Born Trump

by Emily Jane Fox

  They hired both a wedding planner and an event designer—the same designer who worked on Ivanka and Jared’s wedding—who worked with the couple to strike a balance between what Eric described as “formal and fun,” with elegance mixed in. What they did not plan for was that Lara would have a riding accident a couple of weeks before the big day, sending her flying off a horse and straight to the X-ray machine. She broke both of her wrists, meaning she would need to cover the bottom halves of both of her arms with casts before, during, and after her wedding. Lara tried to brush it off. She initially posted a photo of herself holding up two bandaged wrists, her lips turned downward in a pout: “Wedding countdown: 2 weeks and 2 casts to go!” On October 27, less than two weeks before the nuptials, she posted a photo of her, in tan riding stirrups and boots and a black helmet, clearing a jump on the back of a horse. “There are inherent risks that we all take in life,” she wrote in the caption. “When you truly love something, it’s worth it. I wouldn’t take back one day of riding—stuff happens. I will ride again and it will be better than ever. Most importantly, I still get to marry the love of my life on Nov 8th!”

  Luckily, she was able to wear soft casts by the time her wedding day came around, meaning she could slip them off for the ceremony. The casts would go back on for the reception, at which point, she did in fact cover them with fingerless, gathered and bejeweled gloves custom made for her and her casts.

  The sun fell into the horizon as Ivana, in a different pink, off-the-shoulder gown that flowed into a mermaid silhouette, accompanied her youngest child to the altar. Eric wore a black tuxedo, white bow tie, and Tiffany cuff links, his blond hair slicked back to show off his deepening widow’s peak. Next to his best man, Don Jr., he walked down the aisle that Saturday evening in the mid-fall Florida heat, in front of guests like Real Housewives of New York’s Jill Zarin, Howard Lorber of the brokerage firm Douglas Elliman, and radio host Elvis Duran. Ivanka, dressed in a cobalt-blue gown like the rest of Lara’s bridesmaids, stood off to the side. Ivanka’s daughter and Don Jr.’s son followed, as flower girl and ring bearer. Eric’s nephew shared the role with Lara’s rescue dog Charlie, who also served as ring bearer. Lara walked down the aisle with her father and a bouquet made with baby pink roses, the petals on the skirt of the Vera Wang gown floating in the light breeze. Her simple tulle veil waved against her highlighted blond hair, which she left down for the ceremony, and the diamond earrings from Ivanka’s fine jewelry collection that she’d chosen for the day.

  They asked Jared to officiate the ceremony, under a sweeping white, dozens-of-feet-high chuppah. From an extended arch of hundreds of tightly bunched ivory flowers flowed a cascade of hanging crystals that fell in steps and framed the couple in front of the palm trees in the background. The couple had asked his sister’s husband to officiate because “Jared knows us so well that what he had to say was heartfelt and especially meaningful,” Eric said in an interview at the time. Jared spoke into the microphone arranged in front of him to help the couple exchange their vows, telling the bride, “You are not just gaining a family. You are getting 6 million Twitter followers.” Eric and the newest Mrs. Trump kissed and walked back down the aisle, past the ivory urns filled with bursting lollipop ivory florals.

  The ballroom was lit in a golden hue, decorated in more golds and pale pinks and ivories, with white orchid trees with gilded branches at the center of each table. Unlike Donald and Melania, who made a spectacle out of flying in a chef for their reception, and Don Jr. and Vanessa, who served a formal meal to their guests, Eric and Lara decided on a buffet. “Our guests could eat to their hearts’ content,” Lara said in an interview at the time, including a nod to her southern roots with a station set up with barbecue and shrimp and grits, “but not be stuck at a table.” Donald toasted the couple, while mentioning his first wife, Ivana, and thanking her for raising such a wonderful son. Don Jr.’s best man toast—or roast, rather—left the guests in stitches.

