Author’s Note
I would imagine that the idea for this book, and my initial attitude toward it, was not entirely unlike those of the First Family when Donald Trump decided to launch a bid to become the president of the United States of America. To start, like the Trump kids, none of this was my idea. I got a cold e-mail one afternoon at the end of September 2016 from Jane von Mehren, a literary agent (and in my estimation a patient patron saint), with the subject line: “Might you be interested in talking books?” She introduced herself and pitched an idea for a “dish-y” but “really well-reported book” about Trump, and his kids in particular. By that point, I had been closely, compulsively covering the Trump family as a reporter for Vanity Fair. Like the Trump kids, I was sick of it all by that point (little did I know!), but intrigued enough to take the meeting.
We met on a sunny Monday afternoon during the first week in October, and I told her that I would take the week to think about it and get back to her. The truth is that after the meeting, I ghosted her. Everyone thought Donald Trump was going to lose, and that in a month his family would go back to selling themselves with a slightly elevated or denigrated brand, depending on where you sat; I didn’t know how interesting this man, who captivated and aggravated the world for a minute, would be post–November 8. Frankly, I didn’t know how interesting this would be to me. They were a famous New York family with a questionable level of wealth who lived life so publicly that I didn’t know if there was anything left to know about them. These people were scrawled across Page Six since they were in diapers. Everything worth knowing about them was probably already out there. Like the Trump kids, I liked my life the way it was. I had enough on my plate that the idea of taking on something else on top of everything also struck me as unnecessary.
That Friday, the Access Hollywood tapes broke, and on Sunday, Donald looked as if he were stalking Hillary Clinton onstage at a presidential debate. I dodged Jane and went back to checking the countdown clock I’d set up on my phone to tick down the days, hours, minutes, seconds, until the election would be over.
About a week before the election, I began reporting a story for Vanity Fair’s “The Hive,” about what Ivanka Trump was planning to do to get her brand back on track, and how she would transition back to life on earth after her dad conceded. I was later to the conversation than the Trump kids were, but it was one they were having at that moment, too. I made a bunch of calls to people who worked with her, who would work with her as she readjusted come November 9. Their general sentiment was that she would have to let everyone breathe and calm themselves down. She would keep her head down and focus on the business, and maybe quietly, privately, start talking to reporters. These people said Ivanka had been very strategic about what she said and when she said it, and throughout the campaign, she talked only about issues related to women and families, and in the general support of her father. It was what one person called an impressive, calculated business decision executed over the course of eighteen months, knowing that it would serve her well after the election. Would some people hold her accountable for what her father said and for not speaking up about it? Sure. “But what will they be holding her accountable for once Hillary wins?” one person connected to the campaign told me on the Friday afternoon before Election Day. “Policies her father never got to enact?”
The story never ran. An entirely different one was written. On the evening of November 9, as the world woke up from its collective coma and realized that Donald Trump had been elected the forty-fifth president, I sent Jane an e-mail. The subject line read: “Let’s do this.”
My hesitation faded a week later, when 60 Minutes aired its interview with the new First Family. “I think it’s impossible to go through this journey and not change,” Ivanka whispered. Two days later, early on a weekday morning, my phone buzzed with an incoming call from an unknown number. I was still in my pajamas when that same voice came through my receiver. The call was off the record, so I can’t report what she said. But, while Ivanka was still insisting at that point that she would not take on an official or unofficial role in her father’s administration, she was going to take advantage of an opportunity she never imagined now splayed out in front of her.
So for the next fifteen months, I set off to figure out who they were and where they came from and what shaped them, in order to understand how they’d changed and where they might go from there. There was no political agenda or bent. These would soon be some of the most powerful people in the world, and I wanted to give a view into their past as a way to preview what their future might look like, too.
I dove deep into their groups of friends, former classmates, colleagues, and business associates to learn the ins-and-outs of the First Family—the intense privilege and the damage left by a very public divorce, periods of rebellion and public mastery of the media, the engagements and weddings and reality shows and rotten business deals that make up the life of a family. I interviewed hundreds of people, many of them multiple times, for hours. I culled through thousands upon thousands of what I think are just about every press clipping that mentioned the Trump kids back to the 1980s. Do you know how many times they’ve been written about since they were children? The sheer volume is staggering.
I faced two main issues in my reporting. The first was Don Jr.’s name. Since there are so many ways in which to refer to him—Don, Don Jr., Donald Trump Jr., Donny—the effort to find old press clippings about him was a complicated one. And the second was that there was an endless number of people who wanted to talk about them. The talk didn’t stop. This person knew that person who had gone to boarding with one of them. That person’s friend taught one of their preschool classes, and their former colleague partnered with them on a real estate deal. At lunch with them, a well-known flak who’d worked for the family or a publisher who worked on one of their books would be eating across the room. Would they want to be interviewed for a book I’m working on? Most often, the answer was yes. Sometimes, it was less kind. And for every yes, I tried to figure out their motivation for wanting to speak to a reporter.
By now, it is no secret that this is a First Family with no equivalent. President Donald Trump is in the White House with a First Lady who is his third wife and two senior West Wing advisers to whom he is related. His two adult sons are back in New York running the family business from which the president opted not to divest, despite a constant barrage of ethical concerns. He has five children from three women and a string of products from water to wine, hotels to cologne, all of whom and which bear his last name.
