Once the divorce was filed, though, Marla fought to make sure she had enough money to buy her daughter the good life Tiffany had been born into. This was particularly true when it came to making sure that her father would take care of Tiffany the same way he’d taken care of her older siblings. She complained to friends and lawyers that in Ivana’s prenup and their subsequent divorce settlement, his first wife had scored a far more generous arrangement when it came to supporting Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric than Marla had for Tiffany. Like Ivana, Marla argued that she had signed the marital agreement under duress—just days before the wedding—relenting only under the pressure of the clock ticking closer to their big public day. “I was backed against the wall,” she said in another interview with the Daily News in the fall of 1997. “I really felt at the time that I had no choice. I was looking out for the best for my baby.” Donald contended that Tiffany was “very, very special” to him and that “she will be magnificently taken care of.” When it came to whether or not he was stiffing his youngest daughter, he told the press, “I don’t think there should be an issue about that.” Marla responded by saying that she hoped that proved true. “I’m praying that he’s fair where she’s concerned. She’s a famous child, and I want to give her a secure home in a good, safe neighborhood, in a good school district. That’s all I want.”
For a time after the divorce, Marla tried to give her that secure home in New York. Immediately they settled into something a bit more normal—and certainly closer to earth, less gilded, and lacking a certain balance in the checking account—outside Trump Tower. “Now we enjoy the simple things,” Marla said in an interview at the time. “Being a child brought up riding in limousines all her life, [Tiffany] looks at the buses and the cabs and says, ‘I want to ride in those.’ We have a much more normal life now. It’s about pure, unconditional love.” As pared down as their lives were, they were inextricably tied to Donald in Manhattan, where the Trump name was splashed across buildings and tabloids, and stood for something Marla did not necessarily want to associate with anymore. He had already started dating Melania, which meant his name was again in the gossip pages. Marla also wanted to restart her acting career. She couldn’t live off the divorce settlement, and that was not as easy to do from New York. She would bring Tiffany with her when she traveled for auditions, and at first she kept a little apartment in Hollywood where they would stay as she went out for TV gigs and movie roles. But Tiffany was getting to the age where she would need to settle into a real school, and she couldn’t be traveling back and forth to Los Angeles with her mother. It wasn’t as though she was going to spend half the time with her father, anyway, so Marla made the choice to move with Tiffany to California.
At first it was going to be temporary. “If I get the right parts, I’ll stay,” Marla said at the time. She never really landed them, but she stayed regardless. In November 1999 she bought a 5,770 square-foot home for herself and Tiffany in a gated community called Mountain View Estates. It was one of 385 Mediterranean-style homes built in the early 1990s in the private community behind stone gates and buttressed by two man-made ponds with fountains spouting water toward the sky. The grounds are meticulously kept, and the homeowners association dues go toward maintaining the tennis courts, funding security, and keeping access to hiking trails in the surrounding Santa Monica National Recreation Area open.
Marla paid $1.349 million for the sunny yellow five-bedroom, six-bathroom home with a terra-cotta roof and views of the mountains, built on a lot big enough for a basketball court and a swimming pool with a custom water slide and swim-up bar with several stools built into the water. Inside the house’s double doors, a double-height rotunda with a double wrought-iron staircase led to Marla’s bedroom, with a stone fireplace and balcony, and Tiffany’s, outfitted with a fluffy pink carpet and frilly drapes.
