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Ivanka and Jared 2: Tarnished Gold


samurai_sarah

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Unwanted Ivanka is wanted, you hear! She's wanted! She sacrificed a lot. Like puppies, and kittens and bunnies. So she deserves it!

 

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This is about an Ivanka/Junior scam exposed in a New Yorker article re: Trump Soho, Cy Vance and these two scamps.  And yes, they are crooks, all of them.  The rotten little apples don't fall far from the rotted stump that is their father. 

How Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Avoided a Criminal Indictment  Oct. 2017

<snip>

Spoiler

 

In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.

 

 

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I agree with Auntie:

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

"The lesson of Ivanka Trump’s latest reported intervention with her father"

Spoiler

President Trump issued the subtlest of rebukes Thursday to his supporters who chanted “send her back” about Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). He said he disagreed with the chant and that he tried to stop it. (He didn’t.)

And who reportedly advocated for that course-correction? You guessed it: his daughter, Ivanka Trump.

Thursday was merely the latest time the president’s daughter has been reported to have intervened to guard against her father’s worst impulses. The Wall Street Journal first reported:

On Thursday morning, Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter and White House adviser, expressed her displeasure to him about the “send her back” chant at his campaign rally the night before, White House officials said. A group of House Republicans, including members of leadership, also complained to Vice President Mike Pence about the chant at a breakfast meeting, White House and congressional officials said.

CBS News also reported that it had “learned President Trump took a lot of heat from his family over the racist chants at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday. He heard from first lady Melania Trump, his daughter Ivanka and Vice President Pence.” The New York Times, meanwhile, reported, “Nervous Republicans, from senior members of Congress to his own daughter Ivanka, urged President Trump on Thursday to repudiate the 'send her back’ chant."

Our Washington Post colleagues reported that Pence became a conduit for other Republicans who were disturbed by the chants. We can’t know whether it was Pence and consternation from the party, his daughter’s dismay or some other factor that tipped Trump into disavowing the chant. But a central element in these kinds of stories about Trump’s course corrections continues to be his daughter.

Other things Ivanka Trump has reportedly urged her father to do from behind the scenes? To halt a planned LGBT rights rollback, to issue a strong statement about anti-Semitism after the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue, to stop the family separation policy at the border and even to withdraw Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination amid accusations of decades-old sexual misconduct.

The Times’s Michael Barbaro summarized it:

This isn’t to cast doubt on the idea that these conversations actually happened. An adviser’s role is generally to advise privately. We shouldn’t expect an adviser or a president’s daughter to speak out publicly every time they disagree with the commander in chief.

But what is worth emphasizing is that Trump is repeatedly going too far for his own daughter — and the frequent distancing of her from what he did, even privately, is remarkable. It would be more dramatic if she were to state these things publicly, sure, but the practical impact is the same. When even she reportedly doesn’t trust him to respond appropriately to a massacre at a synagogue, that’s saying a lot. When she and others have to intervene to halt the predictable progression of a racist political attack, things are pretty badly off the rails. The veil of anonymity doesn’t change that.

What’s also going to be interesting to watch is whether the president continues to heed her reported advice. What happens when he renews his attacks on Omar at the next rally, and some supporters resurrect the “send her back” chants? Trump hasn’t exactly shown a great desire to rein in his crowds — especially when they are acting on his own unmistakable cues.

Generally speaking, we hear about it when Ivanka Trump’s advice is heeded — often after an action has already been taken. There’s no guarantee that will continue to be the case here. Trump has already downplayed the severity of the “send her back” chants, and if he had to be persuaded to say he disagreed with them, that shows you what he really thinks. That’s really the lesson of Ivanka Trump’s repeated, reported interventions.

Of course, we know he decided to change his mind and not continue to listen to barbie this time.

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4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"The lesson of Ivanka Trump’s latest reported intervention with her father"

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President Trump issued the subtlest of rebukes Thursday to his supporters who chanted “send her back” about Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). He said he disagreed with the chant and that he tried to stop it. (He didn’t.)

And who reportedly advocated for that course-correction? You guessed it: his daughter, Ivanka Trump.

Thursday was merely the latest time the president’s daughter has been reported to have intervened to guard against her father’s worst impulses. The Wall Street Journal first reported:

On Thursday morning, Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter and White House adviser, expressed her displeasure to him about the “send her back” chant at his campaign rally the night before, White House officials said. A group of House Republicans, including members of leadership, also complained to Vice President Mike Pence about the chant at a breakfast meeting, White House and congressional officials said.

CBS News also reported that it had “learned President Trump took a lot of heat from his family over the racist chants at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday. He heard from first lady Melania Trump, his daughter Ivanka and Vice President Pence.” The New York Times, meanwhile, reported, “Nervous Republicans, from senior members of Congress to his own daughter Ivanka, urged President Trump on Thursday to repudiate the 'send her back’ chant."

Our Washington Post colleagues reported that Pence became a conduit for other Republicans who were disturbed by the chants. We can’t know whether it was Pence and consternation from the party, his daughter’s dismay or some other factor that tipped Trump into disavowing the chant. But a central element in these kinds of stories about Trump’s course corrections continues to be his daughter.

Other things Ivanka Trump has reportedly urged her father to do from behind the scenes? To halt a planned LGBT rights rollback, to issue a strong statement about anti-Semitism after the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue, to stop the family separation policy at the border and even to withdraw Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination amid accusations of decades-old sexual misconduct.

