Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Tomorrow is Father's Day so I thought I'd make a card for DWT readers to send around to any Repugs they know, post on social media, whatever. You can blow it up and use it for a lawn sign. It would even make for a nice billboard on the highway, especially down south. It's just a little depiction of Love Republican Style.

Trump Says He "Loves" Alaska But Everyone Knows He Only Loves Trump

In the 2000 election, 167,398 Alaskans (58.62%) voted for George W Bush against Al Gore. Four years later 190,889 Alaskans (61.07%) voted for Bush against John Kerry. Bush was popular among Alaskan voters-- who also backed John McCain (59.42%) and Mitt Romney (54.80%). But Trump isn't well liked by most Alaskans. He barely eked out a majority against Hillary-- 51.28%, pretty sad compared to Bush. And today it was widely reported that Bush had decided he will neither endorse nor even vote for Trump in November. Colin Powell, Bush's Secretary of State, told Jake Tapper on State of the Union that he "certainly can not in any way support" Trump this year and that Trump has "drifted away" from the Constitution, has been an ineffective president, and "lies all the time." Trump's response was to tweet that Powell is "a real stiff." He hasn't savaged Bush yet. None of this is going to make Alaskan independents more likely to back Trump. Independent voters decide who wins elections in Alaska.

Right now, Alaska has two Republican U.S. senators-- Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, the former an independent-minded conservative and the latter a knee-jerk boot-licker for Trump. Sullivan, who is rumored to be considering dropping out of his reelection bid and allowing Gov. Dunleavey to take the GOP nomination so that he (Sullivan) can run for Governor in 2022, is in a toss up race against independent Dr. Al Gross, who has been endorsed by the Democratic Party. Murkowski isn't up for reelection until 2022. But she already has an opponent: Señor Trumpanzee.

As we saw yesterday, she praised Jim Mattis' criticism of Trump and told a journalist she is "struggling" with the idea of backing his reelection. The most thin-skinned sociopath in American politics immediately flipped his wig and let loose with these two nasty, adolescent tweets:

After embarrassing himself by attacking and threatening a senior Republican senator-- despite having promised McConnell he wouldn't do that in return for McConnell's unwavering obeisance-- Trump lavished praise on all the GOP senators most likely to lose in November because of his reverse coattails: David Perdue (R-GA), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Martha McSally (R-AZ), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Steve Daines (R-MT) and, of course, Dan Sullivan. Sullivan is such a nonentity in DC that Trump couldn't even think of a single thing to say about him... so just retweeted 5 random Sullivan tweets from May 22, 23 and June 2.

The Anchorage Daily News reminded its readers that "During the 2016 presidential campaign, both Murkowski and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) called on Trump to drop out of the race after the release of a video in which the GOP nominee boasted in vulgar language about forcing himself sexually on women. Both said they weren’t voting for him at the time."

This morning, Gross told me that "Alaskans appreciate when their elected officials take a stand and have a backbone. We can all respectfully disagree with one another, but at the end of the day, Alaskans want to be represented by independents-- people who aren't beholden to an orthodoxy, a party, or an ideology-- because here in Alaska if  you can't think for  yourself, you just won't survive. Dan Sullivan doesn't understand this because he doesn't understand Alaska. He's not from here, and has been solely focused on climbing the National Republican political ladder. I have zero interest in climbing any political ladder. My focus is on making Alaskans' lives better. That's my focus and always will be. I'm Always Alaska."

Princess Ivanka Trump’s Tone-Deaf “Helpful Household Hints” Blow Up In Her Plastic Face

-by Noah

While her brothers show what assholes they are by posing with their defenseless murder victims, Ivanka prefers to reveal herself by speaking or obnoxiously tweeting, just like Daddy-Poo.

Earlier this week, The Princess Bozo tweeted out some of her clueless ideas for “fun activities” that a mother can do with her children while marooned at home and social distancing themselves from the outside world, you know, not unlike Ivanka herself distances herself from the outside world in the White House or whatever tacky palatial Trump homes she and her douchebag husband choose to live in.

Ivanka’s tweet consisted of her suggestions along with a photo (seen below) of her and two of her children “camping out” in their “living room.” The photo isn’t new by any means. You can tell by the age of her kids that it’s three or four years old. Also, we now here that the photo was taken in an apartment in Russia. Whether the apartment is owned by the Trumps (likely) or the Putins is up for conjecture.

In any event, The Princess Bozo suggested that mothers should “plan a living room camp out! Throw a bedsheet over some taped together brooms. Plan a menu & ‘pack’ sandwiches, salads (S’mores optional).” It was an open invitation for instant twitter blowback and the blowback exploded bigly.

Celebrity-Model Chrissy Teigen may have been the first to fire a shot across Ivanka’s ass but she was not alone. Teigen asked The Princess Bozo- “After we quote pack unquote sandwiches, can we please have Covid tests?” Teigen also commented that the “brooms” in the photo weren’t brooms but pieces of a clothing rack “but yeah, America only understands ‘taped together brooms.”

Other responses to Ivanka’s inanity quickly came from the twitersphere as follows:

1. Obama_I-Miss wrote: And a f-cking pay cheque- does Ivanks even know or care, how stressful it is for so many that can’t work right now?

