Born Trump

by Emily Jane Fox

  Charlie pleaded guilty to the eighteen counts levied against him, from tax evasion to witness tampering to improper campaign donations—or, more succinctly, as Christie called them, “crimes of greed, power, and excess.” They sentenced him to two years, during which his son visited him every weekend. Jared would fly down every Sunday, then spent the rest of the week taking the reins of a company he didn’t yet know how to lead.

  Both Charlie and Jared painted the other Kushners as the true villains in this story. “I don’t believe God and my parents will ever forgive my brother and sister for instigating a criminal investigation and being cheerleaders for the government and putting their brother in jail because of jealousy, hatred and spite,” Charlie said in an interview with The Real Deal. Jared too thought of his father as the victim of lazy siblings who’d milked their father for all he was worth and then twisted their silver spoon in his back. “His siblings stole every piece of paper from his office and they took it to the government, siblings that he literally made wealthy for doing nothing,” he told New York Magazine. “All he did was put the tape together and send it. Was it the right thing to do? At the end of the day, it was a function of saying, ‘You’re trying to make my life miserable? Well, I’m doing the same.’”

  What lay in front of Jared was both an unbelievable shot and an insurmountably Herculean task. He was fresh out of graduate school and running a multibillion-dollar company that his family now needed him to use to avenge their name. So he looked beyond garden apartments in the Garden State and toward Manhattan. And he waited for the day in the near future when his father would be back home, beside him in their weekly meetings.

  The day didn’t come as soon as Jared and the rest of the Kushners had thought. Charlie was set to be released twenty-eight days early. In the scheme of things, twenty-eight days is a blip—just four weeks, shorter than any month other than February, shorter than the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, most years, at least. But for a family who believed their patriarch to be the victim in all of this, every day that he was there was a nightmare. It was an injustice. And so those extra days were not just a silver lining but a great white hope, bringing them closer to a new, rightful beginning.

  Chris Christie, though, had another plan. He insisted that Kushner serve out those twenty-eight days, making sure he would not serve a week or a day or a minute less. This was gasoline on the Kushners’ wounds. As a friend of Jared explained, it was so painful at the time that he carries it with him, even to this day: “He just can’t let go of that part of it.”

  Charlie was released to a halfway house in Newark, from which Jared consulted him on his great big bet in the big city. By the time Charlie was released, Jared had put a bid on 666 Fifth Avenue, the forty-one-story skyscraper between Fifty-Second and Fifty-Third Streets in Midtown Manhattan. All beige blocks and aluminum panels, the tower was built in 1957, and designed by the same architects who worked on Rockefeller Center, just a few blocks away. Jared had brokered the deal to pay $1.8 billion for it, which at the time made it the most expensive office building in all of the United States. The Kushners financed it with very little money of their own, financing the rest by taking on a load of debt. Jared and Charlie had a name to rebuild, and an empire to get on with. It was a deal not unlike Donald Trump’s redo of the Commodore Hotel, thirty years earlier and dozen blocks downtown. Both brought their dad’s real estate dreams across rivers, from Queens and from Jersey, respectively. Both signaled that the bridge-and-tunnel crowd was making an entrance. For the Kushners, the family’s real estate wunderkind and his newly released felon father had arrived.

  The problem was that they arrived at the most spectacularly wrong time. It was 2007, and the real estate market, particularly in New York City, was teetering on the edge of the cliff that would soon crumble into itself and take the rest of financial market with it. By 2008, the building was bleeding so much money that it could not keep up with its debt payments. To keep afloat, the company sold off the building’s retail space. Vornado Realty Trust, a public company, took on 49.5 percent of its equity.

