known the president longer than anyone else in Washington, DC. She created continuity for him. She was low maintenance, with a positive attitude and a diplomatic ability to sidestep a personality conflict. Working in the corridors of power, she would find that latter quality to be no small thing.
Finally, since the White House and a family brand was at issue, it didn’t hurt that Ivanka Trump made all the lists. She was named by Forbes as one of the one hundred most powerful women in the world.6 Time had her pegged as one of the top one hundred most influential.7 Fortune listed her, along with Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, in their prestigious list of forty under forty.8 Meanwhile, numerous sources routinely named her as one of the most beautiful women in the world.9 Ivanka Trump was doing just fine without a White House job.
CREATING HER OWN SPACE
Ivanka Trump’s office is on the second floor of the famous West Wing, just above the Oval Office and two stories above the White House mess, which is run by the US Navy and is where the senior staff can take thei
r meals.
Tina Tchen, the director of public engagement under Barack Obama, once operated out of this same office. Tchen, who would serve as chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, would become famous as the so-called fixer in the Jussie Smollett case in Chicago. Karl Zinsmeister, who was assistant to the president for domestic policy for George W. Bush, also once worked in this office. But in the coming years it will be Ivanka’s name that will mark this territory. No future staffer will likely complain when they are assigned these quarters; they will simply be told that Ivanka Trump once operated from this corner of the White House, and that will be all the reassurance their troubled ego will need.
Ivanka has windows with views that are blocked by parts of the White House building just outside. One of them overlooks the South Lawn, where the president and first lady take off on Marine One, the helicopter that shuttles them to Andrews Air Force Base and beyond. But there is no way to see it from Ivanka’s office. When there is a state visit, the prominent guests motorcade up the South Lawn’s driveway and are welcomed under the awning that extends out from the Diplomatic Reception Room.
The South Lawn was where, in the mid-nineteenth century, Martha Johnson, the daughter of President Andrew Johnson, let cows graze. Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth president, was fiercely opposed by Congress, which was trying to impeach him. Martha, his daughter, had marched down to Capitol Hill and demanded appropriations. They may not like her father, she told them, but the White House belonged to the people and it was in disrepair; they needed funds to sustain it. To shame the stubborn congressmen, Martha maintained milk cows on the lawn, to provide milk for the first family. Congress was impressed with the presidential daughter, but it didn’t help her father, who was impeached anyway.
The decor in Ivanka’s office is clean and minimalist. There is an hourglass near her desk, which is a purposeful reminder that her time to do good things is limited. There are books and interesting pictures, including one of Ivanka and Kim Yo-jong, sister to the North Korean dictator. The two women were seen as diplomatic rivals by the international media, but they are all smiles in the photo.10 On the walls there are copies of signed, bipartisan legislation she has worked on. One visitor noticed “a framed copy of Trump’s typed ‘Remarks Regarding the Capital of Israel’—signed ‘To Ivanka, Love Dad.’” It was written “in the president’s oversized Sharpie scribble—and lyrics to Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin.’ Handwritten to her by the songwriter.”11
I was struck by the creative use of such limited space. To the left, back behind a wall was Ivanka’s working desk. No casual observer could see the papers on it. She herself could work with privacy and simultaneously look to a big-screen TV, which was mounted in the opposite corner above a long beige chaise lounge that ran the entire length of the east wall. To the right of this was a small conference area, with a table and chairs on all sides (a luxury for most West Wing offices). The table and chairs were not of the White House traditional Kittinger dark mahogany veneer, but were light and modern.
The decor and the limited sunshine from the blocked windows gave Ivanka’s office a mood that was quite distinct from other parts of the White House. Many of the other rooms are windowless, interior rooms, lit only by lamps and chandeliers, but even offices with windows—Jared’s, for example—tend to have the sunlight obscured by heavy drapes. Ivanka’s office felt open. When you closed the door you wouldn’t know you were in the White House. You might just as well be in a sleek, downtown New York office, or someplace in Silicon Valley.
It was at her conference table, sitting opposite each other, that we began our interview. Members of the White House staff sat at both corners taking notes.
IT’S THE PRESIDENT’S STORY
“Where do you want to start?” she asked.12
“Well, there are no rules,” I explained. “Some histories begin with the inauguration. Others are biographies that begin with the birth of the president or even his great-grandparents.”
“Well, are you going to revisit some of the campaign?”