The Times’s Michael Barbaro summarized it:

This isn’t to cast doubt on the idea that these conversations actually happened. An adviser’s role is generally to advise privately. We shouldn’t expect an adviser or a president’s daughter to speak out publicly every time they disagree with the commander in chief.

But what is worth emphasizing is that Trump is repeatedly going too far for his own daughter — and the frequent distancing of her from what he did, even privately, is remarkable. It would be more dramatic if she were to state these things publicly, sure, but the practical impact is the same. When even she reportedly doesn’t trust him to respond appropriately to a massacre at a synagogue, that’s saying a lot. When she and others have to intervene to halt the predictable progression of a racist political attack, things are pretty badly off the rails. The veil of anonymity doesn’t change that.

What’s also going to be interesting to watch is whether the president continues to heed her reported advice. What happens when he renews his attacks on Omar at the next rally, and some supporters resurrect the “send her back” chants? Trump hasn’t exactly shown a great desire to rein in his crowds — especially when they are acting on his own unmistakable cues.

Generally speaking, we hear about it when Ivanka Trump’s advice is heeded — often after an action has already been taken. There’s no guarantee that will continue to be the case here. Trump has already downplayed the severity of the “send her back” chants, and if he had to be persuaded to say he disagreed with them, that shows you what he really thinks. That’s really the lesson of Ivanka Trump’s repeated, reported interventions.

Of course, we know he decided to change his mind and not continue to listen to barbie this time.

Until somebody publicly claims to have done so, I take every so-called intervention with a grain of salt.

These reports only serve to make this administration look like it isn’t in total agreement with Trump’s policies and actions. 

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@GreyhoundFanthis is how it works: 

Pretty damned scary when a long con is playing out before our eyes. 

Edited by Howl
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Love the burn on Barbie:

image.png.ae9d8f35f818e380a27c85d707db8ee9.png

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The article:

New Laswsuit In Investigation Of Ivanka Trump And Jared Kushner's Use Of Military Transport

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American Oversight today sued the Trump administration to determine whether and to what extent the president’s daughter and son-in-law invited Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on trips so that they could travel on Air Force planes.

According to reports from the New York Times and author and journalist Vicky Ward, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner regularly requested to fly on Air Force planes even when their presence was unnecessary or inappropriate. According to Ward, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson rejected many of these requests — prompting the couple to invite cabinet officials along, often Mnuchin.

In April, American Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act request for communications from Mnuchin and the couple related to their presence on military aircraft, including invitations for Mnuchin to accompany them. The Treasury Department’s failure to provide records in response to the request has prompted today’s lawsuit.

American Oversight has been investigating Trump administration officials’ high-priced travel at taxpayer expense, from the use of chartered planes for official travel to the use of military aircraft for personal use. In 2017, Tom Price resigned as secretary of health and human services after it was revealed he’d spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on government-chartered jets, and later [that year], Mnuchin took a military jet to see the solar eclipse. As the official roles of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House remain murky, whether and how the couple has taken advantage of public service remains just as important to clarify.

“Members of the first family have consistently used the trappings of the White House as personal status symbols,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight. “Whether they are inserting themselves into meetings with world leaders or seeking joyrides on military vehicles, the public has a right to know if Jared and Ivanka are abusing their proximity to power for personal satisfaction.”

American Oversight’s complaint is available [in the linked article]

 

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"Ivanka Trump is acting as if everything is normal"

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Ivanka Trump descended upon Bogota, Colombia, this week to talk about women’s empowerment and left us talking about her sleeves. They were voluminous, bell-shaped swaths of green fabric. As the first daughter stood in solemn formation with the Colombian vice president, the sleeves caught a draft and attempted to launch themselves away from her body. Midair, they formed into perfect circles, and this became the hallmark photograph of the trip. Ivanka Trump from the neck up was on a mission of benign diplomacy. From the neck down, flying saucers.

It’s shallow to call attention to a minor clothing malfunction, but this viral sleeve image is what alerted many people to the fact that Ivanka Trump — who, after all, is not an elected official with a dedicated press corps — was in Latin America at all.

To understand exactly what she was doing there, your best hope was to follow the itinerary she unspooled on Instagram: She launched the Academy of Women Entrepreneurs, which, she said, was “designed to equip women with the practical skills they need to create sustainable businesses and to participate more fully in the global economy.” She participated in a wreath-laying ceremony. She met with Colombia’s president and vice president, and then she prepared to head to Argentina and Paraguay for more of the same.

Ivanka abroad seems to be Ivanka’s platonic ideal of herself: doing things that are considered patriotic but not overly political, important but not controversial, and personally on-brand. If you believe the rumors that Ivanka will run for office one day, you see her social media presence as fodder for a future campaign ad.

Four out of her past five Instagram stories have been devoted to her encounters abroad with heads of state. On a trip to Africa earlier this year, she documented herself sitting with Ethiopian President Sahle-Work Zewde. At the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, she name-checked a whirlwind of prime ministers. She went to South Korea and met the president; another photo in that series saw her slipping off to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.

President Trump’s deepest desires are primal and obvious: to be loved and worshiped. What his daughter wants has always been a little harder to pin down, but when she’s traveling abroad you see it plain: to be legitimate. To earn respect in a cohort composed not of the sycophants her father favors but of intellectual leaders. To fit in well enough that foreign dignitaries begin to think she really is one of the foremost experts the United States has to offer.

To be Ivanka abroad is to escape from the utter weirdness of this White House, with its rally chants and doctored weather charts, and instead give speeches to erudite diplomatic allies who are protocol-bound to nod and smile. Back home, her father is starting an online feud with an actress from “Will and Grace,” but Ivanka is in Colombia, praising the economic empowerment of female business owners, visiting a strawberry farm.

