Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 164

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Born Trump: Inside America’s First Family,"  by Emily Jane Fox.

And as the Trump-Kushners gravitated more to the five-star hotel and private-plane end of the spectrum, a place on their detail became one of the more desirable assignments in the administration. In administrations past, the plum gigs had usually been on the First Lady’s Detail, known as the FLD. Jokingly, agents have dubbed the FLD “Fine Living and Dining,” because most First Ladies make so many trips to so many lovely places, go out to the best restaurants, and take a few vacations with their kids, with their detail in tow. This First Lady stuck closer to home—or homes, in the Trumps’ case. She rarely made public appearances or traveled anywhere other than to Trump Tower, Bedminster, New Jersey, or Mar-a-Lago. She didn’t socialize outside much, either. 

Ivanka, on the other hand, more than made up for it. She crisscrossed the country, flitted about vacation spots at luxury resorts, frequented glitzy parties and hot restaurants, and stayed at several city and beach and country homes. In jest, some agents started referring to Ivanka’s detail as FLD Lite. Since the typical FLD didn’t exist in Trumplandia. Ivanka’s, more than anyone’s, was the assignment to get.

Ivanka’s siblings had a tougher time. Don Jr.—“Marksman”—in particular chafed at the idea of protection, for several reasons. For starters, he was generally more private than his sister. He went to his home in the Catskills to fish and build bonfires and roam around on ATVs with his kids most weekends, and took off for days-long hunting trips in the most remote parts of the Canadian bush, looking for moose, and ten-day boys’ fishing trips in Alaska. He wore flannel shirts and baseball caps, sometimes full-camp suits with neon orange vests. He flew mostly commercial, in coach, hopscotching from one flight to a small airport onto a tiny plane into a far-flung town no one on the Upper East Side had ever heard of. 

“I have friends that they only knew me as Don,” he’s said of the people he meets out upstate or in hunting camps. “They find out what my last name is and they’re like ‘I had no idea.’ You see them the next time and they’re trying to treat you differently and you’re like ‘what happened.’ Why should that make any difference? They’ll say, ‘You’re right.’ It’s a great equalizer.”

Jared’s parents, Charlie and Seryl, were supportive of the Trump campaign, hosting a couple of open houses at their Long Branch, New Jersey, beach house on Donald’s behalf throughout the campaign. It wasn’t an option not to throw their support behind Donald; in effect, that would mean not throwing their support behind Jared. They were proud of what he was doing, and whatever he needed, they would do. That their son was effectively running a presidential campaign gave them enough naches for them to put their own distaste at some of the campaign nonsense and rhetoric aside. The Access Hollywood tape, for instance, rippled their household. But what rankled them wasn’t Donald’s language—that he’d boasted about using his special privilege as a celebrity to grab women by the genitals, or kissing a married woman he wooed with furniture shopping. It was that their son had walked to Trump Tower the day after the story broke to help handle the fallout. It was a Saturday, and their son shouldn’t have been working. That, they told him, wasn’t quite keeping Shabbat.

At the time of the divorce, at the age of eight, Ivanka clung to her father even more. She’s admitted that she sees any other woman in her father’s life as competition, and the fear that he might replace her or not always be around for her led her to visit him more in his office, call him more when she was at school. “I got angry with him,” she told the Daily Mail in 2006, but she did not turn her back on her father—not necessarily because she forgave him or felt as though he deserved her attention, but because she couldn’t help herself. “I’m such a loudmouth that giving him the silent treatment would only seem to be punishing me, rather than him,” she said.

Donald used his daughter as a human shield in private, too. Once, when he had just started dating Melania, he told a friend that he might get into some more public hot water. He had been fooling around in the Trump Tower triplex with model Kara Young earlier that day—leaving what he described as a mess of twisted sheets in the bedroom and towels smeared with her makeup in the bathroom, forgetting that Melania already had access to the apartment. When Melania confronted him about the foundation rubbed into the towels, he told her that Ivanka had come over that day after a modeling shoot. The makeup, he said, was hers. Just ask her.

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 in, and we’re all just dying to watch, even if the dirty laundry they end up airing, intentionally or otherwise, stinks.