Barron’s sister-niece arrived on May 12, 2007. On the evening of the eleventh, Vanessa made her way out to a charity event in the city, walked the red carpet with her swelling belly, and walked inside in time for her water to break at her feet. She labored for twenty-one hours, with Don Jr. there for most of them. When Kai Madison Trump arrived, at six pounds fourteen ounces, the couple named her after Vanessa’s father. But she got something of Donald’s. “Everyone who sees her is amazed by her hair,” Vanessa told People, which got the exclusive first photos of Kai, as the magazine had with Barron, and published them a month after she was born. “She needed it shampooed right away!” Years later, Kai and Barron would start at the same Upper East Side preschool together, only a year apart.
In the winter of 2009, Donald J. Trump III—D3, as he came to be known—was born. Tristan Milos Trump, his middle name after Don Jr.’s beloved Dedo, followed in October 2011. Then came Spencer Frederick, his middle name after Don’s other grandfather, exactly a year after Tristan. In June 2014, Chloe Sophia joined her sister and brothers. “#FullHouse,” Don Jr. tweeted after she arrived. He, like his father, and like his father’s father, had five kids—three boys and two girls.
By 2017, it became clear that he would follow his father in another way. Vanessa did not accompany Don Jr. and the rest of his family to the New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago, which also happened to be her husband’s fortieth birthday. Tongues started wagging in their small circle, where talk was over not whether they would separate, but when. Most believed they would stick it out through the 2020 election, if they got that far. But Trump history repeated itself: in March 2018, Page Six reported that they were headed for divorce. A day later, Vanessa filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. “After twelve years of marriage, we have decided to go our separate ways,” the couple said in a statement. “We will always have tremendous respect for each other and our families.” It took about a minute for rumors of Don Jr.’s infidelities to whip around the press, along with stories of how his tight-wad tendencies and attack-dog nature irked her. People were claiming he repeated the very behavior he spent years freezing his father out over.
Five kids, like his father, but with only woman, and no full-time nanny, let alone two. Mothers remember Vanessa as particularly harried, with kids in a constant swirl, particularly as the kids got older and there were five individual schedules to manage. It became a thing of legend among private school moms, who told and retold one cautionary tale of a life with so many kids and so little help. It was warm enough outside that moms and nannies and assorted guardians could pleasantly stand outside Spence, an all-girls school on the easternmost block of Ninety-First Street, waiting for their little girls in their baby-blue jumpers and pleated skirts and white collared shirts and hair ribbons to burst out of the schoolhouse doors in their singsongy, chattery postschool delight. When they all burst out at once, though, the noise that came blaring out was very different. It sounded like a high-pitched siren—the school’s fire alarm system. That’s weird, the moms and nannies and assorted guardians thought and said to one another. Why would they do a fire drill that late in the day, as all the kids were being dismissed?
It was not, in fact, a drill. As Vanessa Trump and a couple of her younger boys showed up to Spence to pick up their eldest, Kai, who’d started at Spence in kindergarten, Vanessa started chitchatting outside. One of the boys ran into the school without her knowing and pulled the handle up on the bright red fire alarm hanging on the wall, just inside the school’s entrance. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” one of the other moms remembered thinking. Her daughter, who was in Kai’s class, was terrified of loud noises at the time. “This woman had so many kids you had to feel for her. And there was no nanny. But she couldn’t keep enough of an eye on the boys to stop them from disrupting the whole entire school as all the other mothers and people picked up their kids? It was chaos. Absolute chaos.”
Not long after, the school started a campaign to raise money, as uptown private schools so often do, and Don Jr.’s inherited stinginess started to show. At the time, Spence decided to build a brand-new athletic center to keep all of its sports programs within one building. At that point, students had to bounce around in a handful of gyms around the city for their various in-school and after-school sports programs—not exactly a draw for the crowds shelling out $50,000 a year for their daughters’ elementary school educations. At the very least, that should buy their girls a proper gym. But if you’re going to do it at all, why not do it the right way? And the right way, for Spence, was to build an eight-story facility on Ninetieth Street, with a hulking gymnasium taking up two floors, training and locker rooms, squash courts, classrooms, a café, and a greenhouse.