Occasionally, there are cracks in the facade.

In June, a deeply cringeworthy video was released by the French government. In it, French President Emmanuel Macron chatted with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; Theresa May, then British prime minister; and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde. And Ivanka — Ivanka was there, too, horning in on the conversation. She could be heard, in the 20-second clip, clumsily interjecting something about “male-dominated” industries.

In response, Macron looked away. May ignored the comment. Lagarde pursed her lips, and delivered what could only be described as baffled side-eye.

What had prompted her to think she needed to speak in that moment? What was she doing there at all?

Moments like this are useful, because they bring us back to reality. The reality of Ivanka is that she goes on these trips, and she meets these leaders, and she is smart and gracious, but she is not Theresa May. She is not Angela Merkel or Christine Lagarde; she is Ivanka Trump.

It’s always hard for me to figure out how, or whether, to criticize Ivanka Trump. She prompts withering hatred from her detractors, but focusing the hatred on specific charges is harder than one might think. At a surface level, she says the right things, she tweets the right things. Her causes are backed by good impulses — who doesn’t want economic opportunities for women in developing countries?

They are also, of course, backed by rampant nepotism: last month, the White House looked at canceling billions of dollars in foreign aid, but officials said Ivanka’s initiatives would not be affected.

Still, it’s easy to see how in normal times, the public might let that slide. In normal times, under a normal president, we might let his daughter have her projects and initiatives.

That, I’d argue, is everyone’s essential problem with Ivanka, even if they haven’t quite put their finger on it: She behaves as if we are in normal times. She behaves as if she is working in a normal administration. And she behaves as if her role is benign diplomacy, rather than what her role should be — acknowledging and fighting against the madness.

The work she wants to do internationally on behalf of women is laudable, but there are dozens of scholars and economists who could do it as well or better; nobody needs Ivanka’s specific brain on these matters.

What she could do — what only she could do — is act as a public check on the president of the United States. She could offer an informed, clear-eyed perspective on her father’s behaviors and fitness for office. She could publicly express with a daughter’s love and concern that, yes, it is really worrisome that the president keeps falsely insisting that Alabama is going to be hit by Hurricane Dorian. She could say, “Here’s what he’s doing that scares me.” She could say, “Look, here’s everything I know. I love my dad, but here’s everything I know.”

Would she be fired? Probably. Disinherited? Maybe.

But that’s where her value is. That’s her diplomatic mission. The one thing she could be doing to be taken seriously is the one thing she’s not doing.

Instead, while the president unleashes strange rants about “America’s Spying Apparatus,” and how Hurricane Dorian really was going to hit Alabama, Ivanka posts photos of herself hugging women in the strawberry field.

Instead, while migrant children are being traumatized at the U.S. border, the first daughter visited a camp for migrants on the border . . . of Colombia and Venezuela.

She is the single person on the planet whose public approval or disapproval of her father could possibly matter — to him or to his supporters.

If she wanted to be thought of as a serious person, as a hero rather than a passive villain or cipher, she could have impact where she actually could have unique, meaningful impact.

Instead, we’re left scrolling through pictures on her Instagram feed. And analyzing her flying dress sleeves. Which is the only visual preposterous enough to evoke the absurdity of it all.

 

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I hope she takes lots of paper towels

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Ivanka Trumpon Sunday night announced a trip to Alabama ― and sometimes, the jokes just write themselves.

The daughter of and adviser to President Donald Trump shared an AL.com report that said she would be at the Alabama Robotics Technology Park in Decatur on Tuesday for a workforce development announcement.

Last weekend, her father repeatedly warned the state of a nonexistent storm threat, claiming Alabama “will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by Hurricane Dorian. Then, he spent the next week defending that warning and insisting that Alabama was facing a storm threat even though it wasn’t.

Twitter is doing its thing and letting her have it. 

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Molly Jong-Fast's wonderfully snarky take on Ivanka's trip to South America.

Don’t Cry for Her, Argentina

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Last week the president’s favorite child—who happens to also be his trusted advisor and the wife of the guy who’s supposed to fix government, solve the opioid crisis, run point on China, and bring peace to the Middle East—went to South America.

Why Ivanka Trump went to South America no one knows.

Perhaps she went to make a splash. Or to focus on her vague and meaningless mandate of “women’s empowerment.”

Or maybe Ivanka went to South America because there’s a long history of fascist enablers finding solace below the equator? Either way, Ivanka Trump went to Argentina (and Paraguay and Colombia) to do her best Eva Perón but ended up reminding the world, once again, that she’s Marie Antoinette.

Ivanka came with the promise of a truly tiny amount of aid: Apparently, the administration is willing to give $120 million for Colombia. (For a sense of scale, the Kushner family spent $1.8 billion buying 666 Fifth Avenue in New York.) But she also came with a suitcase filled with dresses from Latin American designers. Oh, and a new, serious, grownup haircut.

It seems possible that the entire purpose of the trip was to drive a stake through the concept of irony. Because while Ivanka was in Colombia she decided to visit a camp for Venezuelan migrants.

It is unclear if these camps are more humane than the ones her father has built in America. Where, just to remind you, we have conditions such as “A cell meant for a maximum of 35 held 155 adult males with only one toilet and sink” and “detainees were wearing soiled clothing for days or weeks.” Who could say.

If I had to, I’d guess that the real reason Ivanka went to South America and pretended to care about the plight of immigrants is because she never directly challenges her father. And visiting one of his migrant detention camps in America would have been doing exactly that.

