Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

The idiot wind blows strong with Tiffany Trump. She is the least known of the Donald Trump Demon Spawn. In fact, until this year's Republican Con-Vention, some of us thought maybe she was some sort of aberration in the Trump family. You know, like maybe she was some kind of maybe semi- decent, at least relatively normal person, perhaps flawed like all of us, but not an evil mess like all the rest of Trump's fetid offspring. Some assumed that that was why we never heard from her. We thought maybe the Trumps found her embarrassing somehow. We had heard that daddy didn't think she was as attractive as Ivanka and that maybe, in his sick mind, that was enough to keep Tifanny hiden. If that's true, you know her father would have tried to turn her into one of those kids that gets kept in an attic closet if he could. Personally, I think Tiffany looks fine and, let's face it, when it comes to the Trump kids, if you want unappealing to anyone but those who get off on the freakish, there's Eric. And, by the way, Ivanka, the apple of daddy's little penis, will always look to me like something soulless, sculpted out of plexiglass, and polished up to a nice shine.

But, alas, as tonight's meme shows, Tiffany Trump opened her yap three weeks ago and sounded like just another in the line of seemingly inbred Trumps right down to the blatant, in your face, lying. Her daddy runs from everything he lacks the moral or mental capacity to handle. He bribed a quack doctor into diagnosing phantom bone spurs to avoid fighting a war in Viet Nam and more recently, lied his way out of fighting a war against what he himself called a plague. On Monday, he ran away from a serious discussion about climate change by smugly saying "Science doesn't know."

Tiffany has now gone away again, back in her box, but the evidence presented in tonight's meme is all you really need (as if you even needed that). The family appears to be a nightmarish cult within an even bigger nightmarish cult; kinda like a set of Russian dolls each one a little smaller than the previous one, but just the same otherwise. Tiffany's lying RNC message to America was perversely and appropriately like Nikita Khrushchev's claim that the Russians invented baseball. It's even more so in light of the continuous, right up to the minute, disdain that her father shows for our military people, and probably to her as well, behind her back. Given what we now know from Mary Trump, the somewhat black sheep of the extended Trump family, even money says Tiffany was told to whore herself out and say what she said or be disowned and cut out of her daddy's will. Or, was she just doing what she really thought she should do. That may be even worse. Dear Tiffany, how would you feel if, by some just and righteous miracle, your daddy's assets were all seized either before or upon his death? Would you set the story right? Would you be a lying Trump to the last? Or, would you run away, make some appointments with Ivanka's plastic surgeon, or Melania's, change your name, and head for the hills. Would you even know how to feed yourself?

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Damn! I never got my invitation! It must have gotten lost in the mail. So many problems with the mail these days. About a week has gone by now and it still hasn't arrived. Sad.

Not that I would have gone but it would be a pleasure to have a memento of any Trump death. The sooner that failed contaminated gene pooI disappears like a miracle the better. I don't know about the "love and devotion" part but, yeah, definitely, it would have been a "pleasure." Sigh, if only I'd gotten the invite. I coulda even celebrated via ZOOM instead of making the trip. I'm sure the Orange Menace and its family would have understood. I coulda ordered in some fast food hamberders, and, I always have a bottle of champaign in the fridge. I wonder if the invitation came with discount coupons for the latest MAGA, QAnon, or KKK merch. I bet it did!

Well, there's always next time. Here's hoping another old Trump brother dies soon. You know, I think I better have a few extra champaign bottles at the ready for that one!

The Trump Family-- What An Ugly Mess!

Even Eric Trump will be speaking at the Republican convention-- the whole Trump family-- but not Barron... and not his sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. Definitely not his sister. Washington Post reporter Michael Kranish explained why over the weekend: secretly recorded tapes. Yes, another glimpse into the dysfunctional sociopath in the Oval Office. Their niece, Mary Trump-- the one who wrote the book-- recorded the phone conversations with Trump's older sister, Maryanne, in 2018. "Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president," wrote Kranish. "'His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,' she said. 'I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.' Lamenting 'what they’re doing with kids at the border,' she guessed her brother 'hasn’t read my immigration opinions' in court cases. In one case, she berated a judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant respectfully. 'What has he read?' Mary Trump asked her aunt. 'No. He doesn’t read,' Barry responded." Most of us have noticed; we have a president who doesn't read. He manages to read a teleprompter, sometimes and often very badly. But he's a functional illiterate.

