by Doug Wead
At the end, First Lady Melania Trump rose to her feet, and the audience immediately followed her lead, giving Marlana VanHoose a thunderous standing ovation.
“There was this wonderful mood from the National Cathedral,” Lara said. “The feeling that God was bigger than all the hatred and bitterness. There was the feeling that we were going to be okay.”
Back from the National Cathedral, the Trump family was finally given a tour of the White House, with all the grandkids in tow. “That was the first real tour for Lara and me,” Eric Trump says. It was a first for Don Jr. and his children.
“We walked all around the place,” Eric said. “I wandered into the Lincoln bedroom. The first thing I noticed was how long the bed was. Remember, I’m 6’ 5”. Lincoln was really a tall guy. What was his nickname?”
“Rail-splitter.” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right. He was a big guy, a tall, strong guy. There was a very tall mirror in a wooden frame that could tilt. I had never seen one like that. I’m taking in all of the furniture that is so period specific to him. The chandelier and the lamps were gas lit and are now converted over to electric.
“On the far side of the room, between the two windows, was the famous Gettysburg Address. Later, when I made trips down to the White House and stayed overnight in that room, they would take down the Gettysburg Address and they would put it on the nightstand so as you go to turn off the lamp, there it is. It’s not locked in 12 inches of glass with special lighting. It’s very, very close.
“On the nightstand there is a little oil portrait of Lincoln’s son, Willie, who died in that bed. He was eleven years old. Lincoln kept the picture on his office desk in the next room. Now they keep it in the bedroom.
“The first time I saw that portrait next to the bed with the Gettysburg Address sitting there, within eyesight, something that you could reach out and touch, trying to fall asleep in the bed where Willie Lincoln had died and broken the hearts of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, well, it brought home the gravity of all the great, new responsibility we had as a family. I began to understand how our patterns were going to change, how life was going to change.
That night, January 21, 2017, the last night of the inaugural celebration, the night of the service at the National Cathedral, the Trump family was exhausted. They gathered in the State Dining Room, a bittersweet moment. They had won. The family was together. But soon they would be scattered, with many of them headed back to New York City. The first lady wanted her son, Barron, to finish school there before moving down to Washington, DC. There was no decision yet on where Jared and Ivanka would be.
I told Eric that in my study of presidential children, I’d found that they almost all loved their White House years, because they’d been able to spend so much time together with their family. They had usually been separated while the father pursued power, but once they won the presidency, that journey was over. He could stay home.
I had once pressed Jack Ford, the son of President Ford, on this very subject. “But didn’t you live in Wyoming?” I asked.
He said, “Yes, but every weekend the White House would send out a jet to pick me up. We spent more time together than ever.”15
Eric Trump looked wistful. “I would say that we are the opposite,” he said to me, during an interview over lunch in New York City. “We used to see our father every day. Not anymore. Not anymore.”
Donald Trump’s grandchildren now filled the White House. Don Jr. and Vanessa had five children. Jared and Ivanka had three.
“That last night of the inauguration celebration we were all together,” Don Jr. remembers. “The White House staff created a table full of kids’ food in the State Dining Room, and, as you know, the kids always get the good stuff. Everybody likes kids’ food. Soon the adults were in there chowing down on hamburgers and chicken fingers.”
The children didn’t stay in the dining room long. They were soon scattered throughout the State Floor in a rousing game of White House hide-and-go-seek with Uncle Barron as the supervisor.
“The kids all love Barron,” Don Jr. explains. “He rules the grandkids.”
Within minutes there were shrieks of laughter and screams of delight as Trump children were rousted out from behind drapes in the Blue Room and from underneath chairs in the Red Room.
With the sounds of giggling grandchildren echoing in the halls of the White House, the adult members of the Trump family sat down together around the table in the State Dining Room. Carved into the stone fireplace were the famous words of John Adams, the first president to live there: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this House and on all who shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.”
Eric and Lara Trump had an announcement. “That night, Eric and I told the whole family I was pregnant with Luke, with our son,” Lara said. “It was just a very special memory that we will always have.”
Hearing the loud exclamations, Barron came rushing back into the dining room. He was sweating and huffing and puffing. Out of breath. “What happened? What happened?” He was juggling both worlds: the grandkids, where he reigned supreme as the favorite uncle, and the adults, who were busy changing the world from the White House State Dining Room.
“It was so peaceful and so beautiful,” Lara said. “The family was all together. It was just magic. We had been through so much. There had been so much pain and accusation. It had really been shocking. It had been a long, bitter, divisive campaign, but now the nightmare was finally over. The country would come back together as it always did. There was so much to do.”
“Okay?” Barron asked, waiting for an answer. Was that it? Was there more? Were the announcements over? “Okay?”
The kids were calling from the East Room of the White House, where they had found new, foolproof places to hide. Uncle Barron was needed elsewhere.
NOTES
1. Interview with Lara Trump, January 2019.
2. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotes by Donald Trump Jr. in this chapter come from conversations, emails, and interviews in 2019.