  After the couple’s first dance, during which Eric gave Lara a very lovely little staged dip, they hardly left the dance floor. Their siblings joined them, as did all of their kids. “All of the siblings were right smack dab in the middle dancing,” one guest remembered, as a fifteen-piece band played. They eventually cut into their six-tiered cake—a confection in various shades of whites and pinks and textures. It was hardly as ornate as the Sylvia Weinstock masterpieces of Trump weddings past, but this one was, in fact, edible.

  They moved onto an after-party by the pool, where a DJ followed along as Lara turned the whole thing into a karaoke party. The bride sang along to every single song he played.

  Chapter 11

  Tiffany

  The Voltron from Another Universe

  Tiffany Trump sat alone on a couch backstage in the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, one Tuesday evening at the end of July in 2016. A little earlier in the evening, on the other side of the stage at the Republican National Convention, the party called roll to get an official delegate count. After knocking out a baker’s dozen opponents in sixty-five primaries and shelling out more than $600 million in campaign dollars, at 7:12 p.m. on July 21 Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee for president of the United States, having exceeded the threshold of 1,237 delegates. It was Don Jr., a delegate for the state of New York, who technically got his father over the line. “It is my honor to be able to throw Donald Trump over the top in the delegate count,” he told the thousands and thousands of people cheering in the arena’s audience that evening, and the millions more tuning in from home. “Congratulations, Dad,” he said from the front row of New York’s section, alongside his siblings, Ivanka, Eric, and Tiffany. “We love you.” An instrumental version of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” played over the speakers. The rest of the red-hat-wearing crowd leaped from their seats, slapping their palms together, hugging their neighbors, taking selfies in front of an arena erupting in applause around them.

  Don Jr. would speak again onstage later that evening, on a night the Republican National Committee themed “Make America Work Again!” As would Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Jeff Sessions, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, the National Rifle Association’s Chris Cox, golfer Natalie Gulbis, The Bold and the Beautiful’s Kimberlin Brown, and Ultimate Fighting Championship’s president Dana White. Despite the fact that she had just graduated from college two months earlier and had never actually held a full-time job apart from a summer internship her older half sister scored for her at Vogue, Tiffany was also slotted in among the nineteen scheduled speeches on an evening dedicated to focusing on rebuilding and bolstering the American workforce. It didn’t matter much that she couldn’t speak on the theme; no one did, really. Much of the rest of the lineup used their speeches as opportunities to jab-hook Hillary Clinton and fawn over Donald, congratulating him on his official status as it happened.

  The timing of Tiffany’s speech had a triple misfortune. First, she was scheduled to follow Christie, a gifted orator with years of experience as a US attorney and governor and presidential candidate. His performances at the primary debates were, in fact, part of the reason Donald was so keen to have Christie on board his campaign team in the first place. Second, she would be the first member of the Trump family to go onstage after her stepmother’s speech at the convention the night before. Melania had done a fine job delivering a beautifully eloquent, reflective speech. Large chunks of that beautifully eloquent, reflective speech just so happened to be plucked and pilfered from a convention speech Michelle Obama had given onstage at her husband’s nominating convention in Denver in 2008. The media pounced. Melania was humiliated. Politicos on both sides of the aisle scratched their heads as to how this slipped by the many people who should have been vetting this speech down to its every adverb and punctuation mark. Those inside the Trump orbit and campaign were not entirely surprised that a gaffe of this proportion was possible, given the bare-bones, chaotic, chicken-with-its-head-cut-off nature of the operation. But many were furious
that the secret of just how bare-bones, chaotic, chicken-with-its-head-cut-off the campaign was had been laid bare by the blunder. In some ways, this lowered the bar ever so slightly for Tiffany. All she needed to do was not plagiarize her speech, and it would play better than her stepmom’s did. But that Melania’s had now fallen so flat also meant that Tiffany’s had to land, that she could not have any mishap, that it had to mean something. The campaign, and her father, couldn’t handle another blow—not one at the hands of his own family, that’s for certain. With his wife’s sentiments all but forgotten in the chaos her speech created and its sentiments discarded because they were largely not her own, his youngest daughter then needed to humanize Donald, to portray him as a family man, to share the little details only a daughter can that would both reveal to the American people something intimate and telling about Donald Trump and evoke something familiar, universal, in their parent-child bond for the rest of the electorate to see themselves in. Jenna and Barbara Bush had done this for their father, as would Chelsea Clinton.