2. @RandallUhrig showed a picture of the detention cages in Texas where children have been stashed after being ripped from their parents’ arms and wrote: Too bad other parents don’t have the luxury Ivanka has of staying home with the kids. Or making tents except out of tin foil. Her kids are 8, 6, & 3 yrs old so unless she rented a baby, the last time she stayed home with them was two years ago.
#closethecamps

3. In the same vein, @LizWhite33 wrote: What do you suggest for the kids in cages who don’t have sheets?? Will the guards provide s’mores?? #fucktrumps

4. Christian wrote: fun fact, that staged photo is roughly 3 years old.

5. @OrffThe wrote: People are starvinb, people are ill, and you respond like that in a crisis. You actually have no soul.

6. @streetnoodle wrote: You’ve never been in an average American home, have you, dear?

7. @Catman51913767 wrote: Can you also send aide to retail workers and cashiers who can’t afford to go in isolation or quarantine? Some of us are also paid $7.50, have to use family or food stamps. Please keep in mind we risk our health so Americans can hoard and sneeze on us.

8. @lifesafeast wrote: Congratulations on being rich & being married to a guy actually profiting off this catastrophe. There are actually people suffering. Without enough food. Without nannies or cooks or cleaning people to help with the kids. Who are forced to work or risk losing their job/business.

9. @gabrielsherman wrote: Never waste mass death and misery for a personal branding opportunity!

10. @LisainNJUSA wrote: Ivanka, STOP. This isn’t a snowstorm & day off w/the kids. Enough pix of you. It’s a pandemic that 36% of Americans aren’t taking seriously b/c of your father & FOX calling it a hoax, a flu, and a bad cold. Thx to your dad we have such limited testing & many people will die.

11. @NoShenanigans2 wrote: What? There’s a Camping Barbie now? Damn, I just bought Pandemic Barbie because I was told that was the shinny new toy.

Inae Oh, News and Engagement Editor at Mother Jones, called the advice from The Princess Bozo “A Giant Middle Finger to Parents Struggling During Coronavirus.” I, however was wondering how long before The Princess Bozo or some other member of America’s most insipid family suggests the following tips to deal with this crisis. Here are just a few:

1. Sure the market has gone way down but as our Larry Kudlow says, “Buy the dip!” Yep, take advantage of today’s low stock prices and plan for the future! (It never occurs to the Richie Rich cretins that not everyone has that kind of ready cash.)

2. Out of toilet paper? Use the filters from your Keurig or Espresso machine!

3. Need a little extra cash? Sell your mink or other fur! You can buy a new one in the fall!

4. Have an affair with my dad! Make a quick $130,000!

5. Have your kids make Trump 2020 signs and sell them on line! We will sell you a license to make them and send you all of the patters, approved designs, and legal paperwork you’ll need!

6. Hungry? Eat cake! Eat roadkill! Eat poor people!

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Some people are saying that Princess Ivanka may be the only person in the Trump clan (or klan) who possesses a three digit IQ. I am not so generous. In any event, Big Freaky Orange Daddy-Poo did not appoint her to be Coronavirus Czar but chose catatonic Mike Pence instead, the same Mike Pence who, as governor of the backward state of Indiana, decreed that sterile syringes were verboten at the time when the opioid crisis was on the rise in the state. The result was an increase in statewide HIV and hepatitis C cases. It was quite a triple win for those of the Republican anti-health persuasion: More HIV, more hepatitis C and more need for Big Pharma's various medications; all available at a growing price, of course. Yay profits!

By the way, those latex gloves Ivanka is wearing are enough to send Pence sobbing in fear to "Mother."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Having worked in the corporate world in my career, I've seen more than my fair share of bubble-headed idiots who got their job only because a successful daddy pulled some favors or asserted some power and got the job for them. Once in whatever the business is, they just trade on daddy's name and launch some sort of income stream. Failing that, these types usually glom on to someone else's earlier success and claim it as their own, often doing interview after interview to claim credit. The bigger the lie, the more it sticks in the minds of those who don't know better. The worst of these headcases go so far as to even hire a press flak who is willing to push any mound of bullshit if the money's good enough. In almost every case, the bubblehead wears out his or her welcome pretty quickly due to a combination of having cloaked their insecurities in extreme arrogance and not being up to the job. The ones that I have personally witnessed have always achieved one thing though (aside form having almost as many failed marriages as work failures); they have continuously inspired their co-workers to new heights when it comes to making jokes about them behind their backs.

In the case of the subject of tonight's meme, Ivanka Trump is as public on a wide scale as it gets. With that comes more more jokes; some behind her back but more right out in the open. On the flipside, there also comes more time and more arrogance. It's the same with her Beavis & Butthead brothers. I, for one, look forward to a time when daddy isn't around anymore, having left the scene via whatever manner the fates have chosen. History shows that life might not be so easy for the princess and the princes when the reason for people to be nice to her isn't around anymore. Don't worry Ivanka, you and Jared (if he's still around) can always move to Saudi Arabia. Hope you like the climate.

What Are The Trump Offspring Worth?

