Born Trump: Inside America’s First Family. Emily Fox Jane

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.”

      Some of the guys he’d met as just Don more than a decade before at shooting ranges upstate were law enforcement officers. Don, at the time, was just starting off in the business world at his father’s company, and these guys were just starting off in the police force, or at the lowest levels of the Secret Service. As Don’s role and responsibilities within the Trump Organization grew, so too did his shooting buddies. Some of the guys he’d gone shooting with and hung around with upstate were now assigned to follow him around and look after his family. All of a sudden he went from no-last-name city boy Don to protectee. He was entitled to their service and responsible for pseudo-managing them. For a guy who’d spent years being uncomfortable with them treating him differently because of his last name, this crossed into prickly territory almost overnight.

      That Don and his wife Vanessa had five kids living in New York City didn’t help matters. That meant that Vanessa had to manage essentially six different details—one for her and her husband and one for each of her children. Her phone lit up with texts and calls from agents, telling her one kid was a few minutes late to meet them on their designated street corner; asking if they would be on the north or south side of the street, what time she planned to leave the house for their drive upstate for the weekend, or who was staying late at school that afternoon. “It is literally overwhelming,” a former Secret Service agent explained. “Trying to manage all that with seasoned staff would be mind-numbing. To have someone who’s never done it before try and juggle all of that? Well, it would just be horrific.”

      The head of the detail didn’t make it easier. Unlike Hollywood, he didn’t instantly mesh with the family. There were some preliminary conversations about a potential move to DC, so they put him in place as a temporary stopgap who might be replaced if the eventual relocation did happen. But it didn’t, and they ended up with what came to be a revolving door of agents and shifting dynamics. It was hard for them to get into a rhythm or find a comfortable relationship. “The whole thing has just been sloppy,” the former agent said. “The agents have been sloppy. The communication has been sloppy. Don’s back-and-forth attitude about them has been sloppy.” Hiring someone to help Vanessa coordinate might have made it easier, but the family didn’t spend the money.

      It was simpler for Eric and his wife Lara. At the time, it was just the two of them. Lara got pregnant in the midst of the campaign, so for months there was no extra detail to coordinate, and they had forty weeks to plan for an eventual detail.

      Tiffany’s detail was perhaps the laxest of all. One morning at the end of May, she walked in the front door of the Golden Pear in East Hampton, a tiny, teeming see-and-be-seen spot smack in the middle of Newtown Lane, the town’s little main street. The Golden Pear is some two hundred feet from the Monogram Shop, a little personalization store that, each year since the 2004 presidential election, has sold plastic cups labeled with campaign logos for each major party candidate, sold for $3 apiece to Hamptonites to display on their marble islands or pass around at their catered beach barbecues. The shop owner starts keeping track after the Super Tuesday primary contests in March, and at the close of business each day, she handwrites the total number of cups sold for each candidate on a piece of paper that she hangs in her store window.

      Since this custom started, the cups had accurately predicted the winner—first with George W. Bush, then with Obama, twice. But this cycle, the cups, like every pollster and expert and analyst, got it wrong. Up until the weekend before Election Day, the Monogram Shop sold 4,946 for Hillary Clinton, and just 3,388 for Donald Trump.

      Tiffany didn’t stop in to buy one of her father’s cups that morning, as Chelsea Clinton once did the year her mother ran against Barack Obama in the primaries. She chose to spend her $3—likely four times that, given their prices—on four iced coffees with her boyfriend. She dropped one iced coffee, and no one flinched or helped her pick it up—not even her detail, who was standing at a nearby table noticeably playing a game on his phone.

      Most people didn’t notice her, besides the brief spill disturbance. She was in a baseball cap, and her security presence was so minimal that other customers readily came in and out both the front and back doors without so much as a glance. At one point someone did approach her, at which point she perked up, expecting some sort of comment—though who knows which way that would have gone. Her detail didn’t step in to block the approach, which would have been unnecessary, anyway, since the patron was simply asking if he could steal the extra chair at her table.

      One customer that morning had also been in the Golden Pear one day in the 1990s when Chelsea Clinton and her several Secret Service agents walked in. “The world basically stopped,” he recalled. “For Tiffany, no one really noticed, and the people who did were intentionally looking the opposite direction.”

       CHAPTER 3

       Election Day

      POLICE SHUT down Fifty-Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues midmorning on Election Day for the Trump motorcade. The cars slid up in front of Public School 59, a school turned polling station for the day, just blocks from Trump Tower. Red and blue lights flashed against silver barricades set up to hold back the dozens of people who’d gathered outside to get a glimpse of the candidate and both cheer and boo him before he cast his ballot. He and Melania stepped out of a black SUV, Ivanka, Jared, and their daughter Arabella following seconds behind. They all went down to the school’s gymnasium, filled at that point with agents in boxy suits and earpieces, cameramen clicking away, and reporters shouting questions at the Trumps. The family, in all neutrals, popped against the gym’s baby-blue-and-banana-yellow walls. Apart from Donald, who’d walked in wearing only a suit jacket, all of them kept their coats on inside. Melania’s Balmain coat, with its wide lapel and gold buttons, hung on her shoulders, leaving her arms free. Ivanka kept her cream trench coat belted tightly over her black turtleneck and pants. Jared’s green utility coat remained over the gray V-neck he’d layered over blue button-down, black jeans, and white Common Project sneakers.

      Ivanka approached the registration table first. “Here you go,” the lady behind the table told her. “What you’re going to do is fill out the ballot in one of the privacy booths behind you. When you’re done with that, you bring it to the scanner under the basketball net.” The woman asked Arabella if she wanted a sticker, and Ivanka smiled and brushed her daughter’s hair back as she thanked the woman. She picked up the ballot and showed it to her father. They locked eyes. This was really happening. Melania was next to approach the table, followed by Donald himself. Jared went up last. “Last name Kushner,” he told СКАЧАТЬ