  But that is where the third bit of trouble came in for Tiffany. The draft of the speech she was reading and rereading, rehearsing inside and out and practicing out loud, did not have any of the little illuminating gems about her dad that were needed to sprinkle some humanity on his public image. It was not that Tiffany, like Melania, had been ill served by speechwriters, or that she had wanted to keep those moments between her and her father. The truth of the matter was that she didn’t have many unique, intimate moments with her dad.

  Tiffany’s father and mother didn’t live together when she was born, two months before her parents married, after Donald gave in to mounting business pressure and Marla’s ultimatum that unless he married her by Christmas, she’d take Tiffany and leave. Even after the wedding, Marla and Tiffany and Marla’s mother Ann spent a healthy chunk of their time at Mar-a-Lago, or in Georgia with her family, or in California, where her mom tried to jump-start her acting career while Donald hung back in New York. For a while they lived in separate apartments in Manhattan too, before Ivana and the Trump 1.0 kids vacated the Trump Tower triplex and Donald moved his second wife and daughter in. They didn’t last long. Marla and Donald separated well before Tiffany’s third birthday, and before the divorce was even finalized, Marla moved her to Calabasas, California, home of the Kardashians and the span of the United States away from her father.

  Tiffany would spend spring breaks with her father in Palm Beach. Sometimes her parents would force smiles together at her birthday parties. Infrequently, he would visit her in California for school events, or, if he had business in Los Angeles, Marla would drive her through the valley and into the city to make sure she got face time with her father. She would make an occasional trip to New York, too. And as he did with his older children when they went to boarding school, he would send her notes—messages scribbled in Sharpie. He would call her, too, not just to gab, but if the occasion struck and it seemed appropriate. “She’d like to get to know her father better and spend time with him like his other children did, by going to his office and watching him work,” Marla told the New York Times in an interview during the campaign. “I had the blessing of raising her pretty much on my own.”

  Donald’s friends would regularly hear him talk about how little he knew of his second daughter, and how impressed he was that she’d managed to emerge relatively unscathed by his absentee fathering. “He would say that Tiffany has had a really tough life. Stuff like, ‘I didn’t have any time to spend with her. I never spent any time with her,’” one friend recalled. “He would say, ‘It’s really a miracle that she is as well-adjusted as she is, and that she’s accomplished anything.’ He gets that he screwed it up when it came to Tiffany, and this is a man who doesn’t ever admit that he got it wrong on anything.”

  The distance was apparent to any keen observer throughout the campaign, and was pointed out—constantly. Some news reports likened her to the Trump family’s version of Jan Brady. When in the spring of 2016 Fox News aired an hour-long special called Meet the Trumps, for which Melania, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka all sat down with Greta Van Susteren for interviews, Tiffany was not only not interviewed but also barely mentioned. “There is also Tiffany Trump,” Van Susteren said in a voiceover, “who keeps a low profile.” It is true that the special ran just as Tiffany graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and was likely put together while she was in the throes of finals and senior week festivities on campus. But the slights continued throughout the summer and into the fall, after she moved to New York with the rest of her family. In an interview on Fox & Friends, Donald told the hosts that he was quite proud of all of his children. “I’m very proud, because Don and Eric and Ivanka and—you know, to a lesser extent because she just got out of school, out of college—but, uh, Tiffany, who has also been so terrific.” She was nowhere to be found in the biographical documentary that aired during the RNC in Cleveland.

  So the only anecdotes Tiffany could throw into her speech were lacking the personal depth many wanted of a presidential candidate’s own daughter, which very much reflected the nature of their relationship. Her father wrote “sweet notes” on every one of her report cards—not just on her grades, as people might expect of The Apprentice host, but about her behavior in and out of the classroom—and she’d kept every one. When her grandmother’s fiancé passed away years earlier, her father called her. She praised such “unwavering support.”

