Melania wasn’t due until the tail end of March, which meant that on March 18, Donald thought he was in the clear to spend another weekend at Mar-a-Lago, while Melania stayed put in New York. He had talk show host Regis Philbin and his wife Joy fly down to keep him company. Not long after they left, Melania called Donald and told him he needed to fly home. She checked into the hospital on Sunday evening, and on the morning of Monday, March 20, after eight hours in labor, Melania delivered an eight-and-a-half-pound baby boy, nine days early. They hadn’t yet settled on a name by the time Donald called into MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning show to share the news with the world. Philbin was shocked when his producer told him that a baby Trump had arrived when he was on air filming Live with Regis and Kelly that morning, so he picked up his phone and dialed Donald, who promptly answered the call. “She gave me a nice son,” Donald told his friend. He continued to gush that day to the Associated Press, the wire service—only about himself. “I continue to stay young, right?” the fifty-nine-year-old said. “I produce children. I stay young.”
They eventually settled on a name—Barron William Trump (Barron was one of the pseudonyms Trump sometimes took on when pretending to be a member of his press team, planting stories and leaking tidbits about himself to reporters). Two weeks after giving birth, Melania appeared on ABC’s The View, telling the ladies that the birth was “great” and “very, very easy.” Had she gotten an epidural? Joy Behar asked. “Of course,” Melania said, laughing, in a decidedly un-Marla-like way.
Three weeks later they invited People into their triplex for an exclusive look at the little heir, or, as the magazine nicknamed him, the “Billion Dollar Baby.” “I like to spend every minute with him,” Melania said. “I feed him. I change him. I play with him.” Sometimes she let him sleep in a bassinette in her room with Donald, though he has an entire floor for himself—and the nanny, of course—right above his parents’. The couple had transformed the floor that Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric grew up in for the third iteration of Donald the new daddy. Barron would grow up looking out those same floor-to-ceiling windows his siblings did when he woke up on the sixty-seventh floor each morning. Donny’s Grateful Dead posters, Ivanka’s lavender canopy, Eric’s nautical bedroom, they were all gone by now. Ivana had fled the triplex with her kids more than a dozen years earlier; Marla and Tiffany packed their bags and moved west nearly ten years before. It was Melania and Barron’s turn now, and she filled his nursery with a mink coverlet presented to the littlest Trump by furrier Dennis Basso and a floppy, feet-long dog from FAO Schwarz, courtesy of Barbara Walters.
Donald seemed to be just fine with it—in front of the cameras and a reporter, at least. “I don’t sleep much anyway, so if he cries, that’s fine. I love to feed the baby, not because I have to, but just because I love it,” he said. “A lot of times, early in the morning, I’ll take care of him.” That stopped short of diaper changes, which he said his wife was fine with, too. “Some women want the husband to do half the chores,” he said. “That’s not Melania—fortunately for me.” They posed for an official portrait all together—Melania in an ultra-low-cut black satin cocktail dress, Donald in his typical boxy black suit and cobalt tie, clutching his son, who’d fallen asleep in a white onesie in his arms. Neither of the parents is smiling or looking toward the baby. They stare intensely into the camera, as if the child does not exist and they are posing for an ad for a Trump casino or the new season of The Apprentice. Barron fell into the background of most of the other photos too—like the one in which Melania is posed in front of the apartment’s gilded front doors, under its gilded ceiling, pushing a golden pram with its own chandelier, which Ellen DeGeneres had given the baby a few days earlier. She holds Barron in her other arm, though he’s mostly out of view. He is at the center of a photo shot in his nursery, in which Melania feeds him by bottle on the floor, though the gigantic stuffed dog Walters gave him and the even bigger stuffed lion and elephant and polar bear and teddy bear surrounding mom and baby are the clear focal points—artfully arranged in front of the Central Park view to tell a story of all the spoils this child, not even a month old, already enjoys. In a final photo, however, he is the star. This one was to be of just the baby, wrapped in a Burberry robe, his tiny toes covered by slippers with floppy bears hanging off the top of each foot. As he got changed out of his clothes and into the robe, Donald hovered nearby. “Come on, Barron,” he told his new son. “You’re going to make your debut.”
Chapter 5
Meet the Mini-Voltrons
About a decade ago, Donald’s three eldest children piled into one of their offices on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. They had just finished up their weekly sibling lunch date, for which they meet outside their glass-doored offices, which are all in a row, and travel down the elevators into its puke-pink marble and down the corridor to the Trump Grill.
The three were finishing up a conversation as other people in the office popped in, when out of nowhere, Don Jr. zeroed in on his sister. He clotheslined her, tackling her to the ground, in the dress she had been wearing to meetings all day. Then he plopped down and sat right on top of her head. “I used to do this all the time when we were kids,” he said. “All the time.”
Too stunned to speak, colleagues looked at Ivanka’s beet-red face, which was growing redder by the second. Eric chuckled in the corner before he, too, flew to the ground toward his sister. He started in on tickling her, while Don kept his perch on her blond ring of hair.