I could sense that she had some stories to tell, and if so, that was where I wanted to go. Throughout my interviews with the president and his family, I would constantly order myself to be still and let them tell as much of the story as they were willing to give. I was not going to force them into my outline. The treasure would most likely be found where I didn’t expect it to be buried.
“Do you feel that what has been written about the campaign has been accurate?” I asked. “Is there more to tell?”
“There’s a lot that hasn’t been told,” she answered. “There are people who have gotten no credit for what they have done. And there are many people who tell the story as if it is their own. I have found that the staffers who talk the most often do the least. It is really the president’s story.”
“Well, let’s start with that,” I suggested. “Tell me about the president, your father.”
“What he has done is truly remarkable,” she said. With all the negatives bombarding the White House, she seemed relieved to finally have room to say something positive. “Here is an individual who has achieved an extraordinary level of success in real estate. I mean there are people who have built one great building and they are famous forever for what they have achieved. And rightly so. But here is someone who built buildings, one after another, across New York City and later the world. And that is exceptional in itself. These were not just ordinary buildings. They were the tallest or the biggest or the most spectacular, again and again, setting a new bar, overcoming all of the many complicated obstacles. That alone is enough achievement for one person, in one lifetime.
“And then he replicated that success in an entirely different medium, in television entertainment. The Apprentice was the number one show in America. It was syndicated in countries across the globe. It went on for numerous seasons. The ratings that first year were in excess of the Super Bowl. It was a wild success.
“What is amazing is that there was this consensus against the whole idea of this show. Most of the experts said a business show would fail. They had numbers, they had focus groups that could tell you what was going to happen. That was the traditional feedback at NBC. But my father had a vision for what it would do, and as it turned out, he was right; it succeeded, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
“So even before he ran for president, even before he got involved in politics, he had succeeded in two entirely different mediums. Each one had their own obscure rules for achievement, their own traps and lessons to be learned. It would take most people a lifetime to master either one of them. Let alone do both. And then, finally, he would run for president. And he would win.”
Everything Ivanka was saying raised the question, how had he done it? Donald Trump’s critics were still dismissing him as an aberration. His election was an accident of history that would soon be corrected. It was Hillary Clinton’s loss, some said, not his win. The recovering economy was the work of Obama, delayed. The collapse of ISIS was just good timing. The generals had done it. Trump was lucky. Problem was, he was getting luckier by the minute. Energy independence had been the goal of seven presidents. How had that suddenly happened?
Ivanka understood the critics, their need to believe their own ideas. She too, supposedly, had different political views from her father on many issues. But she had seen too much. She had heard this chorus of attacks and doubters before. In good conscience she could not buy into the media consensus. How had he been so lucky in so many distinctly different mediums, as she put it? Something was at work here, and if the media didn’t want to know it, if history didn’t believe it or care, well, she wanted to know for herself. At least.
In our conversations it became clear that she had given this a lot of thought over the years. America was just now becoming intrigued, but Ivanka had been a student of Trump for much of her life. She knew that building buildings was not easy, because she herself had worked at it. She knew that having a hit television show was
not easy, because she herself had been pitched on the idea. And while she had not contemplated a political career, she had seen enough to know what an endless Rubik’s Cube it could be. Donald Trump had conquered all three separate disciplines, right before her eyes. The media was convinced that Donald Trump was lucky? Ivanka was not going to make a fuss about it, but privately, personally, she knew better.
Between 1999 and 2001, Ivanka Trump and other young wealthy teenagers had been talked into doing a movie documentary entitled Born Rich, in which she had come off as quite circumspect. In one scene she described a public event when a strange man walked up to her and asked, “What’s it like to be wealthy?”
The teenage Ivanka Trump had been taken off guard. “Excuse me?”
And he persisted, “What does it feel like to have never felt any pain?”
“That really upset me,” she said in the film, “Not because I was upset for myself but because I was upset for him. I was bothered by the fact that he could be so ignorant.… To think that with money comes happiness.”13
At Christmas or birthdays, Ivanka had her own unique wishes as a child. “Rather than getting Barbie dolls, I used to get upset. I always wanted Legos or erector sets,” she recalled, laughing.
“I love looking at the New York skyline,” she said in the film, “and being able to figure out what I’m going to add to that. What patch of sky will one of my buildings be in?”14
This was a teenager, an ambitious, hungry Ivanka Trump, unashamed, wanting to build on her father’s success. While some of the other teenagers in the film, all the sons and daughters of wealth, seemed tormented by their privilege, Ivanka came off as inspired.
She would go on to build some iconic projects, including what the family refers to as Trump Doral and Trump DC.