  Before Jared picked up and moved to Washington to work in his father-in-law’s West Wing, he worked out of a corner office on the fifteenth floor of 666, within spitting distance of his mom, dad, and sister Nicole’s offices (Nicole’s husband, Joseph Meyer, is the chief executive of Observer Media). Josh, who has a venture capital firm, Thrive Capital, of his own, and Dara live in Livingston with her family. Charlie insisted that Jared take the south-facing office, with a view of St. Patrick’s Cathedral’s spirals piercing the sky over the city, a gesture that signaled his deep appreciation for the way his son had shouldered much of the burden while he was away, and a passing of the torch. The family operates under the principle of “Whatever Jared needs.” He’s the golden child who made the business survive, associates say. But golden child doesn’t begin to do his status justice.

  At the company’s weekly meeting for principals, held at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday mornings in a vast conference room with a table that seats at least two dozen people, Jared sits in the middle of the table, sandwiched by Charlie on one side and Seryl on the other, as they make their way through the three-hour agenda, during which they go over acquisitions, financing, and construction. If a family member walks into the meeting, no matter how late, or who is in the room, or how into a discussion they are, each Kushner stands up and greets them with a hug and a kiss. In fact, they do this whenever they enter or exit a room.

  There had been much to talk about at these meetings since Jared took over. The company went on a tear acquiring properties up and down the East Coast, including a deal for 733,00 square feet of the former Jehovah’s Witness headquarters on the water in Brooklyn—a developer’s fever dream that they paid $340 million to make come true.

  The deal came through when Brooklyn had already been a thing for years. There was a Whole Foods on the horizon; top realtors from Manhattan descended to lord it over brownstone bidding wars, and obsessive helicopter parents hovered around private schools with endless waitlists; the HBO series Girls had already shot a handful of seasons there, and a few SoulCycles had already opened their grapefruit-scented studios around the borough. Jared, though, was astounded by the place. “I’ve been checking out my brother’s company and tech companies, and people really seem to love Brooklyn,” he told a real estate acquaintance a couple years back. “They live there.” The person tried to keep his eyeballs in his socket for the rest of the conversation. “I was looking at this guy who looked all of twelve, but he was saying things that would only come out of the mouth of a baby boomer.”

  All the Kushner kids talk to their parents every day. The grandparents spend a great deal of time with their kids’ spouses and children at their beach house, for Shabbat, on family trips over winter breaks. Josh, the baby of the family, has been dating Karlie Kloss, one of the highest-earning supermodels in the industry, for four years. Charlie and Seryl, however, have yet to meet her.

  Kloss is not Jewish, though she has been taking classes and attending Jewish lectures with Josh diligently for some time. The family often says that the couple have not yet made a commitment to each other, so why would they take the time to meet her?—a barely veiled way of saying she is not Jewish, and she has not said she will convert, though friends of Charlie think he would have a hard time letting her in even if she did. To many of Josh’s friends, it screams of hypocrisy. They embraced Ivanka. They helped her through the conversion. Why should it be any different for Josh and for Karlie?

  “Josh is not Jared,” one family friend noted. “Jared has the leverage in the family because of what he did for Charlie.” There are some people who think it goes beyond this. They say that Karlie is not seen as educated in their minds, that she’s a midwestern girl from a midwestern family, and that she’s a model who’s posed in lingerie and walked the runway at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show nearly nude. “They care a lot about modesty,” the family friend explained. “C
harlie says that she’s done photoshoots where she’s basically naked, and that he can’t be okay with.”

  Chapter 9

  Don Jr.—Voltron Number Two

  The Attack Dog

  The University of Pennsylvania’s men’s basketball team entered the 1999 NCAA championship as the eleventh seed in its division. March Madness, or “The Big Dance,” as it is sometimes called, is the annual college basketball blitz in the final weeks of the third month each year, in which college players duke it out on courts across the country, and the rest of the country eagerly pours money into office pools and family bets, guessing which one of the teams of teenagers and twentysomethings will go all the way. There’s a system and something of a science governing the whole thing. Champion teams from thirty-two Division 1 conferences and thirty-six teams chosen by a selection committee and divided into four regions get organized into a single-elimination bracket. Within each region, every team is seeded and matched against another team for the first round. It’s predetermined who the winner of round one will face in round two, who the winner of that game will face in round three, and so on.