It was lavish, certainly, but it was nearer to earth than the triplex or Mar-a-Lago. Marla stuck her in the $30,000-a-year Viewpoint School in Calabasas, where she was a fairly standard rich kid with a recognizable last name. Once she got her license, she drove a black Audi A5; in her senior year, she went to Coachella to see Rihanna and Calvin Harris with her friends, and to senior prom in a hot pink floor-length gown. Donald paid for most of it, but that’s about where his daily involvement stopped, and where the Trump side of her ended. “She [hasn’t] grown up in the Trumpdom,” Marla said in an interview when Tiffany was a teenager. “She’s grown up really a kid playing soccer, playing basketball, playing her sports. Pretty regular. I’ve been the soccer mom, I’ve driven the SUV.” Tiffany said that the move to California let her have a fairly normal, comfortable existence—the kind of childhood her older half siblings never got. “Since I have grown up on the West Coast, I’m definitely different from all of them growing up on the East Coast,” she remarked on Oprah. “‘It was great for me getting a chance to grow up as a normal kid just out of the spotlight, versus all of them growing up in New York. They always had that intense media and spotlight on them.”
Marla had boyfriends, of course, but it was mostly her and Tiffany making dinner together, playing tennis, shuttling to sports practices, spending time in Georgia with her family. After Tiffany graduated from high school, Marla accompanied her on a European trip, through Paris, London, Vienna, and Amsterdam. “I’ve had a real blessing of being able to raise Tiffany as a single parent,” she said. Donald, she said, took care of her school and some of her needs, “but as far as the day-to-day parenting, I’ve been the one here. There’s no secrets I ever kept from Tiffany.” Tiffany wasn’t shy about how much her mom did for her. “We’ve always been very close, since she raised me as a single mom,” she told Oprah. “My friends are always like, ‘Wow, you guys have a really good relationship. She’s with me a lot of the time and people find that kind of shocking.”
That’s not to say Tiffany had no relationship with her father. There were the Palm Beach breaks and he would fly in for occasional school events. But she didn’t quite get him, nor he, her. Her siblings spent years perfecting how to maneuver around and interpret Donald—how to get a few extra bucks for a pair of jeans or a trip they wanted to take, when the best time to ask was, what moods to avoid. Tiffany hadn’t spent years collecting that emotional data. And so when she was in high school, about fifteen years old, she approached Ivanka for some intel. Tiffany didn’t have a credit card linked up to her dad’s account, and she didn’t know how best to ask their dad about it. As Ivanka tells it in her book, The Trump Card, Tiffany’s “relatively simple money needs” were not “because she was spoiled,” but because she wanted to keep up with her friends at school. Tiffany had come up with a strategy; she shared with her sister, who told her it was no big deal and to make the ask. Tiffany couldn’t quite work up the courage, though. She couldn’t pull the trigger. “I didn’t tell her of course,” Ivanka wrote, ostensibly telling her and anyone who would read her book, “but I went to our father and suggested he think about surprising Tiffany with a credit card for Christmas, with a small monthly allowance on it. Sure enough, he did just that. Tiffany was thrilled and relieved. And so appreciative.” (Donald never had to worry about Tiffany taking advantage of the card. Like her father, she developed a reputation among her friends for her thriftiness. A certain set of Penn students follow a social schedule that repeats itself each week. On Thursday evenings, big groups of friends go out to dinner—usually a bring-your-own restaurant blocks downtown from campus—before heading to a club rented out by a different fraternity each week for Penn students, where they each pay $10 at the door and party with people they could just as easily party with in their frat houses. Tiffany sometimes went along with this, and friends remember that when she did, she had a habit that stuck out to the other well-off Ivy League students. Typically, the check would come and someone would divide the total by however many people came to dinner that night, regardless of who ordered the more expensive entrée, who just got a salad, who requested a soda or a side dish. When Tiffany would
go out to dinner, she became somewhat notorious for scrutinizing the bill, tallying up what she owed, down to the penny, and only agreeing to pay exactly that amount. She would explain that her father provided her with a budget of $500 each month.)