Ivanka is in a strange position of wanting to pantomime actual human emotion in the hopes that it will salvage her brand from her father’s toxicity. It’s an almost impossible needle to thread: How does the daughter of the guy who cages migrant children in America pretend to care about migrant children? By showing up to look on benevolently at other migrant children in other countries? Does she really think that’s going to work?

Maybe she does. Or maybe, as I mentioned before, she really wants to beat irony over the head with a lead pipe. Because in addition to visiting a migrant camp to make concerned noises about the detention of migrants, Ivanka was also pushing her Private Label feminism. She called the female Venezuelan leaders “warriors,” and tweeted that “It was deeply moving to meet female leaders of the Guaidó coalition as well as some of the women impacted most by the brutal Maduro dictatorship in Cucuta today.”

Which I guess is nice but maybe we could do more to take apart brutal dictatorships in America’s sphere of influence? I mean, more than sending the American president’s daughter on a sight-seeing tour with enough aid money to buy three floors of a Manhattan office building? Tough to say, of course. Geopolitics is dreadfully complicated. Just ask the 30-year-old who the president just took over for Ivanka’s husband on solving the Middle East.

Ivanka’s brand of fake feminism doesn’t sit very well with her father’s brand of lite fascism. She wants to be seen as someone who empowers women and protects children while she is enabling a man who has for his entire adult life treated women poorly and for most of his presidency treated children abominably.

So the first daughter goes all the way to South America to act out her woman-in-government shtick and even there is hamstrung by her inability to criticize her father’s cruelty. And in the end, she does what she’s good at: fashion statements and meaningless speeches comprised of nothing but platitudes.

She’s not a presidential advisor. She’s the daughter of a czar.

Although it’s possible that none of this gives her proper credit. Because Ivanka may be a fake feminist, but she’s a very real—and very successful—opportunist. Her father’s campaign manager insists that the Trumps are a political “dynasty that will last for decades.”

Which means that Donald Trump thinks of his family in dynastic terms. And if that’s the case, then whose next? Melania? No way. She’s just here to outlive her pre-nup. Eric? He was Fredo before it was cool.

What if Ivanka’s entire White House adventure is just an elaborate scheme to position her against Don Jr. to be tapped as dad’s successor?

Think about it for a minute. Because however superficial and useless Ivanka might seem, next to Don Jr. she’s basically Nancy Pelosi, Margaret Thatcher, and Eleanor Shellstrop, rolled into one.

Oh, and in case you were wondering who this is referring to:

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Geopolitics is dreadfully complicated. Just ask the 30-year-old who the president just took over for Ivanka’s husband on solving the Middle East.

You could not make this up, you really couldn't.
You see, it's literally Jared's former Coffee Boy. Yes, literally. Berkowitz's former job really was to get Jared his coffee. Because getting coffee makes you eminently suited to realize peace in the Middle East.

 

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This is an excellent article about Treason Barbie, Udvay, and Quesay. It's extremely long, but worth a read. As it is lengthy, I will only quote a handful of interesting passages.

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They stood shoulder to shoulder—Don Jr., Ivanka, Jared, and Eric—watching the conquest unfold on TV. Ohio was theirs. Then North Carolina and Florida, too. The vaunted midwestern “blue wall” was crumbling on live TV, as ashen-faced pundits muttered about the electoral map. The scene was surreal, and delicious.

While Don and Eric fielded congratulatory text messages, some in the room noticed Ivanka cut through the thick scrum of campaign aides and attach herself to her father’s side. “Did you hear that, Dad?” she asked whenever the TV delivered good news, expertly guarding his attention just as she had since she was a young girl.

Around midnight, the family realized they would need a victory speech. No one had bothered to write one, because Trump wasn’t supposed to win—at least not electorally. He was supposed to go down in a spectacular blaze of made-for-TV martyrdom that all of them could capitalize on. Ivanka had a book coming out. Don and Eric were working on a line of patriotically themed budget hotels. And preliminary talks were under way to launch a Trump-branded TV network that would turn disgruntled voters into viewers. Now they needed a new plan.

One by one, they retreated from the buzzing hive on the 14th floor of Trump Tower and rode the elevator up to their father’s penthouse. Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller—sleep-deprived and pulsing with adrenaline—began punching out a draft for the president-elect to read. But Ivanka took one glance over Miller’s shoulder and concluded that it wouldn’t do. (Someone who read it later summed up the tone as “We won; fuck you.”) The next act of the Trump story was beginning tonight. This was a task for family.

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The Trumps like to invoke the Kennedys in their own mythmaking. The president has called Melania “our own Jackie O.” Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, whose father reportedly sees himself as a “Jewish Joe Kennedy,” had a framed photo of JFK in his Manhattan office. And close Ivanka watchers have noted that her Instagram feed—filled with idyllic photos of family life against the backdrop of the White House—has a certain Camelotian quality.

But if Camelot was always a romantic facade, the Trumps have dropped the ennobling pretense. Like a fun-house-mirror version of the Kennedys, they reel across the national stage swapping the language of duty and sacrifice for that of grievance and quid pro quo. Ask not what your country can do for you, they seem to say; ask what your country can do for the Trumps.

In considering which of his children should carry on his legacy, Trump is now caught between competing visions for the future of the family—one defined by a desire for elite approval, the other by an instinct for stoking populist rage.

