THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 87whatever city they tell me to,” Don complained dur-
ing one trip, accord ing to a travel companion. “Jared’s
the smart one. He has it all figured out.”
But Don discovered that he had a knack for cam-
paigning. Bounding into county fairs and hunting
expos in boots and blue jeans, he dazzled crowds
with his knowledge of duck blinds and fly-fishing—
sounding more like a Trump voter than a Trump. He
thrived in the shouty, testosterone-soaked realm of
#MAGA Twitter, where his
provocations routinely went
viral. Don’s habit of amplify-
ing memes from the right-
wing fever swamps generated
controversy. (One infamous
tweet compared Syrian refu-
gees to poisonous Skittles;
another featured the alt-right
mascot Pepe the Frog.) But
it also helped turn him into a
kind of Breitbartian folk hero.
“He’s one of the bros,” Mike
Cerno vich, a popular far-right
social-media personality, told
me. “He has a classically mas-
culine personality, and you
don’t feel like he’s a snob. He
really likes the meme culture—
it’s not fake for him.”
Don may have lost the inside game to Jared and
Ivanka, but he was building a grassroots base of his
own. When fans began calling on him to run for
mayor of New York City—and Don responded with
a bit too much enthusiasm—his father quickly shut it
down. “Don’s not going to run for mayor,” he said in
an interview with Sean Hannity. But Trump couldn’t
put an end to his son’s political career that easily. By
the end of the election, Don’s budding #MAGA star-
dom was undeniable—and he had no intention of
walking away. “Going back to doing deals is boring,”
he reportedly told a gathering of gun enthusiasts.
“The politics bug bit me.”
III.
With the election over and the presidency in hand,
the Trumps got to work doing what they did with any
new asset: figuring out how to sell it. Their initial cash
grabs were clumsy and relatively small-scale. When
the soon-to-be first family was profiled by 60 Min-
utes, Ivanka’s jewelry line blasted out a “Style Alert”advertising the $10,800 bracelet she’d worn on air. When Trump met with
the prime minister of Japan, Ivanka—who was pursuing a licensing deal with
a Japanese apparel conglomerate—sat in on the meeting. As ProPublica would
later reveal, she also helped ensure that a portion of her father’s inauguration
budget was spent at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
Eric and Don—tasked with running the Trump Organization while their
father was away—looked for their own angles. They doubled the membership
fee at Mar-a-Lago, which was already being described as the “winter White
House,” and pushed forward on the development of their down- market hotel
chain, American Idea. Working with a pair of
Mississippi businessmen they’d met on the cam-
paign trail, the Trumps planned a series of red-
state budget hotels stuffed with star- spangled
tchotchkes and decorative Americana, such as
vintage Coca-Cola machines in the lobbies.
Eric in particular welcomed the challenge of
running the family business. He’d always been the
one most interested in construction and architec-
ture, and many in the company assumed that he
would take over day-to-day operations when his
father retired. Now that he had a chance to prove
himself, Eric planned to exploit every opportu-
nity. “The stars have aligned,” he proclaimed.
“Our brand is the hottest it has ever been.”
Jared, meanwhile, was busy attending to
his own brand. When the December 20, 2016,
issue of Forbe s hit newsstands, the cover fea-
tured Trump’s favored son-in-law—his arms
folded, his lapels peaked, his hair a perfect coif—
grinning triumphantly above a headline that seemed tailored to torment Don
and Eric: “THIS GUY GOT TRUMP ELECTED.” Inside, readers were introduced
to a heretofore unfamiliar version of Jared: the visionary strategist who had
run the Trump campaign like a “stealth Silicon Valley startup.”
The brazen credit-grabbing rankled people who’d worked on the cam-
paign. “He never sacrificed or risked a thing,” a former staffer complained.
“Then, after the win, he came in to grab the spoils and anoint himself grand
pooh-bah. It was gross.” Don and Eric were similarly vexed, according to
people close to the family.
Jared had wasted little time in wielding his influence. Just days after
the election, he’d persuaded Trump to fire Chris Christie as the head of
the transition team. Christie had been the federal prosecutor responsible
for putting Jared’s father behind bars a decade earlier, and the dismissal
was widely inter preted as an act of vengeance. But the shake-up also gave
Jared a strategic advan tage, allowing him to exert control over hiring for the
new administration.
Don was not happy with this arrangement. More than once, accord ing to
aides familiar with the process, he would recommend someone for a job only
to have Jared intervene and insist that personnel decisions be run through him.
Worse, Jared seemed intent on staffing the Trump White House like it was a
charter jet to Davos. He recruited Gary Cohn, a Goldman Sachs executive and
registered Democrat, to serve as the president’s chief economic adviser. He
lobbied for Steven Mnuchin, a hedge-funder cum Hollywood producer, to be
named Treasury secretary. Don managed to usher a handful of loyalists into
his father’s administration—but Jared and Ivanka ended up with many more.
People close to Trump speculated about what Jared was hoping to
get out of all this. Some thought he was simply seizing the chance to fill
his Rolodex with world leaders and Wall Street titans. Others would
later point to a sweetheart deal his family cut with a Qatari invest-
ment firm as evidence that Jared’s involvement in foreign policy had a
profit motive. (A spokesman for Jared denied this.)
Whatever the reason, the couple’s headlong dive into politics proved dif-
ficult to reconcile with Ivanka’s brand. As the inauguration approached, sheTrump reportedly began
telling allies, “Jaredhasn’t been so good for
me,” and lamenting thatIvanka could have married
Tom Brady.