Fifty thousand dollars per pupil is a lot of money, but it does not stretch as far as an eight-story fitness megaplex on the Upper East Side. Lucky for the school, they happened to have a Rolodex of already committed families who not only had the money to afford the school but the incentive to fork that money over. It was going to their own kids’ educations, after all, and maybe their kids’ kids’, after that. Add a little friendly parental competition within the classes over which family would give the most? They’d raise the funds, no problem.
But there is a process for this sort of thing. The school began methodically hosting a series of small dinners, asking some of its wealthiest parents to host other particularly wealthy parents along with the heads of the school to talk about the plans and about how they could contribute. Don Jr. and Vanessa made the cut for one of the dinners, held in a sweeping apartment on Fifth Avenue one evening when Kai was in her first few years at Spence. Four couples, along with the head of the school and her assistant, ate around a round table in the dining room before they moved into a living room to discuss the gym. A presentation was made, along with a pitch, and the parents were told that they would later be formally asked if they wanted to contribute in private meetings on Spence’s campus in the weeks and months to come.
The rest of the parents nodded. They’d anticipated this. This is how these things were done. The nodding was interrupted by the sound of Don Jr.’s voice. “I think this sounds great,” he said, loudly enough for the other parents to distinctly remember it years later. Kai loved sports, he told the group, and so he could see her benefiting from the addition, and they wanted to be involved in any way they could.
“I mean, we’re not going to give money,” he said in front of the group. “But I am more than happy to lend my expertise to the building process.” The rest of the parents turned beet red. The head of the school thanked Don for his offer, and said the school would be grateful for a Trump perspective, but that they likely had the whole construction side of this handled. What they really needed to focus on was raising the funds. “You can think about it. You don’t have to answer now,” she said. “None of you do.”
Chapter 10
Eric—Voltron Number Three
The Builder
With Central Park as a buffer, the Upper West Side somewhat insulated the towheaded young Eric Trump from the media chasing his older brother and sister on their way to school on the East Side as their parent’s marriage unraveled. Ivana had chosen the Trinity School for her youngest child years earlier. The school, the fifth oldest in the country, first opened its doors in 1709 with classrooms in the Trinity Church bell tower and in old City Hall. Its founder, William Huddleston, pitched a missionary organization of the Church of England on the idea of a public school in New York City where poor children might be taught in the tradition of the church for free. They agreed, on the condition that the mayor and alderman prove each year that the school was, in fact, educating at least forty poor children. All of this changed after the Revolutionary War. Trinity moved out of the church and into a series of buildings built and commissioned on the very upper west corner of Manhattan, on Ninety-First Street and Columbus Avenue. Trinity shifted from public to private and, centuries later, allowed female students so that it became fully
co-ed. The school founded on the ideals of a gratis education for underprivileged children has since educated the likes of Eric Schneiderman and John and Patrick McEnroe. For a time, Truman Capote, James and Lachlan Murdoch, Humphrey Bogart, Yo-Yo Ma, Ansel Elgort, and Oliver Stone also walked the Trinity halls. In the 2017–18 school year, the school charged parents $49,795 for kindergarten, though the school notes that that figure includes lunch and other required fees. Additional textbooks and field trips and the like cost extra.
The school accepted the baby Trump, which is really all that matters in that rat race. The school’s motto, Labore et virtute—“Hard work and moral excellence”—appealed to the Trumps, as well, at least the first part of it. The lower school building—sturdy brownstone, with sweeping windows that let light flood into classrooms, bays at each end that create grass courtyards for students to play on, and a stone cross atop one of its peaks—shielded Eric during the most tumultuous period in his young life.