I don't want to put words in your mouth but it's probably a fair guess that you think of the Trump spawn as worthless. Not in Forbes world they're not. Chase Peterson-Withorn reports that the 3 oldest offspring are all multimillionaires, $25 million for each of the 2 moron sons and over a quarter billion for Ivanka (counting Jared). I wonder if Timothy Egan's toilet bowl-cleaning sister at the rural Walmart relates to them better than she can to Bernie and Elizabeth.

Unlike their boastful father, they aren’t eager to say. Their earnings aren’t publicly available, and their holdings are tied up in private investments and shielded through opaque shell corporations. Even Ivanka Trump’s federally mandated financial disclosure form, with its broad loopholes and wide ranges, is of limited help.

So Forbes dug into property records, court documents and government filings to unearth as much of the first family’s financial dealings as possible. The findings: Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump appear to be worth about $25 million each. Ivanka Trump has likely amassed similar riches from her work at the Trump Organization but is worth far more-- around $375 million-- when you factor in her fashion line earnings and marriage to real estate heir Jared Kushner. The president’s 26-year-old daughter, Tiffany, and 13-year-old son, Barron, meanwhile, don’t seem to have gotten much from their father so far. Neither has the first lady, besides a small Trump Tower apartment, 33 floors below the couple’s gilded penthouse, worth $1.5 million.

Unlike most wealthy heirs, the Trump children haven’t gotten their riches from trust funds or received chunks of the family business through careful transfers over time. In fact, they own virtually none of the Trump Organization’s vast holdings. The only major venture in which the president has included his family appears to be the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., where his three eldest kids-- Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric-- each owns a 7.5% stake, worth about $6 million apiece.

Instead, most of their money appears to have come from hefty salaries they’ve earned as longtime executives at the Trump Organization. Their father pays well. Over the past two decades, the three siblings have taken in an estimated $35 million each in pretax salary, commissions and bonuses, according to a Forbes analysis of Donald and Ivanka Trump’s financial disclosures.

They have used those earnings to build their own portfolios, buying up splashy real estate and launching their own business ventures-- with varying degrees of success.

The most entrepreneurial sibling, Ivanka Trump spent years burnishing her father’s brand while building one of her own. As an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, she scouted deals around the globe and headed up interior design for Trump hotels, amassing about $25 million of wealth from her day job.

Ivanka Does Baku

She likely earned just as much from her lucrative side hustles. First was an Ivanka Trump-branded jewelry line, launched in 2007. Then came handbags, shoes and other accessories. By 2013, the business was doing about $75 million in sales, according a New York Times review of internal documents. A major line of women’s work wear soon followed, and quickly hit $100 million in revenues. Ivanka, whose company licensed her name to outside manufacturers, likely got around a 7% cut of her brands’ wholesale revenues, which are typically about half of retail sales, according to industry experts. That means her fashion-line income could have topped $10 million per year, before taxes and expenses, at the height of her brand’s popularity.

The good times didn’t last. Hit by her father’s divisive politics, sales reportedly plummeted, and in July 2018 she announced she was shutting down the entire operation, rendering it virtually worthless. “After 17 months in Washington, I do not know when or if I will ever return to the business,” she said at the time.

No worries, since her biggest source of wealth is her husband, real estate heir Jared Kushner. The couple’s financial disclosure forms, which list their assets jointly, peg their net worth between $52 million and $759 million-- nearly all of it in Kushner-related holdings. A document the president’s son-in-law privately submitted to a potential lender, later obtained by the New York Times, narrows that range considerably. It shows Kushner’s net worth was about $324 million at the start of 2017, which would put the couple’s combined worth in the range of $375 million.

Much of their fortune remains tied up in Kushner Cos.’ commercial buildings and rental apartments, plus cash accounts and a portfolio of index and mutual funds. Despite hailing from two real estate dynasties, the couple has little personal real estate of their own. Ivanka still has her two-bedroom “starter” apartment on the sixth floor of the Trump Park Avenue building her father developed, worth about $3 million. But for years she and Kushner actually lived on the building’s 28th floor, in a penthouse owned by Donald Trump. Their vacation home, a cottage at the Trump National Bedminster golf club, is also owned by the president. The couple rents their current residence, a six-bedroom Washington, D.C., mansion, from a Chilean mining heir.

The first sibling to enter the family business, Don Jr. has spent a career working for his father and funneling his salary into businesses of his own, with a mixed track record to show for it. Also an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, Don Jr.-- who helped manage the company’s property portfolio before he and Eric were put in charge of all operations while their father is in office-- likely pulled in similar pay as his sister.

It has afforded him a cushy lifestyle. Don Jr. owns a 5,900-square-foot apartment in a midtown Manhattan luxury tower and an upstate New York cabin, where the noted outdoorsman fly-fishes in the Delaware River. He also appears to own a share of a 171-acre upstate New York hunting reserve alongside Eric. In April, Don Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle made headlines when they snapped up a $4.5 million, seven-bedroom Hamptons mansion.

Like Ivanka, Don Jr. has tried to branch out from his father’s real estate business. A document filed with the city of New York ties Don Jr. to a half-dozen outside investments, with cryptic names like MSMDF Agriculture LLC (which holds a stake in a hydroponic lettuce company) and Future Venture LLC (which the Trump Organization has said was set up “to pursue technology investments”). Those companies have been tied to Dallas-based money manager Gentry Beach, a longtime friend of Don Jr. and a Trump fundraiser. The president’s son once reportedly lost $200,000 investing in a dry Texas oil well with Beach.

