by Doug Wead
23. https://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2017/02/ivanka-trump-magazine-covers-000711?slide=2
24. https://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2017/02/ivanka-trump-magazine-covers-000711?slide=8
25. https://thehill.com/policy/finance/domestic-taxes/365956-ivanka-trump-corker-had-real-integrity-during-tax-negotiations
26. https://www.independent.ie/style/celebrity/celebrity-news/ivanka-trump-said-she-was-blindsided-by-viciousness-of-criticism-directed-at-her-family-35820697.html
27. https://www.businessinsider.com/ivanka-trump-steve-bannon-clashed-white-house-2018-9
28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWGxWzFzdK4
29. Ivanka Trump, The Trump Card (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), p. 128.
4
DONALD TRUMP JR. AND WHISPERS ON AN ELEVATOR
“He knew a storm was coming.”
—DONALD TRUMP JR.1
Born December 31, 1977, Donald Trump Jr. is the eldest child of the president and one of the most complex members of the family. Like his siblings Ivanka and Eric, he has a winning personality. He thinks and speaks with a rapid-fire openness. When the president left his iconic business in New York behind, he appointed Donald Trump Jr. as the boss.
As an advocate of his father’s policies and a cheerleader of his accomplishments as president, Don Jr. is one of the family’s most effective surrogates. Toward the end of the 2016 election campaign he was sometimes outdrawing the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, at rallies and events.
Late one night, in the middle of the campaign, Don Jr. got a call saying, “Congratulations, you are going to be on television in the morning.” His father had apparently said something controversial about Muslims.
“What are the talking points?” Don Jr. asked. His early-morning appearance was only a few hours away. There would be no sleep that night.
“Talking points?” the voice on the other end of the call said, “You tell us what the talking points are. You handle this better than anybody.”2
That was life on the campaign trail for Donald Trump Jr.
In many personal ways, the Trump children are alike. Especially Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, the three born to Donald and his first wife, Ivana. They could almost be triplets. While in most families there is a sloppy one, or an introvert, or an intellectual, or one who is good or bad with money, the Trump children are all bright and personable. On the surface, at least, they are sanguine. They are all positive. They are all confident and well groomed. It is only when they are together that one can begin to distinguish the differences. I would interview each one of them in a succession of repeated cycles, and that afforded me the opportunity to compare.
Ivanka Trump avoids hostility and creates her own positive atmosphere as a mechanism to get things done, Eric allows himself to become more engaged by the process and finds the need to fight back. Don Jr. is more complex. He may be the strongest personality of them all, but he can also be deferential. For example, he did not condemn a campaign staffer who was suspected of exploiting the process for personal gain; rather, he assumes that he did not have all the facts or fully know the other side of the story. He concluded, “I did things differently.” Without any condemnation.
Don Jr. is also less insular. He allows that his father, the campaign, the administration and he himself are sometimes wrong and should have done things differently. For most of the family, the criticism is ignored or not addressed, or the unfairness is so overwhelming that it doesn’t seem to require a discussion. Ivanka tends to compartmentalize it and not let it be a distraction from her work. It’s there, but it’s tucked away neatly in a Tupperware container placed somewhere in the freezer to be brought out, if it has to be, at some other time.
Donald Trump Jr., more than all the others, presses to find out what is behind the opposition to his father and the family. Why is it happening? And sometimes he feels the need to acknowledge that it is occasionally self-inflicted.
ADVICE FROM A FATHER
Ivanka was the first family member I would interview, Don Jr. was one of the last. His reluctance had a reason. He had just signed a contract to do his own book.
“Normally, they would frown on me working with another author when I am writing a book of my own,” he said, “but since we have the same publisher and the same editor, I think they can make an exception, right?”
Lucky for me. I was on track to interview the whole family and the most important members of the White House staff. The loss of Don Jr. would have been a gaping hole in the story.
Ivanka had talked to me about her uncertainty over her father’s planned presidential announcement. It turns out that her big brother was having the same doubts. “Even days before the announcement I was unsure,” he told me. “I was wondering. ‘Was this the real thing or not?’”
Just before Donald Trump announced for president, he and the family gathered in his office on the twenty-sixth floor on the commercial side of Trump Tower. There they were all given final instructions. When they left, they took an elevator down to the mezzanine floor, where the family separated. Ivanka would take to the stage to introduce “the next president of the United States”; Don and Eric would take the elevator down to the ground floor and join the crowd. Donald and Melania Trump would pause for a few moments and then descend the escalator to one of the most controversial press conferences in political history.
“The day of the announcement,” Don said, “my father told me something that I would remember, again and again in the coming weeks and months. It would be one of the most accurate observations I would hear since my own immersion into politics. We got on the elevator and he turned to look at me and he said, ‘Now we find out who our real friends are.’