But it is a First Family so uniquely suited for the second decade of the twenty-first century and its fame-obsessed, money-hungry, voracious twenty-four-hour cycle of a culture. They are Gossip Girl meets The West Wing. The Kardashianification of the Kennedys. And they’re just dying for you to tune it, and we’re all just dying to watch, even if the dirty laundry they end up airing, intentionally or otherwise, stinks.
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without Jane von Mehren, who planted the seed and then nurtured the hell out of it—and me—from the beginning. I would not have said yes to anyone else, nor would I have been able to get through this process without her wisdom, reassurance, kindness, and very gentle, much-needed shoves in the right direction. If I had any lingering doubts about the whole thing, they evaporated when she brought this—and me—to Jonathan Jao. When I worried that many might not be interested in some of the softer sides of this story, I’d remember the raw way he reacted to the more human aspects the same way I did. He got it—and me—and proved to be a light post, a whip-smart wordsmith, and an endlessly patient ally. Jonathan Burnham and Doug Jones at HarperCollins took this—and me—under their wings from the get-go, giving this the kind of support and time any author would dream of. I feel beyond lucky to have worked with Sofia Groopman, Tina Andreadis, and Tracy Locke, who put this together and made it happen, and promoted with such efficiency, savvy, and attention.
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sp; This book is filled with many stories from many people and many articles I would never have even known existed without my researcher, Nicole Landset Blank. She is both an absolute wizard with her work and my soul sister. She received as many tough reactions from people not supportive of the reporting as I did; she read through all of the articles, listened to many hours of interviews, combed through property records, and managed always to find an answer to whatever question I threw her way. My life, and this book, would have been significantly worse without her (and a thank-you to my colleague Nick Bilton for introducing me to her).
I never would have found myself writing about the First Family, or in a position to author this book, had it not been for Jon Kelly, my editor at Vanity Fair, who saw the story in them long before I did. He always sees the story, which is why he is the gold standard for any reporter trying to find the bigger picture or smaller victories along the way. He pushed my reporting and gave me the space and platform to start telling their stories the way people actually wanted to read them. Everything I write, he makes better, smarter, more interesting, and certainly more fun. I’ve been humbled by the encouragement for my reporting and for this project across Vanity Fair. I am especially grateful to Graydon Carter, Radhika Jones, Ben Landy, John Homans, Mike Hogan, Doug Stumpf, and Krista Smith for their advice and many boosts along the way.
I am deeply indebted to the generous, tireless, talented reporters and authors who shared notes, insights, and bits of reporting, and their stories on which I leaned to fill out this book. I am grateful for the years of shoe-leather reporting that helped inform my understanding of the family and pointed me toward key players and events I might have otherwise missed.
I have to thank the many people who agreed to speak with me for this book, who dug deep in their memories for little anecdotes and offered their time and gossip and insights. They put up with my follow-ups and follow-ups on follow-ups without hesitation. One of the best parts of this book was getting to speak with such a vast array of people, who were all united by three things: they all knew the Trumps, they all wanted me to get this right, and they all loved to gossip.
My WME family, Bradley Singer, Jason Hodes, Jon Rosen, and Eve Atterman, have been touchstones and sounding boards throughout.
I would be remiss not to apologize for all of the birthdays, holidays, dinners, lunches, coffees, calls, and appointments I had to reschedule or miss or cancel over the course of a year and a half. My friends, who all received many “I’m so sorry to do this” messages, were not only patient and understanding but also so overwhelmingly supportive that I somehow wound up feeling even guiltier. I owe you all a great deal of thanks and drinks. I also owe appreciation to the many pairs of running shoes I wore through to clear my head as I worked. Fleetwood Mac helped, too.
Naturally, this book took a great deal of reflection about families, and boy, do I feel fortunate to have been born into mine. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all put up with my absence, checked in for proof of life, and delighted in this project. My sister, Becca, is a stunningly gifted writer (the better writer, surely) who commiserated and willed me along this process. It was not just because she had recently finished a gorgeous book of her own; my sister has always been my greatest cheerleader, my first call for any kind of commiseration, and the most empathetic, sympathetic, deeply kind soul I’ve ever met. She is maybe only matched by her husband, Kenny, who puts the “brother” in brother-in-law and shows up for all of us every day. My niece and nephew, Annabelle and Beau, are my heart. Knowing that I would go back to seeing them more often once this was all done with was my pot of gold. My parents, Robb and Nancy, joked that I would dedicate this book to my childhood stuffed animal (thank you, Pinkie) and our dead family dog (RIP Lucy). There was never any question that this was for, and because of, my parents. They felt every disappointment, reporting win, setback, leap forward, stress, deadline, as their own, partly because I called them to share each one immediately, but mostly because that’s the kind of parents they are. They are nurturing and smart and present and the best people I know. I don’t know what I did to win this familial jackpot, but I am so stinkin’ lucky that I did.
About the Author
Emily Jane Fox is a senior reporter at Vanity Fair. A former White House intern, she is also a graduate of Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania.
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born trump. Copyright © 2018 by Emily Jane Fox. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Digital Edition JUNE 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-269079-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-269077-7
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Born Trump Page 36