But Don Jr.’s best-known ventures were in Charleston, South Carolina. He was among a group of investors who purchased an old Navy hospital in the city for $5 million, with a plan to renovate it and lease part of it back to the county. After the renovations dragged on and the government pulled out, the developers filed for bankruptcy and sued the county. The parties settled in 2017, and the county repurchased the property for $33 million. It’s unclear whether Don Jr., who told Charleston’s Post and Courier he was a passive 10% investor “with no voting rights or control,” profited from the deal.

Then there was the nondescript, rusting warehouse in a North Charleston industrial park. Don Jr. and a group of investors bought the place as part of a prefab concrete business they hoped would revolutionize low-cost home building. The venture never took off, leaving Don Jr. and two others on the hook for a $3.65 million Deutsche Bank loan they had personally guaranteed. Days before the loan became due, his father stepped in. Donald Trump purchased the debt, then foreclosed on the property, bailing his son out in the process. The president quietly sold the building, which had a history of roof leaks and environmental contamination, in February 2018 for $4.1 million.

The youngest of the three siblings from the president’s first marriage, Eric Trump’s finances appear to be the most closely tied to Donald Trump. He lives in a penthouse on the edge of Central Park that spans four units-- two purchased at a suspiciously steep discount-- in his father’s Trump Parc East building. He keeps a luxury duplex on the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in New York’s Westchester County. And his pay as an executive vice president at the Trump Organization-- where he oversaw much of the firm’s golf club and resorts business before he was tapped to co-run with company with Don Jr.-- seems to be his only major source of wealth.

The New York City filing appears to tie Eric to only two ongoing businesses: his stake in the Trumps’ D.C. hotel and the Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia. There, Eric Trump apparently has a complex arrangement with his father. Eric serves as the winery’s president. Its website is maintained by “Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC.” And Eric Trump-related companies appear to handle daily operations. Yet Albemarle County land records and the president’s financial disclosure form make it clear his father actually owns the property.

The Trumps have employed convoluted, interfamily arrangements for decades. According to a New York Times investigation, Fred Trump used a handful of methods-- essentially turning his heirs into his property managers, landlords, bankers and consultants-- to move wealth to his children while skirting taxes. Donald Trump may be following suit. In addition to the winery deal, Ivanka’s disclosure lists a handful of stakes in ventures that shift money from Donald Trump’s empire to members of his family. Through T International Realty LLC, Ivanka is entitled to commissions from the sale of condos her father owns. Through entities like TTT Consulting LLC and DT Bali Technical Services Manager LLC, Ivanka is entitled to consulting and management fees from properties her father’s companies manage—making her a consultant on the Trump Organization’s own deals. The ventures’ ownership structures hint that her brothers have similar stakes. These businesses don’t seem to have thrown off major cash yet, according to financial disclosure forms, but they could provide avenues for the president to transfer significant wealth to his children. (Ivanka converted her income stream from these ventures into fixed annuities for the duration of her tenure in government, in an effort to sidestep conflict-of-interest concerns.)

Besides these deals, Forbes found no signs that Donald Trump, who spent three decades looking under every couch cushion for assets to show Forbes for our twice-annual billionaires lists, has handed his children a large sum of cash. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, appear to have made only minor bequests to their grandchildren, according to documents filed by their estates.

 Yet the lack of detailed financial records, including Trump family tax returns, make it difficult to fully trace how much wealth has trickled down to the president’s children. If they have taken on significant debt or have invested exceptionally poorly, they could be less well off than we estimate. If they have extensive and well-hidden business ventures, they could be richer than we figure.

Regardless, they’re in no hurry to speak up. When Forbes launched its inaugural list of the 400 richest Americans in 1982, Donald Trump personally lobbied harder than anyone for a higher spot on the ranking. “Share fortune estimated at over $200 million,” we wrote in the issue, listing Fred and Donald Trump together. “Donald claims $500 million.” In 1985 he invented a fake persona to lie about a transfer of wealth from his father, successfully securing a sole spot on the list. Three decades later, his children are roughly the age he was back then. But rather than announce a financial coming-out of their own, they are taking a decidedly less Trumpian approach: They’re not commenting.

Raise your hand if you want their taxes to go up (Elizabeth Warren). Raise both hands if you want their taxes to go up a lot (Bernie). Now bark like a dog if you want to read one day soon that Barron shot them all with Eric's favorite elephant gun (Howie).

Barron by Jim Boden

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

It is often said that if you want to know where a child got their stupidity from just have a look at the parents. It's the old "apple doesn't fall far from the tree" adage. That adage is certainly true when it comes to the apple of the president's eye, Ivanka Trump. Sorry Eric, Donnie Jr. and Junior Psycho Baron, but your dad really does love your sister more. Maybe it's 'cause she's considered "the smart one" compared to whatever single digit IQs each of you have or maybe it's for other oft-speculated reasons but, even if she is the smart one, please don't ever let her drive a car or operate any power tools. Hell, I'd hate to even watch her try to navigate an automatic doorway.