“My father is not very philosophical about things. He is very practical. A results-driven guy. But he knew that this was not going to be easy. This was his understanding of the real world. He knew a storm was coming. He knew that there would be controversy either manifested or created by the establishment, the media, and sometimes, certainly, because of our own actions. He recognized very quickly that this would separate the wheat from the chaff among the friends we had known our whole lives.
“I often think of that moment and the look in his eyes. I don’t know that truer words have ever been spoken.”
I asked Don Jr. if I could find that story somewhere online so I could flesh out more of the details to give a fuller description of the moment.
“Well, I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve never read it or seen it. I will certainly use it in my own book.
“To me,” he said, “that was one of the memorable things he has told us over his lifetime because it was so prescient. My father was always teaching us about life and business. This was one of the most fundamental Trumpian quotes I can remember. Direct, succinct, and to the point.”
Life and reality. There is always the way we want things to be and then there is the reality.
“My father has always had a good understanding of the real world. How difficult. How rough it can be. How brutal it is.
“People are always saying, ‘Did you know it was going to be this bad?’
“Well, we didn’t go into this naive. We didn’t get in thinking that it was going to be easy. People are not going to be nice.
“Sure, we didn’t have a full appreciation of just how vicious and how brutal it would be. I don’t think anybody had. Jimmy Carter spoke up about it. He said, ‘Listen, I’ve taken my share of heat but nothing like this.’ And that’s the reality.”
I was curious about another reality.
WHEN TRUMP MADE HIS DECISION
There was a mythological sequence of events, etched in stone, unassailable. The story, promoted by the New York Times and reinforced by almost everybody in the media, both left and right, held that Trump had been provoked to run for president by his humiliation at the April 30, 2011, White House Correspondents Dinner.3 The authoritative Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly had insisted that thi
s narrative was the right one.4 One could actually see the video footage online. There was Trump, shoulders hunched, taking the stinging mockery. How could the public deny what they, themselves, had witnessed?
According to Marcus Brauchli, who was nearby at that famous dinner, Donald Trump had been “incredibly gracious and engaged on the way in, but departed with maximum efficiency.”5
I had spent the last forty years researching stories about presidents and knew how many of the “most certain” moments were often flawed. Consider George Washington’s cherry tree episode, dreamed up by Parson Weems. Or Lincoln’s tribute to his “angel mother,” promoted by his law partner William Herndon and featured in the opening pages of a Pulitzer Prize–winning book. I personally knew how the Bush family enjoyed a chuckle over books and “authorities” who were convinced that Dick Cheney ran the White House during those years and it was he who had convinced George W. Bush to invade Iraq. Of course, Karl Rove, the media assured us, was Bush’s brain.
There were some other theories about Trump’s motivation for pursuing the White House; most of these theories were the inspiration of family critics, and all of them ascribed bits and pieces to the businessman’s ego. The tongue-in-cheek theory of the director Michael Moore got the most attention. He insisted that Trump had been jealous of Gwen Stefani’s paycheck for her appearances on The Voice and wanted to run for president to prove to NBC that he was more popular.6 Such was the parochial world of American entertainment. Everything, even world politics, was about them.
My own experience and research gave me little assurance that I could convince anybody else about the truth of Trump’s decision, even if I could find it, but it did make me curious enough to press the Trump family. What was their own version of what had prompted this moment in history? Regardless of what the media thought, where did the Trump family itself believe it had all begun? And what did the president say?
The president told me it was born out of frustration, watching the country he loved falling into decline. “Stupid deals,” he often said.
He had always brushed away the idea that he was reacting to the Obama attack at the correspondents’ dinner. “I loved that dinner,” Trump later told the New York Times. “I can handle criticism.”7 He told me that he had the thought years before that dinner.
I was eager to speak to Donald Trump Jr., the oldest Trump sibling of his generation, to get his take on how his father made those early steps toward a decision. When and where was the idea born? How had it evolved?
“I’d been hearing about it my whole life,” Don Jr. said. “If you look at the feed on my Twitter account, he was talking about it in the mid-eighties. That was a full twenty years before the correspondents’ dinner. Then, of course, I remember his appearance on Oprah.
“For years he had been watching the drain on the American economy and how the government was doing such a bad job on trade deals. Back then it was Japan that was screwing us. Now it’s China and others. But not a lot has changed.
“I remember him getting so fired up. Frustrated. That America was leaving so much money on the table. Getting bad deals because the departments were being run by a bunch of incompetents. They shouldn’t have been running anything, let alone what I call the largest company in the world, the United States government.
“So I saw him get upset about it. I saw him, over the last decade or two, become increasingly more vocal about it. He’s the kind of guy, you can only throw stones for so long before you have to step up and act. He’s more of a man of action than anything. So finally it was time.”
I asked Don Jr. about the 2011 Wall Street Journal–NBC poll showing his father as a presidential contender, within 4 points of Mitt Romney.8 “Do you remember the poll?” I asked. “Did you have any thoughts, maybe this could happen?”
“Yes,” he said, “I remember the poll. I remember believing it.”
