by Doug Wead
THE CALIFORNIA TRUMP
Tiffany Trump was born October 13, 1993, in West Palm Beach, Florida. She is the president’s only child with his second wife, Marla Maples, and the fourth child in the Donald Trump family. Tiffany and her mother are best pals. In fact, I caught up with Tiffany on a return trip from Mallorca, Spain, where the two had been vacationing together.
I wanted to know how much this presidential business had been a part of Tiffany Trump’s life. Could she name an exact day or time that she first became aware of her father’s intention to run for president? Did she have earnest conversations with him like Don Trump Jr.? Did she remember him reading newspapers with exasperation like Eric? Or did she remember the family summit at Bedminster that Lara had talked about?
“It’s a conversation that has been going on within my family all of my life,” Tiffany said. “But speaking about it is far different than when it becomes a reality. I don’t think there was any way to tangibly and mentally prepare for the impact my father’s announcement would have on our lives.
“My dad’s announcement came at the time that I was going into my senior year at the University of Pennsylvania, and being on a college campus during this time led to both positive conversations and challenging surprises amongst my friends and fellow students.”
Life for a presidential candidate’s son or daughter at a university cannot be easy, especially for the child of a Republican. American academia has been notoriously liberal for many years. One of the Nixon daughters was reportedly spit on by fellow students as she walked across campus.
George W. Bush had once expressed to me his concern about his own daughters being on campus during a presidential campaign. I had talked to him on the telephone in 1997 when he was the leader in the latest presidential preference poll. I asked him what he was going to do.
“I’m not going to run,” he answered.
“Why not?” I asked. “You are at the head of the pack.”
“Because of the girls,” he said. He was referring to his twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. “They would be in college then and it would ruin their lives.”
“Did it ruin your life?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “It made my life.”4
How did being the daughter of Donald Trump, a controversial and unconventional political figure, affect the world of Tiffany Trump, the young student, at a time when campuses were more politically radical than ever before? According to many reports, free speech was now limited on many campuses.5 Even beyond the classroom and academic discussions, how was her life impacted socially?
“Technology was a factor,” Tiffany said. “And the growing influence of social media and online platforms played a large role in the impact it had on my family and my own life.
“One of the most challenging experiences for me,” Tiffany said, “was even seeing friends I had in elementary school in California quickly judge me for simply supporting my father. Early in the campaign I chose to delete my Facebook account.
“Growing up as the daughter of Donald Trump I was accustomed to uninvited attention in the past, given his fame, but I had learned to protect myself from public exposure. Although at times it was difficult to handle the lack of anonymity, I adjusted. Instead of allowing external forces to rattle me, I focused on what I could control: pursuing my education and ensuring the authenticity of my own actions. However, when my father decided to run for president, the nature of the attention directed toward me shifted from curiosity to contempt and from interest to judgment.”
BECOMING A PUBLIC FIGURE IN ONE DAY
Tiffany Trump’s rebirth as a celebrity happened suddenly, without time to prepare. It was a jolting experience. She delivered her speech to the Republican National Convention and suddenly, with the flip of a switch, she was known to millions of people. She could not walk down the street or into a restaurant without being recognized. For the millions who missed that televised moment, there were many others on the street nearby, curators of public life, who could whisper, “Do you know who that is?”
She was living in New York City at the time. “I had been taking the subway alone to work,” Tiffany said. “However, after the Republican convention it began to become a little more difficult to fly under the radar. I was instructed to take extra precautions for my security, which meant much longer commutes and less time simply walking in the city that I love.”
If she had lost her anonymity, her career trajectory was also suddenly knocked off kilter.
“After my speech at the RNC I feel like there was more of a focus on me and what role I would have,” Tiffany said. “The RNC was the first time I truly spoke about my father’s run for president.
“I had an internship in New York City during this time. It was a great opportunity and truly exciting but now more eyes in the office were turned in my direction. I was being watched both out of curiosity and sadly out of blind contempt. It was clear that my life had changed forever.”
What were her emotions and feelings on Election Night? Did she believe the early reports that her father would lose? At what point did she finally conclude he would win?
When it came to crunching the numbers, Tiffany turned out to be one of the more insightful members of the family. “I’ve grown up with the mentality that anything is possible and that things can change in a split second,” she said. “I didn’t believe the early reports, as I think it is nearly impossible to predict outcomes when there are so many factors at play.”
What was she feeling backstage at the Hilton? Just before the whole family marched onstage? America’s new first family?
“It’s hard to really put my feelings in words, but it was both very humbling and surreal, as we didn’t know exactly how our lives would change but it was clear that they would. What so many thought was the ‘impossible’ became reality.”