Apparently, Ivanka is not even up to the low bar that her daddy has set when it comes to the twitter machine. That much was evidenced a few days ago when she launched the tweet that serves as tonight's meme into the twittersphere. On the surface, Ivanka's little tweet might seem effective if the sender and the receiver are both simpletons, but, if Ivanka had even a tiny amount of intellect, she would have researched the context of the Thomas Jefferson quote she used. She doesn't and she didn't so it backfired on her bigly. Sad.

Ivanka thought she'd both score points with daddy and give his followers an easy defense talking point, but, as they say, context is everything. The context is this: It turns out that when Thomas Jefferson was complaining to his daughter Martha about his political enemies, it was all about his multiple assignations with his slaves and the children he had fathered with them. So you see, Ivanka, here's another adage: People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. That's not to say that your cretinous dad has any kids we don't know about, yet, but, well, we know he'd love to have some slaves. Oh wait, he does. Lindsey Graham is one. Then there's the newbie Matt "Flor-i-duh Man" Gaetz, and, of course, the whole republican side of the aisle in both the House and the $enate.

Ivanka's mindless tweet evoked some great responses. Here are a few of them. The first comes from the husband of Kellyanne Conway:

• George Conway (gtconway3rd) - Inventing facts? Have you met your father?
• Ryan Knight (@Proud Resister) - "When the speech condemns a free press, you are hearing the words of a tyrant." - Thomas Jefferson Your father is a tyrant.
• Rachel Joy Larris (@RachelLarris) - It's interesting Ivanka picked this example because the thing Jefferson's enemies were accusing him of, fathering a child with a slave was absolutely something he did. 6 times as a matter of fact. Jefferson being called out for something he actually did.
• John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) - You're delusional. Our founding fathers would have put your daddy in the stockades three years ago.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Oh my fucking god! Ivanka actually, for real, said that she got her moral compass from daddy. Oh what a surprise! She said it without any consciousness of irony, but why would she? Knowing the irony in something requires an intellect. Brain cells would help, too. What the fuck is Ivanka trying to tell us, that she stashes random kids in cages, looks for ways to bilk us taxpayers out of even more of our money, hands over secrets to our enemies for cash, snorts adderall, sleeps with porn stars, and pays Playboy bunnies for sex?

Ivanka Trump made this now infamous statement as she met with a group of corpulent multi-jowled corporatistas a few days ago. It was a real crowd pleaser for the assembled oligarchs, CEOs, and Wall Street vermin. It was just what they wanted to hear as they proceeded to throw their money up on the stage.

Moral Compasses and Trumps. What a concept! True North must be stuck on evil. Forget impeachment. Impeachment was never going to be enough anyway. All Trumps should be prohibited from reproducing from now until eternity. And they should never be allowed to change their surnames like people with the same surnames of history's most evil have often done. They didn't want to be thought of as even a very distant relative. We will always need to know if someone is a Trump, for the good of the Earth.

Now, I have to say one more thing and I don't give a damn what anyone thinks about me saying it: Look at that face. I've seen more natural faces on those high tech Japanese robot girls you see on TV science and tech shows. This one has been programmed for evil since "birth."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

The Sarah Palin of the Trump administration. Am I being unfair? Maybe. Do I care? No. Not one iota. There's no fair in dealing with evil. Some idiots (red hat types) say she's presidential material. Republicans said that about Palin, too. Genius. Always consider the source. I look at anyone named Trump and I hear the Deliverance theme playing in my head. I would like to see her try to dress a grizzly though, but, I'll have to be content knowing that she can see Russia from her house.

Ivanka is the orangutan's daughter. If she was worth even a nickel, she would have run away from home at 12 years old and never looked back. The fact that she didn't shows that the apple of her father's soulless eyes just fell to the ground and stayed there rotting. Whatever. Don't blame her, you say? Fine. It's all in her DNA. It's a Trump chromosome thing. Blame her DNA.

The Trump Dynasty Will Be Just Like The 1,000 Year Reich

I'm totally enjoying season 2 of HBO hit, Succession, the Jesse Armstrong series created around the Roy family, sho some fans say is loosely based on the Murdoch family and others argue is loosely based on the Trump family-- but really combines both. The video up top was the first season's trailer and the one below is the second season trailer:





Yesterday's McKay Coppins feature for the Atlantic, The Heir, will give a big boost to the Successor fans who swear the Roys and based on the Trumps. So far I don't recall having heard about the Roys' origin story, but, of course, the Trump's is notorious: "The empire," wrote Coppins, "begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia... Curtained-off 'private boxes' line the wall opposite the bar, inside of which are beds, and women, and scales to weigh gold powder, the preferred method of payment for services rendered. Word of the restaurant’s off-menu accommodations spreads fast. 'Respectable women' are advised by the Yukon Sun to avoid the place, as they are 'liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings.' But among lonely prospectors, the Arctic Restaurant is a hit. Before long, Friedrich is boasting, with a hereditary penchant for hyperbole, that his establishment serves more than 3,000 meals a day."