  In 1999, sixty-four teams entered the tournament. It happened to be a history-making year. It marked the first time that the University of Connecticut took the trophy after a tight win over Duke—77 to 74—in the championship game at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was also the year Gonzaga University first came on the scene as an NCCAA tournament superpower. The then relatively unknown team almost made its way to the finals, before UConn staged a comeback in the last minute of their Final Four game. Every year since then, Gonzaga has made the tournament.

  Penn entered March Madness that year with a 21–5 record—not terrible for the Ivy League school, which is typically not a shoo-in for the tournament. The Quakers faced off against Florida, the number 6 seed, in the first round, which they played in downtown Phoenix at the NBA home of the Suns. It was the first day of the Big Dance, on March 11, a date that happened to be in the middle of Penn’s spring break. So while the members of the men’s basketball team sweated out the pressure in Phoenix, most of their classmates sweated out alcohol elsewhere, mostly farther south, in villas in resort towns in Mexico or on the Keys in Florida or within the walls of all-inclusives in the Caribbean. That’s where Don Jr. was when his team took the court against Florida that day. He’d gone on a fairly standard—by rich-Penn-kid standards, that is—spring break trip to Jamaica, where gobs of other rich Penn kids and students from other Ivy League schools and Big Ten schools and state schools and liberal arts colleges on a similar vacation schedule migrate to get sunburns and flirt with alcohol poisoning. Who was Don Jr. to break the mold? Sure, he had grown up on vacations to Palm Beach and Aspen and summers on the Mediterranean aboard the Trump Princess. But a spring break trip to a crappy resort with other college kids? That wasn’t his father’s idea of a spring break, for which there was only ever one option, and that was Mar-a-Lago, the private club in which he was the king and his children the little princes and princesses of the castle by the sea. Don Jr. once told a New York magazine reporter in 2004 that his father would balk when he told him that he wanted to go fishing. “Why would you go fishing all weekend?” he’d ask his son, who he thought could just as easily play golf. “I don’t get it! It’s crazy!” His siblings chimed in with their own examples of their dad’s contempt for activities and trips that would have him venturing outside of Trump-owned properties and Trump-approved hobbies (namely: golf) that he himself would not choose. “I went to Hawaii and he was like, ‘Oh, don’t go to Hawaii!’ He had disdain,” Eric added. “I just came back from Hawaii two weeks ago and that was exactly his reaction,” Ivanka interrupted, sending all three of them into a fit of laughter. Eric broke into a spontaneous imitation of his father—an imitation dozens of late-night comics, professional and amateur alike, have perfected over the years. “Why don’t you just go to Palm Beach?” he said in his father’s signature rasp. “We have Mar-a-Lago!”

  So Don Jr.’s Jamaican jaunt was more than a typical spring break. It was a knowing break from his father—a trip that meant more than a raucous good time, though of course Don Jr. was never one to say no to that back then, even if it stood for absolutely nothing more than an afternoon or evening of heavy drinking. Perhaps no one in Jamaica that March even noticed that the kid whose dad was rich and famous was hanging just like the rest of them. But Don Jr. knew somewhere inside it was a subtle choice that moved him away from the ideals and identity of his father—one of many such choices he’d made since he left for the Hill School nearly a decade earlier. His insistence that he not be seen with his parents at a restaurant near campus when he first moved into boarding school was one of them. That he’d arrived at Penn in a pickup truck was another. That wasn’t what other kids who’d heard a Trump heir was going to be in class with them expected. A limousine, maybe. A chauffeured car, that wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility. Certainly a Mercedes or a BMW. Plenty of others on campus drove them, and this guy was a Trump. “We weren’t the kids showing up to college with, you know, a Ferrari,” Don Jr. told Barbara Walters in an interview on 20/20 in 2015, after his father entered the presidential race—a tacit admission that the pickup truck arrival was part of a collegiate rebranding strategy.