THE LEGACY OF THE TRUMP FAMILY
How do various members of the Trump family feel about his legacy? How do they feel about the future of their own family brand? What has kept them together through all the pressure? What has kept them from familial rivalries?
“Eric, Ivanka, and I are in the same age group,” Don Jr. says.6 “We always had a bigger understanding. We’ve been lucky. I think we’ve seen what happens when something is driven into the ground by ego. This is true in a family or in a business. Perhaps there’s an irony here because in our family you can see the importance of having an ego. You have to be driven to get anything done, but I think we also have had to keep an eye on its disastrous effects.
“A family-run business is really binary. It’s rarely just okay. It’s either good or it’s terrible. More often than not, it’s terrible because of divisions. So, yes, we have many of the Trump characteristics, we have a lot of competition, and yet I think we’ve always had a big picture of what those kinds of rivalries would do if left unchecked.
“Again, speaking for Eric, Ivanka, and myself, I think from a young age, we were exposed to a lot of media viciousness. Going through my parents’ divorce when I was twelve years old. Watching it play out on the front pages of the New York City tabloids for a month. You know, I think it really created an us-versus-the-world scenario. For all the bad things that it caused it also brought us together. We just sort of defended ourselves and took care of ourselves.
“So, while we’re not perfect, we may not agree on everything, I think we understand what the pitfalls of going to the mattresses would mean. We’ve always been able to speak together. We’ve always been pretty vocal about what we were thinking. We talk it out and sort it out.
“People are certainly trying to pit us against each other,” Don Jr. said. “But it just doesn’t work that way. It goes back to our youth. We experienced some of the cruel realities of the world. We know that many of the things that might divide us, many of the rivalries, are created by nonsense. We’ve always had a unique ability to stick together, to be that childhood unit that we were when I was twelve, Ivanka was eight, and Eric was six. I
think Eric will tell you that I was a big mentor to him growing up. We’ve always had that sort of relationship, where we’re really as close as you can be as a family, and that’s the way it’s always been.”
I asked Eric Trump how often he gets back to the White House. How often does he check in with the president? “I’m there once every couple of weeks. I speak with my father often. He has placed tremendous trust in me, and we have long been very close.”
How has power affected the president? How has it affected the family?
“That day in the elevator,” Eric said, “that day that Don talks about. When my father told us, ‘We are quickly going to know who our real friends are,’ he was right. I still chuckle thinking about all the text messages that came in the day after we won. It took most of the day just to respond to them. I got messages from people I hadn’t heard from in six months, saying, ‘Congratulations, buddy. I was there the entire time. I just didn’t want to disrupt you. I knew how busy you were.’
“It’s funny. ‘You’re right. I didn’t hear from you. Now you want to be on the winning team.’ The world is a fickle place.”
I asked Donald Trump Jr. how the White House years had changed the family.
“We are just trying to experience some of the amazing things that we now have access to that we will never have again. Even my father said, ‘Whether it’s the best or the worst presidency in history, you have a finite window to be able to see this piece of America. You should try to experience what you can, because it is truly incredible.’
“That’s how I feel,” Don Jr. said. “This is the greatest nation in the world. To be able to see things and experience things at this level is truly amazing. To be able to roam the White House, to campaign across the country. To be able to see the results of our father’s hard work. To see the dreams he’s had for this country coming true. To see, every day, hardworking Americans getting those new jobs, well, it makes all the adversity, all the hell, all of the media lies, even the witch hunts against my father, it makes them all worthwhile.
“I can tell you, my father, the boy from Queens, is still amazed to this day that he is president. He does not take it lightly. He believes in the magnitude, the gravity of what he has to do. He is still moved by the fact that people elected him. He is not jaded. He is totally focused on doing what is right, no matter how it is misinterpreted by others.
“He is impressed by America. He loves the American people. He is so happy to see the jobs come back, so happy to see minorities and the disenfranchised now experiencing the American dream, so happy to see those people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio who had been forgotten now turning things around. He feels the responsibility to do more, and he is working constantly to find more jobs to help more Americans.”
TIFFANY AT THE WHITE HOUSE
If the White House had interrupted the family business adventure in New York City, it had curiously brought Tiffany Trump full circle, back to her father and the center of the Trump family. Now attending law school in Georgetown, she is only blocks from Jared and Ivanka’s house and her little nephews and niece. She is only blocks from the White House and her father and her little brother.
“I tend to go to the White House to see my dad and stop by to say hi to Melania and Barron about every week. It’s nice that my law school is so close that I’m able to stop by and see Barron playing soccer in the yard after school.
“Being a student at a law school university definitely comes with a lot of curiosity from my peers. The past two years have been filled with some awkwardly funny moments and other more serious and scrutinizing moments.”