3. From interviews with Lara Trump, 2019.
4. https://www.usmagazine.com/stylish/news/what-makeup-products-melania-trump-wore-on-inauguration-day-w
5. https://www.usmagazine.com/stylish/news/melania-trumps-inauguration-hairstyle-how-to-details-w462140/
6. https://nypost.com/2017/01/20/why-ivanka-will-be-the-most-stylish-first-daughter-ever/
7. https://time.com/4641208/donald-trump-robert-jeffress-st-john-episcopal-inauguration/
8. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Tiffany Trump in this chapter come from a 2019 interview with the author.
9. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Jared Kushner in this chapter come from 2019 interviews with the author.
10. https://www.businessinsider.com/ivanka-trump-plays-social-butterfly-at-obama-economic-conference-2009-3
11. https://www.businessinsider.com/ivanka-trump-plays-social-butterfly-at-obama-economic-conference-2009-3
12. Interview with Tiffany Trump, August 2019.
13. Interview with Tiffany Trump, August 2019.
14. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2017/01/21/trump-inaugural-events-end-in-prayer-at-national-cathedral/
15. Interview with Jack Ford for the book All the Presidents’ Children.
10
BLOWING IT UP
“Watching the media meltdown and Martha Raddatz crying on television, well, it was just a little bit too much.”
—DONALD TRUMP JR.1
On January 21, 2017, while the Trump family was attending the traditional inaugural religious service at the National Cathedral, the Grammy Award–winning recording artist Madonna was taking to the podium of the Women’s March to make a solemn declaration. “Yes, I’m angry,” she said. Carefully looking back down at her index cards with her talking points. “Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House …” The crowd cheered.2<
br />
Some of the Trump family members were in a motorcade back to the White House when they spotted her comments on their Twitter feed. Family text messages jumped from car to car.
“It’s interesting,” Donald Trump Jr., told me in his description of the day. “People on the left have been portrayed by the national media as ‘tolerant.’ There is nothing tolerant about the American Left. Even among themselves. If one of their own makes even the slightest slip from orthodoxy, they will viciously turn on them.”
From the beginning, Donald Trump and his family had been a magnet for public criticism. Some of this was pure partisanship. Or just plain tribalism. The Red team against the Blue. Some was animated by money that members of the establishment feared they might lose if Trump won the election and made progress in reforming the government. And some of it was just crazy as in the Philadelphia Daily News comparing Trump to Hitler on its front page.3
Still, none of that fully explained the vitriol directed at this family, including its most innocent and defenseless members. Perhaps this was because “the Donald” was tough, he could take it, and since he seemed impervious to the most outlandish attacks, the best way to hurt him was possibly through the people he loved.
The viciousness of the attacks was without parallel.4 For example, on the morning of the inauguration, Stephen Spinola of Comedy Central tweeted that ten-year-old Barron looked like a “date-rapist-to-be.”5 In a follow up tweet he ridiculed the young man’s genitals.6 A writer for the NBC show Saturday Night Live tweeted that the president’s son would be America’s “First Homeschool Shooter.”7 (Barron was not homeschooled.)
Attacks on the first lady were equally vicious. When she appeared radiant in a blue coat and long blue gloves on Inauguration Day, the attacks only intensified. A New York Times reporter, Jacob Bernstein, made the claim that she had been a “hooker.” It was the sort of sexist claim that high school boys make of young ladies whose beauty and brains are a threat. The Times responded by saying that “the comment was not intended to be public.”8 Bernstein apologized but was not fired.9
Meanwhile, the UK Daily Mail took the story public, claiming that First Lady Melania Trump had once worked for an escort service. Not only was it wrong, but the newspaper subsequently lost a lawsuit over its attack and publicly admitted that its claims about the first lady were not true. They had to pay out $2.9 million.10
When Donald Trump complained about the rapper Snoop Dogg threatening him with a gun in a video, the rapper “Bow Wow” (Shad Moss) tweeted back the threat that he would make the first lady a sex slave.11 “Shut your punk ass up talking shit about my uncle,” Moss said, “before we pimp your wife and make her work for us.”12
When news came that Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump Kushner, would work in the White House, Trevor Noah from The Daily Show promoted the slur that Trump wanted to commit incest with his daughter.13 He urged television viewers to hashtag this idea on Twitter.
When news leaked that Lara Trump was pregnant, the celebrity Chelsea Handler led a public attack on the unborn child.14 “Just what we need. Another person with those jeans [sic]. Let’s hope for a girl.”15 Handler, stung by criticism that she couldn’t spell correctly, attacked the Trumps again in the fall, declaring “Is there anyone dumber than @realDonaldTrump? Besides his children, and Melania?”16
Examples of such ferocious attacks go on and on. In May 2017, the comedian Kathy Griffin arranged for a picture of herself holding the severed, bloody head of President Trump.17 In June, the actor Johnny Depp posed a question to his audience at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England: “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” He then added, “Maybe it’s time.”18
Chelsea Handler’s curse on Lara’s unborn baby didn’t work. And it was a boy. Eric Luke Trump was born on September 12, 2017. A second baby, Carolina Dorothy Trump, was born August 19, 2019, to become the tenth grandchild of the president.