Tiffany was clear about how living on the opposite coast from her father gave her cover. That all but disappeared when she left California on August 27, 2012, and moved east to Philadelphia for school. For the first time, she got a sense of what it was like to live life in a place where people treated her as they had treated her siblings when they heard the Trump name. As many students do in their freshman year, Tiffany went along with her friends as they felt out Greek life and other social clubs on campus. Formal sorority rush would not start until her second semester, but she started going to events during the fall of her first year at Penn for the Tabard Society, a semi-secret all-women’s group on campus. Unlike official sororities, Tabard was off campus and not recognized by the university. It has no national chapter or other branches on other campuses. So its selection process began months earlier than the sororities’ did, and dragged out for months, unlike the sorority “rush,” which wraps up tidily within about a week. The group of girls looking to join Tabard usually hovers well about two hundred, though the group ultimately offers spots—or “bids,” as they call them—to just ten to twenty girls. Tabard’s early events in the fall are open to any girl on campus who wants to join, but once the girls have mingled for a few evenings, they become invitation-only, and the number of girls invited to each event gets smaller and smaller as the process moves along. Tiffany Trump attended the first event or two, along with her friends, but by the time it got to the first invitation-only event, she did not make the list. People in the group thought she was perfectly nice, but feared that having someone with her last name would turn off other girls looking to join the house. That risk outweighed the reward.
The risk was due, in large part, to the fact that Tiffany arrived on campus at a time when her father was more than just a recognizable Manhattan real estate developer known for his science experiment of a hairdo, his Cheeto-hued skin, his string of high-profile divorces and supermodel wives, and the oft-imitated “you’re fired” he made famous in prime time on his reality TV show. In 2011, a year before Tiffany started at Penn, he started publicly questioning the validity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Obama was such a popular figure on campus at the time that students still hung Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” posters in their dorm rooms. On the eve of his first presidential election, students poured out of their apartments and study rooms and the Van Pelt Library, cheering and hugging and banging on cars blaring music through open windows, despite the November chill in the air. Hundreds of them started walking down Walnut Street toward Center City, not because there was an organized celebration waiting for them farther downtown but because they were buzzing inside, bursting with so much exuberance that they couldn’t stay inside or keep it to themselves. They needed to move. They knew they had been witness to history, and they almost had to see the scores of people out there reveling in this moment to believe it. So to many of Tiffany’s classmates, the fact that the man bearing her last name repeatedly went on cable news and tweeted to claim that Obama’s birth certificate was “a fraud” and urged him to debase himself and his office by providing proof did not engender a lot of goodwill.
That the Trump name hadn’t stung Tiffany sooner is a testament to Marla’s decision to move her out of New York and far away from Donald. By the time Tiffany’s siblings were in college, they had spent so many years under public scrutiny, treated differently—both positively and negatively—because of their last name, that they consciously ran away from it. For Don Jr., that meant showing up to Penn in a pickup truck to prove a point (though he did find himself in the occasional “Don’t you know who I am?” fights). Ivanka made a calculated effort to portray herself as the anti–Paris Hilton, constantly stressing what a hardworking homebody she was, content to skip the clubs for a movie and ice skating and hours at the office. Eric would actually deny it when people asked if he was, in fact, that Trump. They had lived through people trying to take advantage of their family, so they learned to turn away from it entirely in their social lives, keeping in touch with old friends they knew they could trust or those who couldn’t care less about their last name or how they grew up.
Tiffany, though, hadn’t grown sick of the association, because she hadn’t really been associated with it much before. Sure, she lived a cushy life in Calabasas with Marla, but it was largely private, mostly normal, and well shielded from the incessant life on camera Marla bemoaned after she divorced Donald. She hadn’t yet had people use her, or burn her, the way her siblings had. And unlike Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, she was too young to remember the firestorm around her parent’s divorce, so she hadn’t learned how that sort of attention can turn on a person on a dime.
Beyond that, she was the very definition of a privileged millennial, keen on posting every aspect of her life, as if it were a contest: who could share the most, get the most likes, attract the most followers. She quickly found how to do that, posting photos of her on her dad’s jet or poolside at Mar-a-Lago, in a glittery gown in front of a towering Christmas tree, surrounded by dozens of presents, in the front row at a fashion show, behind the scenes at a photo shoot, or dancing in a lace bikini by a Southampton pools, wearing a tiara and a fur hood and munching from pool-deep soup bowls filled to the top with caviar.
