90 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTICIvanka seemed consumed by her coverage. Omarosa Manigault Newman,
who worked in the White House for the first year of the administration,
recalled Ivanka derailing a senior staff meeting to complain about a Sat-
urday Night Live sketch that portrayed her as the face of a perfume named
“Complicit.” “Ivanka was thin-skinned,” Newman wrote in her memoir, “and
could not seem to take a joke.”
Ivanka’s favorite-child status had long been tied to the good press she
generated for her dad. “For Trump, everything comes back to optics,” Cliff
Sims, a former White House aide, told me. “She is the archetype of what he
wants—the most beautiful face, the most buttoned-up message, everything
just exactly the way it should be.” But as Ivanka became a less attractive
surrogate, Trump’s patience with her and her husband waned. A news story
about Jared using a private email server to conduct government business
prompted a presidential meltdown in the Oval Office. “How could he be so
stupid?” Trump fumed, according to a White House official who was present.
“That’s what Hillary did!”
Trump reportedly began telling allies, “Jared hasn’t been so good for
me,” and lamenting—in jest, perhaps, though no one could say for sure—that
Ivanka could have married Tom Brady instead. More than once, the presi-
dent wished aloud that the couple would move back to New York.
Ivanka reacted to her sudden loss of influence by affecting an airy, just-
a-daughter pose. “I try to stay out of politics,” she said in an interview with
Fox News—a puzzling claim for a White House official. To those who knew
her, it was clear she was disoriented. For the first time since she was a girl,
her privileged place in the family seemed uncertain.
So when, in July of 2017, Don’s ill-conceived Trump Tower meeting with
the Russians became public—putting Jared in jeopardy—the couple did what
they had to do. Jared released an 11-page statement effectively blaming the
radioactive meeting on his brother-in-law while absolving himself. In a gra-
tuitous bit of knife-twisting, he recounted emailing an assistant, “Can u pls
call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”
The statement infuriated Don, according to family friends—not just for
the way it threw him under the bus, but for the way it belittled him. But Jar-
ed’s maneuver worked on the audience that mattered most.
Watching cable-news coverage of the fiasco from the West Wing, Trump
shook his head wearily. “He wasn’t angry at Don,” a former White House
offi cial recalled. “It was more like he was resigned to his son’s idiocy.”
“He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” Trump said with a sigh.
V.
Saturday Night Live has a running bit in which Trump’s two eldest sons appear
in tandem, with Don portrayed as the smart, responsible big brother and
Eric as a kind of bumbling man-child. In an episode last year, Don answered
questions about the Russia investigation while Eric ate Play-Doh. Real-life
Don seems to delight in these sketches, and has even publicly volunteered
to come on the show to play himself. But within the Trump family, associates
say, the brothers’ roles are exactly reversed.
Sequestered in Trump Tower, Don spent the first year of his father’s presi-
dency as a kind of armchair pundit, watching the news on TV and firing off
tweets. He showed little interest in running the Trump Organization withEric and longed instead for the political arena. But
he rarely called his dad at the White House—“I feel
ridiculous bothering him,” he told a reporter—and
his dad called him even less. In fact, no one in the
first family took Don’s political ideas seriously, least
of all Jared and Ivanka. “You never heard them say,
‘We’ve got to get Don Jr.’s opinion on this,’ ” a former
White House official told me.
In private, Don complained that the West Wing
had been overrun by Democrats, and griped that even
the true believers were too passive. Having immersed
himself in the online meme wars, Don seemed to
believe the White House’s woes could be solved with
the kind of aggressive lib-owning that came so natu-
rally to him. Instead, his father had put his faith in a
timid preppy. When photos were released of Jared in
Iraq in the spring of 2017, sporting a flak jacket over
his oxford shirt and blazer, Don spent the afternoon
trading gleeful text messages with friends about the
Martha’s Vineyard– meets–Mosul getup.
But beneath all Don’s carping was a more per-
sonal grievance: While Jared and Ivanka moved
freely through the West Wing, he was stuck on the
outside, his face pressed up against the glass.EVERYBODY WHO WORKS F OR T RU MP
learns sooner or later that imitating him will only
draw his contempt. The tragedy of Don Jr. is that
he seems never to have learned this lesson. As his
mother has recalled, Trump resisted when she
wanted to name their first son after him: “You can’t
do that!” he protested. “What if he’s a loser?” That
Don went on to confirm his father’s fear largely by
trying to mimic him—in temperament, style, speech,
and career—points to the unique difficulties of being
the president’s namesake.
In March 2018, Page Six reported that Don’s wife,
Vanessa, was filing for divorce after 12 years of mar-
riage. The echoes from his childhood were hard to
ignore. The couple had five kids— including a daugh-
ter who was about the same age he’d been when his
parents split up—and the tabloids were circling.
Hoping to spare their children from the media cir-
cus Don had experienced, he and Vanessa commit-
ted to keep their no-contest proceedings quiet. He
told his publicist he didn’t care what reporters wrote
about him, but requested that they respect his kids’
privacy and keep in mind that some of them were old
enough to read.
Trump had been ambivalent about Don’s wife.
(Some traced his doubts back to her teenage romance
with a member of the Latin Kings gang; others pointed
to an oft-retold story about Vanessa meeting Don’s
dad at a fashion show and later joking that he was
“retarded.”) But the president was even less enthusi-
astic when his son started dating Kimberly Guilfoyle.
The Fox News host had lobbied to become White
House press secretary early in the administration,
but Trump had shown little interest, accord ing to
two former aides. “Even he can tell the difference
between the attractive women on Fox who have a
little bit of substance, and those who will be derided