Trump's grandfather was a hustler, a crook, a draft dodger and a liar, exactly like Trump. The real estate business attracted him and he did well there. His middle son, Fred-- father of Señor Trumpanzee-- takes over after he dies. "He backslaps his way through Brooklyn’s political machine, cozies up to mobsters. One house in Woodhaven leads to two in Queens Village, then several more in Hollis. When the federal government starts offering loans to Depression-plagued developers, Fred is first in line-- and soon he has an army of shovel-wielding workers digging 450 foundations out of the East Flatbush swampland. As rows of mass-produced “Trump Homes” spread across Brooklyn and Queens, the papers call Fred the Henry Ford of home building. Later, when the scandals start to come out-- the charges of profiteering, and fraud, and banning black tenants-- the papers find other things to call him. Infamy attends each new triumph. By the 1950s, he has built thousands of houses and apartments, and become the kind of landlord Woody Guthrie writes songs about." Here's a recording of the song by Ryan Harvey, Tom Morello and Ani DiFranco:

When the time comes to plan his own succession, Fred turns first to his eldest son and namesake. But Fred Jr. has no feel for the business-- he’s soft and free-spirited, and wants to fly airplanes. Donald is the one with a taste for combat, and to him the great unconquered frontier lies across the East River. Donald sees more than money in Manhattan. He sees fame, status, entrée into elite society-- things the Trumps have never had.

The market on the island is crowded and hostile, but Fred and Donald work closely to plot their invasion. Together, they cook books, fleece investors, and fool one regulator after another. Some of the scion’s schemes pay off. Others prove disastrous. But his signal achievement is forging the Donald Trump persona itself-- that high-flying playboy, that self-made man, that larger-than-life titan the tabloids can’t resist. It’s a creation of both father and son, and it will do more for the family business than any casino or skyscraper.

Today a photo of Fred sits in the Oval Office, looking out on an empire much vaster and more powerful than even he could have imagined. And while the president writes his chapter in history, the next generation waits in the wings, jockeying for position, feuding over status, knowing only one of them can be the heir.

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.

Gathered around the dining-room table with a coterie of aides and allies, Trump’s three oldest children took turns dictating while the speechwriter typed. The final product—- a laundry list of thank yous interspersed with patriotic platitudes—was notable only for its un-Trumpian restraint. With his family lined up behind him onstage, Trump intoned, “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans.”

The speech was bland and forgettable, but hall-of-fame oratory wasn’t the goal. The remarks were a placeholder, a chance for the family to work out their next moves. “They’re undeniably adaptable,” Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to the president, told me of Trump’s children. “When the family business was real estate, they learned contracts and building approvals and architecture. Then it was television, and they learned that industry. Now, a decade later, they’ve turned around and learned politics.”

But this latest reinvention has set off a power struggle within the first family, one that has played out largely away from public view. The president and his children-- who declined to be interviewed for this story-- have labored to project an image of unity. But over the past several months, I spoke with dozens of people close to the Trumps, including friends, former employees, White House officials, and campaign aides. The succession battle they described is marked by old grievances, petty rivalries-- and deceptively high stakes.

In his brief time on the political stage, Donald Trump has commandeered the national conservative movement, remade the Republican Party in his image, and used his office to confer untold value on the Trump brand. Between their business holdings and their political influence, the Trumps could remain a fixture of American life for generations. The question now dividing the president’s children is not just which one of them will get to take up the mantle when he’s gone-- but how the family will attempt to shape the country in the years ahead.

For a nation founded in revolt against monarchy, the United States excels at preserving its own royalty. Once a name and fortune are made, the machinery of American power churns into gear. Wealth is passed down through trusts. Important jobs flow to unaccomplished heirs. Famous families get mythologized in the media, celebrated in the culture. The result is a ruling class dominated by dynasties-- from the Rockefellers to the Roosevelts, the Mellons to the Murdochs.

Members of these clans tend to justify their privilege by claiming to uphold a tradition of patriotism and public service passed down by their forebears-- a refrain that has echoed especially throughout America’s most durable political dynasty.

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.

The Trump children grew up surrounded by the trappings of dynasty. Their home was an eponymous skyscraper-- all glass and gold and capital letters-- that doubled as a symbol of their family’s power. Famous surnames can have an enveloping effect on those who carry them, flattening every outside aspiration until the family is all that matters. To young Don, Ivanka, and Eric, the whole world felt as if it could fit within Trump Tower.

From afar, their lives looked like a Richie Rich–style fantasy. They had an entire floor of the triplex penthouse to themselves, with rooms full of toys and big-screen TVs, and nannies and bodyguards attending to their whims. Michael Jackson, their neighbor, stopped by to play video games. Limousines shepherded them around the city.

But within the family their father cultivated a Darwinian dynamic. On ski trips, when they raced down the mountain, Trump would jab at his children with a pole to get ahead of them. His favorite fatherly maxim was “Don’t trust anyone”-- and he liked to test his children by asking whether they trusted him. If they said yes, they were reprimanded. Sibling rivalry flourished. “We were sort of bred to be competitive,” Ivanka said in 2004. “Dad encourages it.” (Tiffany and Barron, born later to different mothers, seem to have been spared from this contest.)