Divorce disorients any six-year-old. It rips apart the tiny pocket of a world they know and feel safe in. Eric benefited from the fact that his parents weren’t the only adults he really knew or that ever cared for him. His father moving a few floors down within Trump Tower did not rock his day-to-day routine as it might have for most other kids. But most other kids don’t have their family not only split in front of them, on top of a mountain in Aspen, but then spill onto every New York tabloid front page for weeks on end. Some children are mercifully spared the shouting matches, the curses, the insults his parents hurled at each other, and the open adultery that put his father very publicly in another woman’s arms so soon. The story was so salacious and omnipresent in New York that even Eric’s kindergarten classmates, who could not even read at that point, brought up the gossip to him in school.
It was not entirely surprising, then, that Eric acted out in school, and teachers soon took note. One of Trinity’s traditional requirements is that students must participate in a community service program and volunteer both out of school and within the walls of Trinity. This meant that older students would take assignments alongside teachers, offering an extra hand and helping to wrangle younger kids. The year of Donald and Ivana’s divorce, one Trinity high schooler got assigned to assist the dancer teacher with her creative movement classes for five- and six-year-olds. One afternoon, at the end of class, she instructed all of the children to put their play mats away. It was chaos, herding the little people into some semblance of organization and coaxing them to leave the place less of a disaster than it was, but all the kids at least tried, with one exception. Eric just stood there while his classmates folded their mats and, as neatly as they could, stacked them up.
It dawned on the student teacher that perhaps Eric had never been asked to clean up for himself before, given what she knew of his family. Maybe he needed a little more of a push or an explanation. So she instructed him further, specifically, kindly, gently pointing him in the right direction and urging him to follow his classmates. “Eric, please put your mat away with the other children,” she remembers telling him.
He barely paused, hardly breathed, before he looked her in the eye, in front of all the other children, and bellowed at the top of his tiny little lungs: “You’re a bitch!”
She blushed, the blood rushing to her face to push down the rage boiling in her belly, unsuitable to unleash on a six-year-old. Pity quickly replaced it. Where does a six-year-old private school kid who lives in a triplex on the Upper East Side pick up that kind of language? Clearly, as a high schooler, the assistant had not been closely following Donald and Ivana’s venomous split. The news was inescapable enough that she did know something about it, though. “I thought it was possible he was acting out because of the divorce,” she recalled. “Or maybe,” she added, “he was just an asshole.”
Eric was not disciplined for the infraction. Years later, though, Trinity “counseled him out” of the school (a private school euphemism for asking a student not up to a school’s academic or cultural standards to leave without pissing off the parents), as Chapin had with Ivanka and Buckley had with Don Jr. No one has ever disputed the strength of the Trump genes, and just how deeply they run throughout all of the family’s lives.
Eric Trump was five when Marla and Ivana shouted at each other over a spoiled mid-ski lunch on Aspen Mountain; he was six when his schoolmates started teasing him about the subsequent sex-laden headlines, and his mother pulled him out of Trinity for a few months for some space and sunshine in Palm Beach. He was nine when his father remarried for the first time. By that point, his mother had a steady boyfriend of her own. “I had a lot of resentment, especially for those people,” Eric said of his feelings when his parents started dating after the divorce.
The disdain Eric felt for Marla is understandable. The way he saw it, she rocked his home life before he could even hit elementary school proper; if not for her, his father would not have moved a few floors down in Trump Tower, and a few years later, he would not have had to move out of his triplex at the tippy-top of the building for a townhouse with Ivana a few blocks north, while Marla and Tiffany moved in—albeit briefly. Of course, it was not Marla who truly broke Donald and Ivana’s marriage. Marriages have to be breakable for that to happen, and there were cracks in the relationship between the first Mr. and Mrs. Trump, waiting for Marla to seep into and fill, when Eric was just a toddler.
It is not as though his parents were particularly present before the split. Workaholics and social climbers, they left it mostly to two dedicated nannies, bodyguards, drivers, hotel workers, club employees, and caretakers on various properties to look after Eric and the other children Trump, whether it was their official job or simply a role they took on out of necessity or the goodness of their hearts. “My father, I love and appreciate, but he always worked 24 hours a day,” Eric told the New York Times. Bridget and Dorothy, the family’s nannies, doted on the kids, as did Ivana’s parents, Dedo and Babi. But a couple of months after Don Jr. left home for boarding school, the same year his parents separated, Dedo suddenly died, and then he and Don Jr. found their beloved nanny Bridget on the floor of their Greenwich home.