But Stephen Hess, a scholar who studies American political dynasties, says succession can be unpredictable in presidential families. Unlike in business, where a patriarch can simply install his chosen heir as CEO, politicians often see their best-laid plans upended by voters: Think of the Bushes anointing brainy, well-behaved Jeb, only to have George W. surprise everyone by beating him to the White House.

For Trump—a distant and domineering father who has long pitted his offspring against one another—the unsettling reality is that the choice of who will succeed him may be out of his control.

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Yet when Don offered to help his father’s campaign, many of the tasks he received had a whiff of condescension. Trump had always been embarrassed by his son’s hunting, especially after photos emerged in 2012 of Don posing with the severed tail of an elephant he’d slain in Zimbabwe. But now that the candidate was wooing rural Republicans, he was happy to let Don put on that goofy orange vest and shoot at stuff for the cameras. “You can finally do something for me,” Trump told Don, according to a former aide.

Don had long ago come to understand that Ivanka was his father’s favorite. “Daddy’s little girl!” he liked to joke. But making peace with her husband’s status in the family was harder. Ever since Ivanka had married Jared, Don had been made to watch as this effete, soft-spoken interloper cozied up to his dad. “The brothers thought Jared was a yes-man,” said a former Trump adviser. “Don, especially, looked at him as very suspect.”

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Tensions between Don and Jared sharpened in the spring of 2016, as it became clear that Trump was going to fire his campaign manager. With Corey Lewandowski on the way out, Don and Jared each began vying for larger roles in the campaign, according to two Republican operatives who worked for Trump.

People close to the candidate knew he would never entrust his campaign to his son—Don’s chances of taking the reins were “less than zero,” a former adviser told me. But Don seemed like the last one to realize it. He hustled to prove that he was up to the task, swapping texts and emails with anyone who said they could help his dad’s candidacy. It was during this period that Don set up a meeting with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. “The Trump Tower meeting was Don’s move to take over the campaign,” a former aide told me. “He was trying to show his father he was competent.” (The spokesperson for Don said: “More fiction.”)

The full extent of the mess Don was making wouldn’t be clear for another year. But even in the moment, the meeting was a bust. The Russians rambled about adoption policy, Jared emailed his assistant looking for an excuse to leave, and no useful intel was produced. Don had wasted everybody’s time.

Jared and Ivanka took a savvier approach to consolidating power, cultivating the new campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, as an ally. By the fall, Jared was traveling virtually full-time with Trump on his private plane, while Don was sent to stump in far-flung states no one else had time for. “I just wake up in the morning and go to whatever city they tell me to,” Don complained during one trip, according to a travel companion. “Jared’s the smart one. He has it all figured out.”

But Don discovered that he had a knack for campaigning. 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 amplifying memes from the right-wing fever swamps generated controversy. (One infamous tweet compared Syrian refugees 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 Cernovich, a popular far-right social-media personality, told me. “He has a classically masculine personality, and you don’t feel like he’s a snob. He really likes the meme culture—it’s not fake for him.”

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Jared, meanwhile, was busy attending to his own brand. When the December 20, 2016, issue of Forbes hit newsstands, the cover featured 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 campaign. “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 interpreted as an act of vengeance. But the shake-up also gave Jared a strategic advantage, allowing him to exert control over hiring for the new administration.

Don was not happy with this arrangement. More than once, according 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 investment 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 difficult to reconcile with Ivanka’s brand. As the inauguration approached, she found herself under siege on the Upper East Side. A horde of New York artists—including some whose work she personally collected—gathered outside a downtown building where she kept an apartment to protest her role in Trump’s “fascist” agenda. Activists launched a viral Instagram campaign juxtaposing her glamour shots with appeals from frightened constituents: “Dear Ivanka, I’ve been raped and I need to have an abortion”; “Dear Ivanka, I’m afraid of the swastikas spray painted on my park.”

This struck Ivanka as profoundly unfair. She—the author of a forthcoming book on women in the workplace and frequent participant in female-empowerment luncheons—was a misogynist? She—a convert to orthodox Judaism and supporter of numerous respected Jewish charities—was an anti-Semite? What did these people expect her to do, disown her father?

But as much as the attacks bothered Ivanka, they also made something clear: The White House wasn’t going to boost her lifestyle business—if anything, the coming years would politicize it beyond repair. To take advantage of this moment, she would need to think bigger. Fortunately for Ivanka, A‑list celebrities and thought leaders were now flocking to her. Leonardo DiCaprio, Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter—all of them wanted a spot on her calendar. She didn’t need to sell handbags or luxury condos to command the attention of America’s elite. Her proximity to the Oval Office was enough.

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The first test of Ivanka’s persuasive powers came when White House officials began drafting an executive order focused on expanding protections for religious conservatives. Ivanka, who knew the order would be seen as anti-LGBTQ, enlisted Tim Cook—the gay Apple CEO, whose respect her father craved—to lobby Trump against signing it, according to a former White House aide. She also privately reminded her father that Vice President Mike Pence had faced nasty political blowback when he’d stumbled into a religious-freedom culture war as governor of Indiana.

Ivanka’s crusade culminated one night in the president’s private study, where Trump was discussing the issue with a small group of advisers. A former aide who was present at the meeting recalled Pence launching into an impassioned defense of the executive order, only to have Trump cut him off. “Mike, isn’t this the shit that got you in trouble in Indiana?” he snapped. Pence quickly retreated as blood rushed to his face. It was clear to all in the room that Ivanka—standing quietly in the corner—had won. When Trump did eventually sign the order, it had been dramatically watered down.