For Trump’s three oldest kids, the defining drama of their childhoods came in 1990, when he left their mother for Marla Maples, moving out of the penthouse amid a tabloid feeding frenzy. Eric, then 6, was too young to fully grasp what was happening, but his siblings understood, and they reacted in different ways. Don, who was 12, lashed out at his father-- “How can you say you love us?” he reportedly spat during an argument-- and refused to talk to him for a year. Eight-year-old Ivanka was afraid of what she might lose in the divorce. “Does it mean I’m not going to be Ivanka Trump anymore?” she asked, tearfully.

In the years that followed, Don seemed to define himself in opposition to his father. Trump loved golf, so Don stayed off the links. Trump was a teetotaler, so Don drank heavily. In his college fraternity, he developed a reputation for blacking out. “He was drinking himself into a really dark place,” said one former fraternity brother, who recalled Don breaking down in tears at a party as he talked about his father. “He hated what his dad did to his mom. For a while, he didn’t even want people to know his last name.” (A spokesperson for Don said: “This is fiction.”)

Ivanka, meanwhile, worked to stay close with her father. She stopped by his office every day after the divorce, and when she was at boarding school she called home often-- seeking his advice, and asking questions about the family business. Later, Ivanka would recall with pride how her dad interrupted important meetings to talk to her: “He’d always take my call.”

On June 16, 2016 Ivanka strode across a dais in the atrium of Trump Tower and beamed out at the crowd. “Welcome, everybody,” she said, a glint of amusement in her voice. “Today, I have the honor of introducing a man who needs no introduction.”

That Donald Trump had chosen Ivanka to feature so prominently at his campaign kickoff seemed natural. He’d been grooming her for years to take over the family empire. She was the golden child-- beautiful, telegenic, and in possession of that most important family trait: a compulsive image-consciousness.

According to an aide who helped launch Trump’s presidential bid, Ivanka was the one child for whom he voiced concern while he was deciding whether to run. “I know they’re gonna go after me for the women,” Trump told the aide. “The problem is, they’re gonna go after Ivanka, too, for the ex-boyfriends.” His daughter’s romantic history included a succession of problematic exes-- from Lance Armstrong to James “Bingo” Gubelmann, a D‑list film producer who would later be arrested on cocaine charges with Maroon 5’s bassist.

Ivanka had a brand to protect, something Trump understood. She’d been tending to her image since she was a teenager—carefully evolving the Ivanka persona from party-girl socialite to lean-in lifestyle guru. She had her own fashion line and a flagship boutique in SoHo. Alongside Jared-- another real-estate scion-- she had wedged herself into Upper East Side society, earning invites to exclusive charity functions and a cameo on Gossip Girl.

Ivanka may not have thought her father could win the presidency, but she chose to treat the campaign as a brand-enhancement vehicle. She posed for glossy magazines, and sat for soft-focus interviews on Good Morning America. After speaking at the Republican National Convention, she served her Twitter followers a link to the pink sheath dress she’d worn onstage and encouraged them to “shop Ivanka’s look.” The dress sold out within 24 hours, a sign of the broader strategy’s success: In the first half of 2016, Fast Company reported, net sales at her clothing line were up nearly $12 million.

Navigating the campaign this way required finesse. Ivanka kept her distance from the uncouth rallies in places like Reno, Nevada, and Toledo, Ohio. While Trump riled up the country with Muslim-ban proposals and Mexican-rapist panics, she perched herself on a higher plane, where she just wanted to talk about the issues that really mattered to her, like affordable child care and the gender pay gap. Campaign staffers grumbled that Ivanka’s policy preferences were more closely aligned with Aspen weekenders than Rust Belt voters. “People started to realize this wasn’t about Trump’s vision,” one former aide told me. “It was about Ivanka’s ability to feel comfortable in her New York circle.”

But few were willing to challenge her. Rumors swirled that a state-level staffer had been fired after displeasing Ivanka. True or not-- a spokesperson for Ivanka declined to comment-- the story reinforced an impression that the candidate’s favorite child was untouchable. “It all felt very Tudor,” said the former aide. “Aside from whispers in the bathroom, nobody would dare say anything bad about Ivanka. It was the kind of thing that would get you tarred and feathered.”

While Ivanka soaked up the spotlight, Don was consigned to the margins of the campaign. The two had long been a study in contrasts. Where she whispered, he shouted; where she was careful, he was reckless. Unlike Ivanka-- who couldn’t wait to follow her dad into real estate-- Don had taken a more leisurely path to the family business after college, bartending and bumming around Colorado for a year and a half while his father seethed.

With his slicked-back hair and pin-striped suits, Don had carried a certain fratty energy into adulthood that periodically got him into trouble. (In 2002, Page Six reported that he got a beer stein to the head at a New York comedy club after some patrons thought he was “reacting too enthusiastically to [Chris Rock’s] ethnic humor.”) He spent weekdays working at the Trump Organization, where he developed a millionaire’s belief in low taxes, and weekends in the wilderness with his hunting buddies, where he gained an appreciation for gun rights. As a result, Don came to conservatism years before the rest of his family.

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.”

But Ivanka and Jared’s real power was rooted in Trump’s aspirations for the family. The couple stood as avatars for the elite respectability he’d spent his life futilely chasing. They belonged to a world that had long excluded him, dined in penthouses where he’d been derided as a nouveau riche rube. Cultivated and urbane, they embodied the high-class, patrician ideal he so desperately wanted the Trump name to evoke.