“I’m going to kill you both when you get off me,” she barely got out through her laughter. One colleague told the boys to knock it off by the time she’d reached a deep crimson. “It was funny, and I guess it was sweet,” a colleague recalled recently. “I’d say it was definitely not something you’d see in every office, but this wasn’t every office.” This was an elevator ride away from their old childhood bedroom, a floor below their dad’s office. They were the heirs apparent. If they wanted to turn the office into a sibling Summer Slam, so be it.
That the siblings are so close is largely the product of the bunker mentality they adopted during their formative years, through Page Six and the Mar-a-Lago sequester, through Maria and Melania and more tabloid mayhem than any children need witness. No one else understands what that was like. Nor does anyone understand quite as well what it’s like to work for their dad. They were handed a set of golden keys, and with them, golden handcuffs.
It is hard to believe that this bond, this shared mentality, is what Donald imagined when he decided he wanted a big family. Before Don Jr. was born, he’d tell friends that he wanted at least five kids. Not to mirror his own nuclear family growing up. Not as a status symbol, as some families use it, a point of pride in Manhattan (to this day, having a fourth kid—with all the square footage and tuition money and second taxis that necessitates—remains the ultimate New York status symbol, more than any home in the Hamptons or rare-skinned Birkin bag in the closet). He wanted more kids because that would mean a greater probability one would turn out just like him.
“I want five children, like in my own family, because with five, then I will know that one will be guaranteed to turn out like me,” he’d say. It is common for narcissistic parents to view their children as mirrors. Their children’s gifts and flaws reflect back onto their mother and father, and so they often demand perfection in their offspring. Donald often refers to himself as the smartest guy with the highest IQ, the ultimate dealmaker with the best genes, a storied athlete with an Ivy League education and a company worth more money than any detailed, well-respected calculation gives him credit for. If just one out of his five children had all of those things, well, any parents should be so lucky.
His vision didn’t pan out exactly as he’d imagined. As Michael Cohen, the president’s attorney, who worked closely with the family for the decade, sees it, each of his kids got one of the traits that, together, make up Donald Trump. “They’re like mini super bots, mini Voltrons,” he said. “Collectively, they
make the whole.”
In Ivanka, there is the hyperskilled media-savvy messenger. She works the press to serve her best, and when the camera comes on, she comes alive. In Don Jr., his father’s press-me-and-I’ll-hit-you-back-harder sensibility rages. In Eric is the builder, who lives and breathes construction, a natural when it comes to spatial relations and building material and working with developers and guys on a job site.
“They’re so good in their zones, like the boss is,” Cohen said, “but try to have them do what the other ones are good at, that’s just not what they do.”
Tiffany and Barron weren’t initially categorized in the same way, though it is clear that both had Donald’s guy-on-the-outside-looking-in passed down to them.
Consciously or otherwise, the Trump children have spent their lives settling into and perfecting their prescribed roles within their father’s orbit. The degree to which they’ve dug into them is astounding.
Chapter 6
Ivanka—Voltron Number One
The Media Mastermind
Rain pattered down on the hood of the town car and clung to its windows all the way through Midtown Manhattan, down into the Lincoln Tunnel, and then winding through the sleepy, slick roads in a New Jersey commuter town as one of Donald Trump’s former associates made his way home for the evening. It was 1997, and car phones were plastic bricks, but they worked well enough to telegraph a yammering Donald for the twenty-minute commute home. Mercifully for the associate, Donald got off the line as the driver turned onto his street.
He hadn’t yet put his briefcase down before his wife told him that Donald had called for him.
“But I just hung up with him,” he told her.
Donald, in the years he’d known him, was an infinite pit of need—a time-sucking vampire who fed off those around him to sustain his own vanity. To work with him was to be telephoned or summoned and shouted for, sometimes all at once, to handle noncrises, or actual crises, to stroke his ego or tamp down a rage or puff up an insecurity, or simply, most commonly, to entertain the ever bored and constantly unfocused mind of the man in Trump Tower. They implemented little tricks, ways in which they could get him off the phone quicker or brush him off more readily. Take, for instance, when Donald would not stop calling lawyers and advisers around the time he was taking his Atlantic City casino public. The financials were a disaster and time was crunched, and technically, they were in the quiet period—the time in which a company preparing to go public cannot make statements or news or say much of anything—but Donald just couldn’t shut up. Concerned about the way the press would write about him, he called and called and called with every suggestion and question and thought bubble bursting in his brain. At this point, the ink was well dry on his divorce with Ivana and he had settled in with Marla, who at that moment was sunning herself at Mar-a-Lago.
“I need to wipe this makeup off my face,” he said into the receiver. There were two people on the line, both of whom asked why he was made up in the middle of the week. It was the mid-1990s, predating The Apprentice, and surely they would have had to clear any preplanned press for the IPO.
“I shot a commercial for Pizza Hut with Ivana, but it’s not going to air until the weekend,” he said. (The commercial, now rather infamously, features the estranged couple, in diamonds and black tie, delivering innuendo-laden dialogue: “It feels so wrong, doesn’t it?” “But it feels so right.” “Then it’s a deal?” “Yes! We eat our pizza the wrong way, crust first.”) Of course, that violated the quiet period, but looking for some quiet of his own, one person on the line saw an opportunity.