SELF-INFLICTED MURDER?
While Hollywood and some publications were more extreme in their obscene hostility, the campaign of the television networks against the new Donald Trump administration was just as pronounced. The networks were dependent on their corporate sponsors, which were, likewise, dependent on a system that naturally favored some companies and not others. Donald Trump, the outsider, himself a billionaire, could not be legally bribed by lavish political donations. In his independence, he became a disrupter as he worked to bring some sanity to the nation’s economic woes. And that was most unsettling to those who for decades had drawn sustenance from the rich world of crony capitalism.
No matter how successful the president’s true record may have been, with the stock market up and unemployment down, the media’s hostility toward Donald Trump and his family was toxic. It was having its impact on the public. His popularity hovered around 40 percent. To be sure, the media itself paid a price for their bias. A Gallup poll showed that only 20 percent of Americans had a “great deal” of confidence in TV news, which put it lower than newspapers, which registered an anemic 23 percent.19
The active media campaign against Trump sometimes defied logic.
At first, the economic success of the Trump administration was ignored. One study showed that during a four-month period, less than 1 percent of all television news coverage monitored concerned the economy.20
When the rebounding numbers were too massive to dismiss, critics suggested that while there might have been some economic growth, it was benefitting only the rich friends of Donald Trump. But this, too, was a difficult argument to make. Billionaire elites had overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in the election.21 Likewise, the unemployment numbers undercut the premise that Trump and his economy were hostile to women, blacks, and Hispanics. The government’s own numbers soon showed the lowest unemployment rate in history for blacks and hispanics and the lowest in half a century for women.
Late in the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency, when wages were up for the poorest of Americans, the Democratic and media critics fashioned a new explanation. In September 2018, former president Barack Obama, speaking at the University of Illinois, suggested that the economy was indeed growing, but it was because of him. He claimed that the emerging good news was due to his own economic policies finally kicking into gear.22 Obama, who had wondered aloud how candidate Trump was going to get those new jobs he had promised, was now taking credit for them.
The story of a weakened ISIS experienced a similar metamorphosis. First it was denied. Then it was ignored—and then reluctantly acknowledged with an increasingly familiar new twist. It was all thanks to former president Barack Obama, whose policies had only needed time to cook in order to have their impact.23
Some television networks shamelessly advanced all three theories simultaneously. At any given moment, a pundit might be declaring that the growth was not real and ISIS was not defeated. Meanwhile, another would argue in a subsequent segment that the recovery benefited only the rich. And yet another would say that the economic boom was real and ISIS had, indeed, been defeated, but that it was the work of Barack Obama.
Others may have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the economy was indeed booming, and maybe even Trump was responsible—but they didn’t care. They still didn’t like Trump. It was not really about poor people, after all, it was about their team winning. The comedian Bill Maher spoke for many of Trump’s opponents when he wistfully hoped out loud for a recession.
When Van Jones interviewed Jay-Z on CNN he asked the obvious question. Does Trump have a point? “He’s one who is saying look, ‘I’m dropping Black unemployment. Black people are doing well under my administration.… Maybe the Democrats have been giving us good lip service but no jobs?”
Jay-Z, a Clinton supporter and popular rapper, with an estimated net worth of $900 million, answered by saying, “No, no, that’s not the point. Money does not equate to happiness.”24
Trump was the enemy, even if he was right.
Not only were the president and the first family targets, the media began to grow angry at anyone, public or private, who supported the Trumps. This included the Republican establishment, which had once been a dependable member of the opposition.
That first summer of Trump, a gunman opened fire, attempting to murder Republican congressmen on a baseball diamond in Virginia. Scott Pelley, the calm, erudite, understated anchor of CBS Evening News, wondered aloud to his television audience whether the attempted murders were “foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.”25 The gunman was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
Being a Trump Republican was now worthy of death.
NO HONEYMOON FOR THIS GUY
Historians often refer to the first few months of a new administration as the “honeymoon period” of a presidency. The public, the media, and members of Congress will give the new administration the benefit of the doubt.26 But the media, having failed to accurately call the 2016 election, was in no mood to be accommodating. When the economy took off like a rocket, this time defying the economic experts, the media and its allies became almost hysterical and desperate in their opposition.
A Harvard University study on the president’s first one hundred days in office could not find a single major area of media coverage on Trump that was more positive than negative.27 According to the Harvard study, no other president had experienced such negative coverage.
A 2018 review of more than one thousand television news stories showed that 92 percent were negative, while only 8 percent were positive.28 Trump’s use of social media to speak directly with the American people was likewise under attack. Pro-Trump YouTube channels were allegedly targeted by Google. It was also claimed that subjects and information on search engines were skewed.29
The former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said that “no president since Abraham Lincoln has faced the kind of unending bias and hostility from the media that President Trump is living through.”30