  “I remember when I heard he was going to be a member of our class, there was a little bit of giddy excitement, mixed with a little bit of an ‘ugh,’” one of his classmates remembers. “But I told myself, ‘Okay, he is not his father. Let’s give him a chance.’ Whatever infamy his dad had, with the affairs, and the women, and all the money and gold everywhere and the planes and what have you, that didn’t implicate him.”

  The way Don Jr. tried to spin it was that, sure, the world he came from was glitzy and gilded, but deep down, his parents knew the difference between rotting their children with spoils and making them appreciate what they had. “To say we weren’t spoiled as kids would be asinine, right?” he told Esquire magazine in 2012. “We were very well traveled. We spoke multiple languages. We were around fascinating people who were making history. We got to experience things that other people didn’t experience. But we were never spoiled financially.” He added that “that kept us out of a lot of trouble.”

  The truth was, he didn’t really keep himself out of a lot of trouble. And try as he might to prove that he wasn’t the standard spoiled, arrogant rich kid willing to pull the Trump card, he pulled it, over and over and over. On any given night, Donny would drink himself into a stupor. He would drink to the point where he’d inevitably tussle with other drunk kids on campus who had spoils and arrogance of their own. The mix of alcohol and entitlement and raging testosterone and general lack of consequences for inappropriate behavior would lead to some pushing, some shoving, some putting their red, oily faces close enough to one another to smell on each other’s breath the yeast in the beers they’d been pounding. With a lift of his square chin, Don Jr. didn’t even have to say it, but he said it anyway, and he said it all the time. “Don’t you know who I am?” classmates remember him saying, in so many words. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

  Of course they did. Because he reminded them, for starters. And because he had already developed quite a reputation as a campus boozehound and, as one classmate bluntly put it, “undoubtedly an asshole.”

  “He was classist and he was messy,” one person in his class remembered. “He was pretty out of control, but then again, so were a lot of people at Penn.”

  He was a frat boy who would willingly take part in the hazing rituals passed on in his fraternity—Phi Gamma Delta, more commonly known as FIJI—long after he’d pledged and been hazed during his freshman year. Classmates remember a belligerent Don Jr. standing outside the FIJI house dressed in a barbarian costume of sorts, yelling at the top of his lungs, as flocks of students watched outside. This was a task older brothers forced pledges to engage in. It was a trick many Greek organizations employ—humiliate the peopl
e who will later become your brothers so that they prove their loyalty and survive the kind of mortification rituals their fellow brethren have endured for decades before them. It is bonding beyond logic—a million-dollar experience no one would pay a dime for, and something only eighteen-year-olds out of their comfort zones and eager for acceptance would consider worth it. But Don Jr. had already been accepted. He’d already been bonded, already shared those humiliations, already paid the dues. He continued to participate, by choice, because, to him, it just seemed like a good time.

  Alcohol, no doubt, had a hand in making something like that fun. His classmates remember seeing him passed out, covered in what they assumed was his own vomit, though who knows whose vomit was whose, truthfully. Not once, they recall. It was a habit. As was getting so blitzed that he’d curl up in other people’s beds, passing out without knowing where he was or caring who he might displace. Clearly, he didn’t have the wherewithal to consider whether he’d used the bathroom before he tucked himself in. Quickly, he earned himself the nickname Diaper Don for his proclivity for wetting the bed on these nights. Mind you, these were other people’s beds. But mortification did not stop him. There was always more alcohol to be had the next night and the night after that. Diaper Don would wake up in some stranger’s dorm room or off-campus apartment or bedroom in his frat house, covered in piss, walk back to his own room, and get blitzed that evening or the next anew. Unsurprisingly, he did not walk away with the kinds of college friends he’d really come to trust later on in life, though he has kept in touch with some and aligned with them in his new political life. “A friend of mine from college, someone I used to party with pretty hard, is now a brain surgeon—which I find very ironic,” he told Esquire in 2012. “You go to school with someone, you party with them, and now you feel, I don’t care if you’re the best brain surgeon in the frickin’ world, I ain’t letting you operate on me.”