Born Trump

July 16, 2018
In this brisk, highly entertaining volume, Fox, a senior reporter for Vanity Fair and an MSNBC contributor, sets out to deliver a “dish-y” yet “well-reported” portrait of the Trump family drawn from decades of tabloid headlines and hundreds of interviews with friends, classmates, colleagues, and business associates. The book begins with a recap of the chaotic Trump presidential campaign and transition efforts. The most engaging chapters explore the privileged, emotionally complicated lives of the Trump children, who were deeply affected by their attention-craving, “narcissist” father and his very public dalliances and divorces. Ivanka, who grew up in the brightest media glare, “made a point of setting herself apart” from peers such as Paris Hilton, Fox writes, and seems to have inherited a “preternatural ability to self-promote.” Her husband, Jared Kushner, is calm and driven, though “not exactly an intellectual,” and idolizes Rupert Murdoch. Don Jr. has a colorful history of drinking and fighting. Brief chapters devoted to Eric and Tiffany (Trump’s daughter with ex-wife Marla Maples), who are less in the public eye, feel tacked on, and—except for mentions of “Camelot” and Kushner’s prized pictures of JFK—there is little insight into the Trump family’s political moorings. Then again, as Fox observes, “this is a first family with no equivalent.” This group biography is well-written, occasionally mean-spirited, and rich in gossipy detail.

"Don't. Trust. Anyone. Ever."--X-ray meets psychoanalysis and balance sheet in this sharp-edged look at the workings of America's most dysfunctional gang.When your father is angry, absent, and egomaniacal, it stands to reason that you might turn out a little different from other people--and especially if you throw a lot of money into the equation. So it is, writes Vanity Fair senior reporter and former White House intern Fox, that the Trump family, formed of wives and ex-wives and mistresses and their various offspring, has emerged, with the patriarch's peculiar brand of tutelary wisdom: Don't ever trust anyone, even if that anyone is a member of your own family. In one small but telling passage, Trump asks a confidant what to do with two sons of such divergent abilities as Don Jr. and Eric; when told that he should give the smarter all the challenges he could come up with and the less smart all the challenges he could handle, the answer came back that it was a nice idea, less nice in practice, "because they figure out that's what you're doing." By Fox's account, the most real-worldly of the sons is Don Jr., who carved his own course for at least a time, even if he morphed into "a yapping attack puppy, trailing wherever he went the senior attack dog with the much bigger bark." Canine metaphors aside, Melania comes in for the tiniest amount of sympathy, and perhaps Ivanka too, though a juicy bit of dish comes with the author's account of the zeitgeist-innocent first daughter's ill-conceived and certainly ill-delivered homily to working women, a failure that, one publishing executive says, "was a bloodbath."High-level gossip of a kind, but a well-sourced, train wreck-fascinating look at the makings of Clan Trump, "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."

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