But as time went on, Trump began to tire of Ivanka and Jared’s incessant lobbying. Every time he turned around, they were nagging him about something new—refugees one day, education the next. It never stopped. Their efforts to change his mind about the Paris climate accord exasperated the president, who took to mocking their arguments when they weren’t around. “They’re New York liberals,” he would say, according to a former White House aide. “Of course that’s what they think.”

When the president withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June 2017, the illusion of Ivanka the Trump whisperer collapsed. “Look, It’s Time to Collectively and Officially Give Up on Ivanka Trump,” Vogue declared. “Ivanka Trump is never going to come through,” a New York Times op-ed announced. Vanity Fair published a savage story about her and Jared’s early adventures in elite Washington, where they were widely regarded as dilettantes. “What is off-putting about them,” one politico told the magazine, “is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance. They think they are special.”

Ivanka 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 Saturday 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!”

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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 gratuitous 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 Jared’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 official 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.

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 presidency as a kind of armchair pundit, watching the news on TV and firing off tweets. He showed little interest in running the Trump Organization with Eric 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 naturally 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 personal 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 for Trump 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 marriage. The echoes from his childhood were hard to ignore. The couple had five kids—including a daughter 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 circus Don had experienced, he and Vanessa committed 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 enthusiastic 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, according 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 as airheads,” one aide said. Now she was gallivanting across the gossip pages with his son, and posing for photos on the South Lawn.

The family was friendly to Guilfoyle in person, but there were signs of disapproval. One source told me that after her attendance at a White House Fourth of July party sparked a round of fawning press coverage—upstaging Jared and Ivanka—Don was contacted by an official informing him that he would need to clear his guests the next time he visited. And as Thanksgiving approached, the president made it known that Guilfoyle wasn’t welcome to join the family at Mar-a-Lago, two Trump associates told me. (Spokespeople for the White House and Don denied this.)

Some suspected that the president was simply fed up with the distraction the relationship posed. But according to one longtime Trump adviser, there may have been another reason for his displeasure. Over the years, Trump had frequently made suggestive comments about Guilfoyle’s attractiveness, the adviser told me, and more than once inquired about whom she was dating.

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As the 2018 midterm elections approached, Don decided to get serious about politics. He hired the Republican strategist Andrew Surabian to help shape his press coverage, and began fielding requests to join candidates on the campaign trail.

Crisscrossing the country with Guilfoyle in the year that followed, Don emerged as a veritable right-wing phenom. At the University of Georgia, more than 2,000 young Republicans lined up to hear him speak. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, he was swarmed by fans clamoring for selfies and autographs. Charlie Kirk, the founder of the student organization Turning Point USA, recalled a summit in West Palm Beach that featured conservative A-listers such as Tucker Carlson, Greg Gutfeld, and Jordan Peterson. Don drew a bigger crowd than any of them.

To the surprise of many in elite GOP circles, he also excelled at schmoozing wealthy donors, raising millions of dollars for conservatives in closed-door fundraisers. “He’s as good in a room of six people as he is in a room of 6,000,” says Tommy Hicks Jr., a co-chair of the Republican National Committee and a friend of Don’s.

But the stump was where Don really shined. Taking the stage to wild applause from riled-up MAGA-heads, he riffed and ranted and cracked jokes about gender identity. To watch Don in these settings was to see a man morphing into his father—the vocal inflection, the puckered half-smirk, the staccato “Who knows?” punctuating key sentences. It was as though he had studied his dad’s delivery, practicing each tic in the mirror.

By November 2018, Don had appeared at more than 70 campaign events across 17 states—and powerful Republicans were abuzz. “I could very easily see him entering politics,” Senator Kevin Cramer told me. “I think his future is bright,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Newsmax’s CEO, Chris Ruddy, told me he’d personally encouraged Don to run for office; Sean Hannity called him “a born natural leader.” Senator Rand Paul went so far as to say that Don was one of the best Republican campaigners in the country. “If you can’t get the president,” Paul told me, “he’s a close second.”

Notably, many of these Republicans seemed less enthusiastic about his sister. Cramer, for example, spent 15 minutes in a phone interview gushing to me about Don’s “accessibility” and “irreverence” and gift for “connecting” with voters. But when I asked him about Ivanka, he paused. “She’s a little bit harder to get,” he replied, politely. “Her faith prevents her from traveling on the Sabbath.” Charlie Kirk was similarly careful when we spoke. While all of Trump’s adult children were helpful to the cause, he told me, “I can honestly say that outside of his father, Don is the No. 1 most requested speaker, and he brings the most energy to the conservative base.”

None of this newfound excitement about Don seemed to rub off on the president, however. People close to Trump told me he remained enchanted by the idea of Ivanka as the inheritor of his political legacy. During trips to Mar-a-Lago, he was often heard rhapsodizing about her potential to be the first female president. Don’s political prospects, if they came up at all, were treated as an afterthought. If there was any doubt about which child Trump favored, his Twitter feed told the story: In the first two years of his presidency, he tweeted about Ivanka 16 times, while Don received just four mentions—all of them about the Trump Tower scandal.

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But as Don’s visibility grew, the cold war between him and Ivanka intensified. Now that each had their own teams of allies and advisers, they had grown paranoid that the other’s henchmen were planting damaging stories about them in the press. A few days before the midterms, McClatchy published a story under the headline “Trump Kids on the Campaign Trail: Don Jr. Wows, Ivanka Disappoints.” Ivanka’s camp was enraged, and suspected that Don was behind the story. Later, Don confronted Ivanka over rumors that her team was undermining him in off-the-record conversations with reporters. “Tell your people to stop trashing me to the media,” he said, according to someone familiar with the conversation. (Spokespeople for Don and Ivanka disputed this account and denied that there is a rift between them.)