The gossip pages quickly caught on. The New York Post ran an item in 2013 about spotting her in a sparkly blue sailor costume at the Boom Boom Room’s Halloween party, given by V Magazine. That summer, Newsday placed her at 1 Oak in Southampton on a Saturday evening in June. That fall, the Post detailed her twenty-first birthday celebration, which started out with dinner hosted by her father at—where else?—Trump Soho, followed by a night at the meatpacking district club Up & Down. A year later, at the end of the summer of 2015, MailOnline posted a story about Tiffany dancing so wildly at a Jason Derulo concert that a bouncer told her and her friends to calm down their moves.
Around that time, the magazine DuJour did a feature on Tiffany and the group of other rich kids she was palling around with, who incessantly posed in photos subsequently posted on their Instagram and Snapchat accounts. Collectively, they became known as “the rich kids of Instagram” or “the Snap Pack,” for their tendency to share images across social media almost admirable in their brazen ostentatiousness. There was a blonde with a hard-earned tan chugging a $200 bottle of Cristal, captioned “Water shortage on the island so we have to improvise.” There were chilled rosé glasses sipped in front of sprawling pools, poses in front of jumbo jets or atop penthouses that overlooked the Eiffel Tower, stacks of Cartier “Love” bracelets and diamond-encrusted Rolexes. Their feeds became a delicious guilty pleasure, with other millennials and lookie-loos far older hate-watching their every stomach-turning move. Surely it was a new phenomenon: hundreds of thousands of people following these kids’ accounts, just to both loathe and envy them—kids who hadn’t worked a day, unabashedly, fliply bragging about all the unthinkably grand things they were conspicuously consuming. If their parents had grown up subscribing to the maxim “Money talks, wealth whispers,” this new generation of rich kids bought into the idea that wealth shouted itself from the rooftops, and prayed that hundreds of thousands of people would hear.
This new media-savvy silk-stocking posse included Andrew Warren, the grandson of 1970s fashion mogul David Warren; Gaïa Jacquet-Matisse, the great-great-granddaughter of French artist Henri Matisse; Peter Brant Jr., the son of model Stephanie Seymour and art collector Peter Brant; Kyra Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s daughter; and Reya Benitez, the daughter of Studio 54 DJ John “Jellybean” Benitez.
Because they emerged in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, when the Kardashians and Real Housewives got far more attention than the war in Iraq and the upcoming presidential election (before tha
t turned into a reality show–like spectacle of its own, that is), this group received quite a bit of infamy. In fact, producers looking to turn their social feeds into a reality show of their own approached the crew with a variety of opportunities. In aggregate, they shied away from it. “You have to think long term. It’s easy money, but . . . ,” Tiffany told DuJour. Matisse interrupted her: “But it conflicts so much with all of our different personal goals. Besides, it’s not about money or fame. It’s about our friendships. It’s about us being fucking amazing people and loving each other.” To the New York Times, which interviewed the crew in a piece of its own a few months later, Matisse added that their posting had another, simpler raison d’être. “I look good in pictures I take of myself.”
In the many stories written about the Snap Pack—and there are many—Tiffany was often absent or in the background. “Perhaps unexpectedly, considering her pedigree, Trump—who has just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania—is the least showy of all of them,” the Evening Standard wrote in 2016. DuJour reported that she had an Ivy League degree and “a Southern gentility, using expressions like ‘goodness gracious’” and that, unlike her friends, she was debating whether or not to go into business or apply to law school. It was not unlike the way Ivanka was talked about as a teenager in comparison to her more ostentatious pals when they all appeared in that documentary Born Rich. They might not have grown up spending much time together, but their genetic propensity to use their friends as foils, casting themselves in the best life, shone through in both of them.
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