Without them, his older siblings stepped in. Don Jr., six years his senior, and Ivanka, two years older, not only looked after Eric the way all protective big brothers and sisters do the littlest member of the family, but also like a distinct Trump team. They were their own little unit, a constant for one another when everything else had turned upside down, when nothing or no one else in their world remained enduring or consistent or safe. Donny and Ivanka took their roles as team leaders taking care of the youngest member quite seriously. One of Ivanka’s classmates at Choate who came back to New York on weekends away from their Connecticut boarding school remembered Eric wreaking havoc the way little boys do, and Ivanka would sweep in to calm things down. “When it came to her siblings, one of them was always upset about this or that or running around the house,” the friend recalled. “Ivanka was usually the person to step in. There was no question that she was really protective of him, in a way I’d never seen a sibling who is not that much older be.” When she was at school, she called Eric to make sure everything was okay. She would ask friends to mentor him, to give him advice about applying to schools or internships or sports or girls. “I’m definitely closer to Ivanka [because of the divorce],” he told New York, explaining that “she took me under her wing and raised me, took me shopping, tried to make me cool.” As for Don Jr., he would take his brother off campus once Eric got to Hill himself, touring him around local spots in state parks where they could go fly-fishing or hunting. “Donny, in a way, is like a mentor. He kept tabs on everything that my grandfather taught him over the years and that I was too young to appreciate.” That same year, he told the Times that yes, Donny was his mentor, and his best friend, too—but also, he added, in a way, “he raised me.”
That Eric had the least amount of time with the first iteration of the Trump family, and did not get a tremendous am
ount of time with his father when he was little outside of visiting his office after school, did not mean he did not pick up on some of his dad’s most distinctive traits. They were easy enough to pick up on. Before the divorce, when Donald and Ivana and the children would all decamp to Greenwich for the weekends, the family often went to dinner at Manero’s Restaurant Steakhouse—a local joint with wood-paneled walls and white tablecloths and red vinyl chairs that long advertised under the slogan “Manero’s—always bring the children.” It was a six-hundred-seat joint with an illustration of its owner, Nick Manero, in a big white chef’s hat on the wall, along with a sign promising that if a diner had a baby in the restaurant, she’d eat free steak there for life. Waiters served steak dinners—filets, baked potatoes, onion rings, garlic bread, a wedge salad, a dessert, and a hot drink to close out the meal—for ten bucks in the 1970s and ’80s, and they’d gather around your table and sing “Happy Birthday” with a candle stuck in your cake if they knew the special day. When they were hot, they could barely keep up with the demand, despite the fact that the butcher’s shop was directly connected to the restaurant outside. On a given Saturday night at its peak, Manero’s served more than 1,100 dinners.
This meant that there would invariably be a line of some of Greenwich’s finest out the door on a weekend evening. Andy Rooney would wait. Arnold Palmer did, too. The Price Is Right announcer Johnny Olson hung around biding time for his table like the rest of them. But Eric Trump, a young elementary school student no more than a few feet tall, was not about to stand in line for a table. His family came there every week. They ordered the same thing—a heaping Caesar salad, steaks for each of them, and baked potatoes topped with as much sour cream as the kitchen could muster. As one frequent diner recalled, the little blond boy zigzagged his way through people ten times his age who had been waiting for their tables three times as long. He made it up to the hostess and, without hesitation or much regard for who heard, informed her that his last name was Trump, and he expected to be seated right away. The grown-ups who overheard the youngest Trump—at that time, at least—gawked. Their utter shock and bemusement at his pure chutzpah, mixed with revulsion and their own hunger, did not end up sitting well—and this was Greenwich. These people knew from entitlement. “You can wait in line like the rest of us, dear,” a frequent customer remembers telling him. He caught her eye, stared at her blankly, and promptly looked away.
Born Trump Page 30