In 2011, Donald Trump appeared on CNN with Piers Morgan.9 “Well, I’m a Republican,” Trump said. “I’m a very good Republican. But I thought Bush was a terrible president. I thought he was a terrible leader. The country had no spirit. And ultimately, he did so bad at the end that we have Obama. That’s what we have. It was a gift from President Bush.
“I’m tempted to run.”10
That was 2011.
Donald Trump talked about jobs going to China and India.
Piers Morgan asked about the unemployment rate, and both men agreed that the real figure was close to 10 percent. Probably more.
“Smart guys write regulations,” Trump said. “But smarter persons figure out how to get around them.”
THE BLUE-COLLAR BILLIONAIRE
How was 2015 different? If Don Jr. had been seeing his father running for president all his life, were there any signals that this time it would really happen? That this was more than a boost to the brand?
“Well, like I said, he had been toying with it for a while. I’m not sure I actually believed it was going to happen until it happened.
“Certainly we could see that he was immersing himself into the process. He was meeting with the people he needed to meet. He was asking the right questions. He was reading the right papers. He was weighing the risks required.
“Understand, there are great consequences for a businessman running for president. There is a great cost. Especially if you are going to run as a conservative or worse, as someone who wants to turn around the economy. People are making money the way things are now. They don’t want it changed. There is a reason why people in middle America are growing poorer. So if you are taking on the big companies, and they finance the media, and they run Hollywood, it is not going to be easy. He knew that and he was preparing for that.”
It turns out that Donald Trump Jr. had his father’s instincts for branding and came up with one of the more enduring definitions of just who Donald Trump really is. Don Jr. would call him “the blue-collar billionaire.”
“Again, I knew my father in a way that others didn’t necessarily know him. I knew, for example, that The Apprentice was very good for him because it humanized him. He was not seen by the public as a Ken Lay–Enron type guy. He had a personality that related to regular people in America. I had seen that my whole life.
“I saw him interacting with construction workers on job sites. Union workers. People who were building our buildings. He was not some executive who sheltered himself behind a glass office on Fifth Avenue. He was always with the workers. He wanted their opinions. He listened to their ideas. He valued those ideas and put them to work.
“These were not token visits, these were real moments. I would see it again, years later on the campaign trail; he wanted to know what was wrong and how to fix it. This was one of his secrets as a builder and it later became one of his secrets for winning the presidency.
“There’s something else. From the workers he learned how to be more efficient. How to get the same thing accomplished with less wasted money and time. And they appreciated it. Nobody likes to see waste and stupidity even if it isn’t their responsibility or their company. They hate it. And they lose respect. Why should they care about efficiency if the company itself doesn’t care?
“By the way, that is exactly how he started to turn around the American economy so quickly. He listened to people. He brought them into the White House not to give them speeches but to listen to them.
“I fully understand the irony of the brash New York billionaire appealing to American workers, but this didn’t happen just out of the blue. This was a lifetime in the making. He had actually spent a lot of time with workers throughout his life, and he recognized their plight when he met them on the campaign trail in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where they had lost their jobs.
“I got criticized years ago for an interview I gave where I called him ‘a blue-collar billionaire.’ That’s how I saw him. The media scoffed at the idea. But there is a real truth in it. He cares about the workers and he is frustrated to see government cheat them.
“W
hile there was this early, colorful image of the New York playboy, the truth was he didn’t drink alcohol, he disdained the rubber-chicken-dinner black-tie social circuit. He much preferred a cheeseburger or pizza and watching a baseball game. He socialized more with his workers than with jet-set celebrities.
“During the general election campaign you could see a motorcade pulling into a McDonald’s drive-through at eleven at night. That would be my father.
“You remember all of this talk about the forgotten man? Well, that’s why he ran for president. He hadn’t seen change in decades. He hadn’t seen anyone step up and correct the obvious. Politicians would make promises and then not even try to deliver on them. It was so blatant.
“It is so interesting to see that my father is getting hell for actually doing what he promised the voters that he would do. They heard him. They agreed. They voted for him, and when he started to actually do what the people wanted, the media and the establishment went wild.”
TRUMP WILL NEVER WIN THE NOMINATION
In the spring of 2015, there was universal agreement: Donald Trump could not win the Republican nomination for president. Ivanka and Don Jr. were not alone in questioning whether or not he would even run. Critics saw it as posturing, a publicity stunt, to keep his name, his brand, in the news.
Even beyond the disdain of political observers and journalists, there was a massive pool of resentment already beginning to manifest itself toward the billionaire. The English comedian John Oliver, reacting to the news that Donald Trump might run for president, looked bug-eyed into the camera lens toward his television audience and proclaimed sarcastically, “Do it. Do it.” Oliver pointed his fingers to his eyes. “Look at me. I will personally write you a campaign check now, on behalf of this country that does not want you to become president but badly wants you to run.” Oliver’s audience howled with laughter.