While his siblings jockeyed for political position, Eric spent most of his days at Trump Tower. Don was still technically on the company’s payroll, but between hunting trips and campaign stops, his presence in the office was irregular at best.

Running the Trump Organization during the Trump presidency had turned out to be more difficult than Eric had imagined. After an initial burst of postelection activity, many of the family’s most ambitious plans collapsed. They were forced to scrap their American Idea hotel chain after ethics concerns were raised. International building projects were delayed amid outcry from watchdog groups. Valuable retail space in Trump Tower sat empty month after month, and socially conscious condo owners called for the Trump name to be scraped off their buildings.

Meanwhile, at Mar-a-Lago, patrons whispered that “the boys” were draining the club of its class with cost-cutting measures after numerous charities canceled functions there. When a rumor went forth that Eric had ordered lower-quality steaks to be served at the restaurant, members erupted in outrage: His father never would have allowed this.

Eric blamed the Trump Organization’s setbacks on partisan politics. “We live in a climate where everything will be used against us,” he told The Washington Post. But within the president’s orbit, there was a growing sense that his sons were driving the company into the ground.

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Watching Trump’s children appear on Fox News, one gets the sense that they’re still auditioning for their father’s affection. Ivanka speaks in dulcet tones about how proud, so proud, she is of her dad. Don bashes the “fake-news media” with performative force. Eric, the least camera-ready of the three, clings to talking points, lavishing praise on Trump whenever he gets stuck. (In an interview earlier this year, Eric repeated variations of “He’s the greatest guy in the world” in such reverential tones that even Sean Hannity seemed uncomfortable with the obsequiousness.)

Trump watches these segments from the West Wing and offers a running commentary to whoever is around, according to a former aide. His attitude toward each of his adult children on any given day is shaped by how they are playing on cable news. Ivanka tends to draw rave reviews, while Don’s are more mixed, with the president muttering things like “Why did he say that?” and “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Recently, though, his perspective on his two oldest children seems to have shifted.

After the meetings, the French government posted a video clip that showed the president’s daughter standing amid a gaggle of side-eyeing world leaders as she tried awkwardly to force her way into the conversation. The clip went viral, spawning a hashtag—#UnwantedIvanka—and a wave of parody Photoshops inserting her into great moments in history: mugging for the camera at the March on Washington, grinning next to Winston Churchill at Yalta. News outlets around the world covered the snub. Pundits called it a damning indictment of Trump’s nepotism, while foreign-policy experts argued that Ivanka’s lack of credibility could harm U.S. diplomacy. A quote from an anonymous Indian diplomat recirculated in the media: “We regard Ivanka Trump the way we do half-wit Saudi princes.”

The episode laid bare the depth of Ivanka’s miscalculation. She had thought when her father took office that the surest path to power and status was to plant herself in the West Wing and mingle with the global elite. But after two and a half years of trying to burnish her credentials as a geopolitical player, Ivanka had become an international punch line. There was, it turned out, no market for a genteel brand of Trumpism.

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On a steamy June evening, Trump officially launched his bid for reelection with a raucous rally in Orlando. This time, Ivanka and Jared sat in the audience, while Don—the president’s most skilled warm-up act—strutted across the stage to fervid applause. Bellowing into the microphone until his voice went ragged, he crowed about “crushing the bastards of ISIS” and made fun of Joe Biden for “groping” women. As he neared the end of his speech, Don lifted his arms in the air as if conducting an orchestra, and the arena erupted in chants of “Four more years!”

In that moment, there was little question what the future of the Trump family would look like. After a century and a half of striving, they had money, and fame, and unparalleled power. But respectability would remain as distant a mirage as it was when Friedrich was chasing it across the Yukon. While no one knew when Donald Trump would exit the White House, it was clear what he would leave behind when he did: an angry, paranoid scrap of the country eager to buy what he was hawking—and an heir who knew how to keep the con alive.

 

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More about their Cold War against each other.  Wouldn't it be great if their rivalry against each other imploded this family thoroughly? I for one would enjoy this family's political aspirations die a thousand deaths from a sibling rivalry that runs amok.  Anything to get all of them out of the political arena.    :popcorn:

https://www.businessinsider.com/ivanka-trump-don-jr-war-accuse-planting-bad-stories-report-2019-9

https://www.salon.com/2019/09/09/don-jr-and-ivanka-are-fighting-a-bitter-cold-war-for-prominence-in-the-trump-dynasty_partner/

https://theweek.com/speedreads/863611/don-jr-reportedly-supplanted-ivanka-trumps-heir-apparent

 

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I am very gleeful that reporting of Trump kids infighting is getting serious publicity.  Anything to show how shallow and awful these kids are works for me.  I think the infighting must be serious because it is in People and the Whitehouse is clapping back. I can't get the link to work but essentially Meghan McCain said Ivanka and Jared are not good people. 

Actually Meghan I figured out they aren't good people on my own, but thanks for the confirmation. 

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I guess Treason Barbie is going to try doing stand up comedy next: "Ivanka tells donors she got her moral compass from her dad"

Spoiler

At a mid-August fundraiser in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Ivanka Trump was asked to name the personality traits she inherited most from her parents.

Without much of a pause, Trump told the crowd of roughly 120 high-end donors that her mother gave her an example of how to be a powerful, successful woman.

And her father? He passed onto her his moral compass, she said, according to two event attendees.