Don-- the screwup, the blowhard, the hunter-- didn’t stand a chance. [People peg Roman Roy-- the clownish character played by Kieran Culkin in Succession-- as a take-off on Don, Jr.]

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.”

Don may have lost the inside game to Jared and Ivanka, but he was building a grassroots base of his own. When fans began calling on him to run for mayor of New York City-- and Don responded with a bit too much enthusiasm-- his father quickly shut it down. “Don’s not going to run for mayor,” he said in an interview with Sean Hannity. But Trump couldn’t put an end to his son’s political career that easily. By the end of the election, Don’s budding #MAGA stardom was undeniable-- and he had no intention of walking away. “Going back to doing deals is boring,” he reportedly told a gathering of gun enthusiasts. “The politics bug bit me.”

With the election over and the presidency in hand, the Trumps got to work doing what they did with any new asset: figuring out how to sell it. Their initial cash grabs were clumsy and relatively small-scale. When the soon-to-be first family was profiled by 60 Minutes, Ivanka’s jewelry line blasted out a “Style Alert” advertising the $10,800 bracelet she’d worn on air. When Trump met with the prime minister of Japan, Ivanka-- who was pursuing a licensing deal with a Japanese apparel conglomerate-- sat in on the meeting. As ProPublica would later reveal, she also helped ensure that a portion of her father’s inauguration budget was spent at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

Eric and Don-- tasked with running the Trump Organization while their father was away-- looked for their own angles. They doubled the membership fee at Mar-a-Lago, which was already being described as the “winter White House,” and pushed forward on the development of their down-market hotel chain, American Idea. Working with a pair of Mississippi businessmen they’d met on the campaign trail, the Trumps planned a series of red-state budget hotels stuffed with star-spangled tchotchkes and decorative Americana, such as vintage Coca-Cola machines in the lobbies. Eric in particular welcomed the challenge of running the family business. He’d always been the one most interested in construction and architecture, and many in the company assumed that he would take over day-to-day operations when his father retired. Now that he had a chance to prove himself, Eric planned to exploit every opportunity. “The stars have aligned,” he proclaimed. “Our brand is the hottest it has ever been.”

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.

The week before Trump entered the White House, Ivanka announced that she was taking a leave of absence from the Trump Organization and her fashion line. The seat of the family empire wasn’t in Manhattan anymore. It was in Washington-- and that’s where she and Jared would be.

...The presidential agenda Ivanka envisioned was one her former Manhattan neighbors would approve of. With her help, Trump would enact a paid-family-leave program and reform the criminal-justice system. He would update the nation’s infrastructure, and preserve LGBTQ rights. Republican, Democrat, these were just labels. Once fair-minded people saw what her father had accomplished-- what the Trumps had accomplished-- the family’s legacy would be secure.

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.”

...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 president wished aloud that the couple would move back to New York.

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 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.

... 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.

... 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.

...[A]s 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.

Trump, who’d pledged to recuse himself from business decisions, relied on golf buddies to update him on the company during his weekend trips to Florida. Their reviews seemed to confirm his worst fears. Before launching his campaign, he’d fretted that his kids weren’t ready to take over the business. Now, with Don MIA and Eric flailing, he became preoccupied with what would be left of his company when he returned to it. According to a former White House aide, Trump talked about the issue so often that administration officials worried he would get himself in trouble trying to run the Trump Organization from the Oval Office.

But as the 2020 campaign season entered its early stages, even Eric turned his attention toward politics. His wife, Lara-- a conservative activist from North Carolina-- was an outspoken surrogate for Trump. Eric had been holding back, worried that his father would disapprove; after all, someone needed to mind the shop. But the president encouraged Eric to join his siblings in the fray. There would be plenty of ways to cash in later. This was the family business now.

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.

In June, Ivanka accompanied her father to Osaka, Japan, for the G20 summit. 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.

Don, meanwhile, threw himself into his father’s reelection campaign, while quietly plotting his own future. According to Republicans familiar with the discussions, he considered running for office somewhere in the Mountain West, where his love of guns and hunting could help woo voters. A privately commissioned poll in Montana-- passed around enthusiastically among Don’s inner circle-- showed that 75 percent of the state’s Republicans viewed him favorably. In April, it was announced that Guilfoyle would join the Trump campaign as a senior adviser.

While Don mulled his options, some allies talked him up as a potential chairman of the Republican National Committee. Others suggested he launch a right-wing political outfit that would allow him to hold rallies and bestow endorsements. The word kingmaker started getting tossed around.

Even the president began to appreciate his son’s political value. During a family gathering at the White House, Trump was overheard questioning Don about whether he’d been using the company plane while shirking his day job. A Republican senator in the room intervened to say that without Don’s work on the campaign trail, the party might not have kept its Senate majority. Trump seemed pleased: “I believe it.”

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.

In this week's episode of Succession, Kendall Roy was given a crucial task, getting Naomi Pierce to agree to the acquisition of the family TV network. They're both coke freaks and he manages the task but wakes up the next morning with crap all over himself and the bedding. He doesn't wash top and merely roles up the sheets and... and what? I can't imagine what he did with them. And what about the mattress?