  As Tiffany sat trying to breathe backstage, Marla, who had come to her ex-husband’s nominating convention because she had pretty much always gone everywhere with her daughter from the day she was born, ran around trying to recruit people to keep her daughter calm. “I’m pretty nervous,” Tiffany told one of Marla’s recruits, who let her know that all she had to do to make her father proud was not faint onstage. “I think I can pull that off,” Tiffany joked.

  She made no secret of the terror she felt that evening when she walked onstage in a cobalt sheath dress with a built-in belted waist she had bought off the sales rack at Bloomingdale’s the day before she flew to Cleveland, and tromped toward the dais in patent leather nude pumps. Her teased-up, big-ol’-curl Barbie hair looked more southern beauty queen than Washington establishment, which perhaps served as a nod to both her father’s underlying campaign message and her mother’s Georgia pageant girl history. Behind the microphone, she steadied her face—a millennialized version of a Kewpie. A Bratz doll, with the big blue eyes frosted with purple shadow and fake eyelashes as long as knuckles, puckered-up lips under a tiny ski slope of a nose, cheekbones jutting out and slathered in blush and highlighter.

  “Please excuse me if I’m a little nervous,” she said at the start of her speech. “When I graduated college a couple of months ago, I never expected to be here tonight addressing the nation. I’ve given a few speeches in front of classrooms of students, but never in an arena with more than ten million people watching.”

  Anyone with a pulse would be nervous in that setting. Surely any twenty-two-year-old who hadn’t spent fairly odd, definitively troubling formative years touring as a pop star or getting tutored in trailers on Hollywood sound stages would be scared silly. Tiffany was terrified for all the reasons any of them would be. Unlike her siblings, who had spent their childhoods on the pages of the tabloids, chased down the street by paparazzi, and later, on the set of The Apprentice with their father, Tiffany had lived a relatively normal life. And she had the added pressure, as she always did, of trying to impress a famously hard-to-please father who hardly knew anything about her.

  Rarely is the argument made that a child is lucky to have her parents divorce at a very young age, particularly if it means that she will have little to no memories of life as one cohesive family unit and will know only what it is like to live all the way across the country from one of her parents, with whom she spends virtually no time. Tiffany Trump may be the exception to that line of reasoning. Like bacteria blooming under a microscope, Donald and Marla’s relat
ionship grew, in part, because of the ceaseless tabloid attention they garnered. There was the affair, which was depicted in great detail for weeks, the cover-up, the blowup, and the breakup. All of that coverage was following by their initial coming out as a couple, the messy, years-long divorce from Ivana, the blows to his business.

  Every detail of their courtship, through their on-again-and-off-again engagement, Tiffany’s out-of-wedlock birth, and their eventual wedding, days before Christmas in 1993, played out in the gossip pages and supermarket magazines. So did their separation at the beginning of May 1997, their subsequent squabble over the prenup, and, after a couple years, their official divorce.

  When Donald and Ivana split up in such a spectacularly public fashion—calling in stories about each other themselves to the press—Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric were twelve, eight, and six, respectively. The elder two understood what was going on. It was hard for them not to—their classmates and paparazzi made it impossible even for Eric, not yet in grade school, to avoid. He was old enough to read, and the split caused a fracture between his older brother and his dad that made it hard for Eric to avoid the fallout from the divorce.

  But for Tiffany, unlike her siblings, living through her parents’ divorce would not be a defining event seared into her memory, guiding many of the decisions she would make and leaving scabs to be flicked open for the rest of her life. Tiffany, at just three and a half, would not remember the headlines, or the paparazzi. She wasn’t yet in real school. She couldn’t read. She didn’t live with her older siblings, so their reactions to Donald and Marla’s split couldn’t influence her own (though since they had never warmed to Marla in the first place, the split hadn’t exactly keep them up at night).