The exchange was part of a broader conversation about Ivanka Trump’s life in Washington and the White House during a swanky retreat organized by Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in the Wyoming mountains. Her appearance signaled an informal effort by the Trump campaign, family and top aides to woo donors this election cycle by sharing intimate, colorful details about this atypical White House.

The goal: lean on the celebrity status of the sprawling Trump clan, and even well-known aides, to make donors feel like they are part of the show — and deeply committed to winning the president four more seasons.

It also helps to humanize a brash president best known for his prolific tweets, his media-bashing, his boastfulness about his tough negotiating style and his well-worn Apprentice line, “You’re fired.”

Donors from all over the country appear to love the insider take — even if D.C. operatives or Wall Street executives would prefer more concrete insight into the president’s upcoming moves on China tariffs, potential tax cuts or regulatory moves out of agencies.

“As a Trump donor, it is energizing to hear stories about President Trump being personal and engaged on the issues,” said Dan Eberhart, chief executive officer of Canary LLC, a Colorado-based energy company and Trump supporter who has heard colorful stories at other fundraising events. “The media consistently and conspicuously omits any stories of the president being human or personally engaging, so these firsthand accounts really help paint a fuller picture of what’s happening inside the White House.”

Using personal stories to court donors is a well-worn political strategy. The huge Bush clan propped up each other over the years, with Neil Bush, George W. Bush or first lady Barbara Bush serving as excellent fundraisers and speakers on behalf of their father, President George H.W. Bush. The Romney boys fanned out across the country to speak at events about their father and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney as he ran for president in 2012. Chelsea Clinton frequently stumped for her mother, Hillary, during her presidential bid in 2016, telling supporters anecdotes about Clinton as a grandmother who sang “The Wheels on the Bus.”

Family and close aides like the White House chief of staff can remind donors what is unique about the candidate, or the way he or she interacts with family and friends, making a politician appear more relatable.

The campaign, Republican National Committee and Trump-aligned groups also benefit from a deeper bench of surrogates because it allows them to fundraise in multiple locations on the same day. In mid-July, for instance, Don Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, headlined two fundraisers in California over a two-day period, while the president spoke on the East Coast at an event in Bedminster, N.J.

“This is a very low-cost way to make a big donor feel special,” said Tammy Vigil, an associate professor of communication at Boston University, who studies political campaigns and persuasion. “The idea is to make people feel like they have the inside scoop. You could think of it as being akin to spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom, which donors used to get to do.”

“It’s the storytelling that has become the selling point,” Vigil added. “The stories may not actually be accurate, but it still gives people a sense of connectedness.”

The Jackson Hole event seemed particularly wired into the Oval Office.

During Ivanka Trump’s conversation at the mountain lodge, moderated by former “Entertainment Tonight” host Mary Hart, the president called into the event to say hello and was put on speakerphone. Donors were absolutely delighted, according to four attendees in the room that night.

His message was simple. The crowd was in good hands with his daughter and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who spoke the following night. Implicit in his brief remarks was the idea that Kushner and Ivanka Trump speak on his behalf, said two attendees — a status the president does not afford to even his top White House aides.

Trump’s family isn’t always offering something new. Ivanka Trump‘s comment about the traits she inherited from her father echoed a similar comment she made at the Republican National Convention in 2016, when she told the audience: “My father taught my siblings and me the importance of positive values and a strong ethical compass.” (Through a White House spokesperson, she declined to comment for this story.)

But at other recent events, Jared Kushner has detailed his battleground plans for the 2020 election including the way he intends to keep a close eye on the campaign spending.

He’s joked to donors about the way Washington operatives and the media started to attack him and Ivanka even before they landed in the White House, despite their good intentions.

Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, has regaled donors with tales about Trump being so invested in the upcoming 2020 election that he’s found the president on the couch in the Oval Office, with polls strewn across his lap.

Recently, Mulvaney told donors about his instructions to one White House policy adviser, who was scheduled to brief the president on budget cuts, government spending and regulations. Mulvaney warned that no one gets through a presentation without being interrupted multiple times by the president.

This official did manage to deliver his full briefing, Mulvaney told the crowd. But instead of asking a follow-up question, Trump asked the White House aide who he would be in the world, if he could be anyone — himself or, say, Tiger Woods?

The aide then joked with the president that he would be the Tiger Woods of deregulation if the administration accomplished all it wanted to. It was Mulvaney’s stab at wonky humor.

Donald Trump Jr. is also known for frequently telling off-the-cuff stories about his father to donors at fundraising luncheons, dinners or small gatherings including a recent hunting trip in Texas with the late Republican donor T. Boone Pickens.

“You have to have a draw to convince donors to write a $50,000 check to come to a fundraiser,” said one close White House adviser. “The president and vice president are obviously a draw, and Melania Trump would be amazing, if she would do it. The next best things are the kids. You have to fill the program with surrogates the donors want to see.”

The difference between the 2020 Trump campaign and the 2016 election is that the Trump campaign now has a more organized infrastructure, with a far greater fundraising prowess including an effort this time to land more deep-pocketed donors.

“They are doing a better job of building a bond with major donors than they did four years ago,” said a Republican operative with close ties to the Trump administration. “The major donor class did not know Trump then because he ran a campaign mocking and attacking them.”

“There is a lot of ground to be made up,” the operative said, “and the kids are very important to this.”

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Mark Hamill had something to say to Ivanka

 

 

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13 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

This should be added to the long list of impeachable offenses. She is not, I repeat, NOT a member of the administration. She is not a paid official, and she does not have the security clearances needed to even be in the room. 

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