I asked Tiffany if she could describe the disconnect between public perceptions about the Trumps and the reality. There had been so many false stories, filled with false quotes. On the evening of January 20, 2017, right after the inauguration, a Time magazine reporter, Zeke Miller, wrote a story claiming that the new president had removed the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.7 It was false. The disinformation never stopped. Two years later, Ian Bremmer, a New York University professor and columnist for Time magazine, posted a tweet with Trump saying, “Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden.”8 It was a false quote, of course, but the professor defended it saying it was “kinda plausible.”9 He later deleted the tweet.10
How was the Trump family different from the distorted image created by the Democratic-corporate media propaganda? What surprised people who got to know the family?
“We really are compassionate people,” Tiffany said. “I wish that everyone had a chance to know each of us as individuals so that they could see the true us, which is different from many preconceived notions.
“What most people don’t know is that I am the product of many divergent economic, religious, and social circles. The divide between the two sides of my family is striking. While my father is an affluent businessman from New York, my mother’s family is from rural Georgia, where many of my relatives have been forced to forfeit jobs due to the high cost of gas.
“Similarly, I was not raised to identify with one religion: I was exposed to two. My mother took me to synagogue on Fridays and Saturdays and to church on Sundays. I grew up eating kosher and observing the Sabbath, while also reading the Bible and singing Christian hymns.”
What secrets of success has she learned from her father’s rise to power?
“The importance of having a clear vision and focusing your energy on tangible ways to make that goal a reality—no matter the ridicule, you must stay true to what you believe is in the best interest of everyone.
“To achieve success, you truly have to care about what it is you are doing, why you are fighting for it, and for whom you are fighting.”
I asked Tiffany the question I had asked her brothers: What keeps the Trumps together as a family? Many families have deep divisions. FDR, a Democrat, had a son who opposed his reelection and years later became a big supporter of Ronald Reagan, a Republican. And Reagan had a son who spoke at the Democratic National Convention.11
“Having a common understanding and knowing who we are as a family continues to make us grow closer,” Tiffany said. “Everyone in my family works very hard and has busy schedules, but although that may cause divides for many, for us, I believe our work ethic makes us closer and illustrates how similar we are.”
What are her dreams and hopes for her life? For America?
“I dream that the citizens of the United States can find common ground and unity. There’s too much division in the world we live in, and I believe it is crucial for everyone to listen to each other in order for us to become more united.
“My experiences, both private and public, have provided me with a heightened awareness of the necessity to treat everyone with dignity by seeking to understand others’ opinions without judging their character. As I look to the future, I seek to play a role in healing the divides that have surfaced by being a voice of reason and a peaceful bridge builder. I hope to use my knowledge of the legal system as a tool to advocate for what I believe in and for those in the world who cannot do so for themselves.
“I look forward to the opportunity to define myself through my own actions, my own successes, and my own informed opinions—always listening, always learning, and always seeking to identify commonalities among differences.”
TAKE ME TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE, PLEASE
On June 3, 2019, President Trump and the First Lady were hosted by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at a formal state dinner that was six months in the planning. A long list of administration officials made the trip to London with the president and were present at the royal event, including US ambassador Woody Johnson; the president’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney; the US secretary of the treasury, Steve Mnuchin; the president’s national security adviser, John Bolton; the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders; counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway; and many others.
The media was scand
alized that the president had taken along his own family even though Jared and Ivanka Kushner were White House aides and had become indispensable to the administration. The media seemed to begrudge the Trumps any personal pleasure or honor, even if it was the natural consequence of their legitimate duties. Journalists were sure that no such thing had never happened before. As the author of The Raising of a President and All the Presidents’ Children, I started getting calls from reporters.
No, it is nothing new, I assured them. They were disappointed. Theodore Roosevelt had dispatched his daughter Alice to meet with the empress dowager of China while the whole world watched transfixed. In 1933, newly elected president Franklin Roosevelt sent his son Jimmy, who was an insurance salesman, to meet alone with the prime minister of England and then on to meet with the president of France at the Élysée Palace. Before he had finished his diplomatic jaunt, Jimmy traveled on to Rome, to meet the pope and then huddle with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
In 1991, President George H. W. Bush made sure his own children got to attend a state dinner and personally meet Queen Elizabeth when she visited the United States. None of the children actually worked in government; the president simply wanted them to experience the moment. The eldest son (and future president), George W. Bush, grabbed headlines when he quipped to the queen, “I’m the black sheep in my family, who’s yours?”
“None of your business,” the queen tartly replied.12
Even with that history, the 2019 state dinner with Queen Elizabeth hosting the Trumps was something altogether different. There was great political and public controversy for extending such honors to Donald Trump. In the fall of 2017, the Evening Standard had made it clear that Trump would not be meeting the queen anytime soon.13 It would not be proper. There would be demonstrations in the streets.