“I sure hope you told Marla,” he told Donald. “You better call her right now, because if she doesn’t hear it from you first . . .”
Donald called back shortly after. “The poor girl,” he told them. “She’s sick. She told me, ‘I’m going to puke my fucking brains out.’”
“She’s not sick, Donald,” one associate told him. “She’s sick of you. You better go and get on a plane to Palm Beach right now.” That bought them a few hours of time without a phone call.
So when the associate asked his wife how he could be calling again, she shrugged and pointed him toward the telephone by the precariously stacked mail on the table. He dialed Donald’s private line in his Trump Tower triplex, waiting for the rings to be replaced by the breathy baritone he’d just hung up with a few minutes before.
Ivanka, in her own husk, answered.
“Oh, I know he was trying to talk to you, but he’ll be a few minutes.” So they made small talk about the things you can with your friend’s teenage child; she hated math class but school was fine otherwise. He flicked through the mail, biding time.
“You’ll never believe this,” he told her. “I just got a postcard for a store here called Ivanka’s.” A woman named Ivanka Eror had opened Ivanka’s Country Barn, a home furnishing store that, to this day, sells a collection of antiques, reproductions, and accessories in Wyckoff, New Jersey, twenty-eight miles from Trump Tower. That Ivanka posed, smiling from ear to ear, for a photographer from the local paper, cutting a red ribbon with her husband and the town’s mayor in the summer of 1996.
On the phone, the line went silent. “I told my dad we needed to trademark my name,” Ivanka gritted through her teeth. “He never listens to me. He never listens, but I told him.” The associate smiled to himself. Donald didn’t need to get on the line. The mini version of him had already picked up.
By September 17, 1997, Ivana filed a trademark application for the name “Ivanka.” The document, marked from Ivana’s home on Sixty-Fourth Street, stated the intention to use the name for international trademark classifications 3, 14, and 25: cosmetics (namely lipstick, lip gloss, lip liner, eye shadow, eyeliner, brow liner, mascara, concealer, foundation, pressed powder, loose powder, blusher, bronzer, nonmedicated skin preparations, namely day crème, night crème, mini-lift scrub mask, moisturizer, skin brightener, repair lotion, skin cleaner, astringent, skin toner, eye crème, wrinkle crème, eye gel, spot treatment; body crème, body lotion, bubbling bath oil), jewelry and watches, and clothing (pants, shorts, skorts, skirts, dresses, blouses, T-shirts, shirts, sweaters, sweat shirts, sweat pants, jeans, leggings, bodysuits, socks, hosiery, jackets, coats, anaraks, windbreakers, hats, shoes, boots, slippers, nightgowns, nightshirts, bathrobes, lingerie, intimate apparel, namely brassieres, panties, slips, camisoles, and tap pants).
There is a distinct genetic quality to Ivanka’s preternatural ability to self-promote. Her father, after all, built his real estate empire on a million-dollar head start from his own father and a whole lot of bluster. He spent years making phony phone calls to reporters under different pseudonyms, acting as his own spokesman to plant favorable stories about himself in the New York press, and just as often called them as himself. For a time, reporters at the New York Post put a self-imposed ban on quoting him in stories. Because he was willing to be quoted, all the time and about anything, it was almost too easy to get him on the line agreeing to appear in the story. Readers would tire of it. But there was an American appetite for the particular brand of gaudiness with a New York City address and a one-syllable name on all those buildings—in gold. He’s the poor person’s idea of a rich person, as Fran Lebowitz says, and so his name on polyester ties made in China or mattresses or hotels or water or steak or any of the now-defunct products he licensed his name to over the years had a certain appeal. “All that stuff he shows you in his house—the gold faucets—if you won the lottery, that’s what you’d buy.”
It translated to viewership, too. The Apprentice, built on this foundation, aired for fifteen seasons, later adding a celebrity version. Many have said that its most recent iteration—the presidential one—was an extension of Donald’s brand. Of course, dozens of factors led to his surprise electoral victory, which will be debated and investigated for decades to come. But unquestionably, the ease with which he knew how to market himself and manipulate the media will be among them.
Ivanka i
s the true second-generation version of that salesman. She has all of that self-promotional ease without all the brash. She is the spoonful of sugar to her father’s acerbic “You’re fired” and “Nasty woman.” Where the key to her father’s marketing ethos may have been “All press is good press,” Ivanka’s, honed since she was a child, has been “Control all press so that it is as good as possible.”
The psychology here is a gimme. The narcissism is hereditary, though muted in its inheritance. A full wall in Ivanka’s office was plastered with magazine covers bearing her image from her brief years as a professional model while she was in high school, and subsequent turn into businesswoman with crap to sell to the masses.
“That’s what she was born for! She is a Trump!,” her close friend since childhood, Christina Floyd, told Vogue a decade ago. “The girl knew how to be in front of a camera since she started speaking.”
Part of it was her natural predilection for attention. “I think part of the reason is that she is a beautiful woman, but she’s like me,” Donald once said of his daughter. “She loves the public. She loves to be out there.”
Born Trump Page 19