In the weeks since Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle has been released, she’s been questioned about the source of some of the information, such as her allegation that Trump paid a friend to take his SATs to enable him to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt.

In response to a question from the Washington Post about how she knew the president paid someone to take the SATs, Mary Trump revealed that she had surreptitiously taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry in 2018 and 2019. She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book.

Barry has never spoken publicly about disagreements with the president, and her extraordinarily candid comments in the recordings mark the most critical comments known to have been made about him by one of his siblings. No one else in the family except Mary Trump has publicly rebuked the president.

The transcripts reveal the depths of discord between the president and his sister, illuminating a rift that began when she asked her brother for a favor in the 1980s, which Trump has frequently used to try to take credit for her success.

At one point Barry said to her niece, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Mary Trump, 55, told The Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she plans to do “everything in my power” to elect Joe Biden. Her father, Fred Trump Jr., died of an alcohol-related illness when she was 16 in 1981. In her book, she says Donald Trump and his father mistreated her father.

The Post sought comment about the tapes from Barry and White House officials on Friday and Saturday and did not receive a response. After this story posted online Saturday night, the White House issued this statement from the president that said in full: “Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!”

He was a brat’

The allegation that the president paid someone to take his SATs, which was one of the most publicized allegations in Mary Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, stems from a conversation that Barry had with her niece on Nov. 1, 2018.

Barry told how she tried to help her brother get into college. “He was a brat,” Barry said, explaining that “I did his homework for him” and “I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.”

Then Barry dropped what Mary considered a bombshell: “He went to Fordham for one year [actually two years] and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.”

“No way!” Mary responded. “He had somebody take his entrance exams?”

“SATs or whatever... That’s what I believe,” Barry said. “I even remember the name.” That person was Joe Shapiro, Barry said.

Donald Trump was friends with a person at Penn named Joe Shapiro, who is deceased. Shapiro’s widow and sister told The Post last month that he never took a test for anybody, including Trump. Mary Trump has said it was a different Joe Shapiro, but that person has not surfaced.

During a Post Live interview last month, Mary Trump was asked whether the source of her information was Barry. “I prefer not to say who it is,” she responded. “It’s somebody who would have absolutely no reason to make it up.”

Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump, said that she began taping conversations in 2018 with Barry after concluding that her relatives had lied about the value of the family estate two decades earlier during a legal battle over her inheritance, in which she received far less than she expected.

Under New York law, it is legal to tape a conversation with the consent of one party, which in this case was Mary Trump.

The inheritance dispute was settled privately in 2001, but Mary Trump has said she was duped into an agreement because the family said the estate was worth $30 million and she later believed the value was closer to $1 billion.

Bastardi said she recorded the conversations with Barry to gain information that would show she had been misled by the family about the estate’s value. “She hoped to prove this, as is often done, by recording words contrary to their sworn statements. She never expected to learn much of what she heard,” Bastardi said.

He said that Mary believed the information was particularly relevant given the federal charges that have been brought this year against prominent individuals who took “unethical steps to get their children into college.”

The president has said he got into what was then called the Wharton School of Finance at Penn-- which he called one of “the hardest schools to get in to”-- because he is a “super genius.” The Post reported last year, however, that Mary’s father, Fred Jr., was close friends with a Penn admissions official. That official, James Nolan, told The Post that Fred Jr. asked him to interview his brother for admission, which he did. He was granted a place at the school, which Nolan said was “not very difficult” because more than half of applicants at the time were accepted, compared with last year’s 7.4 percent rate.

The Trump siblings have been publicly supportive of the president. The president’s other sister, Elizabeth, has stayed out of the public eye. The president’s younger brother, Robert, who died on Aug. 15, said in 2016 he supported his brother “one thousand percent.”

In 1999, when family patriarch Fred Sr. died, Barry joined with Donald and Robert in a lawsuit to prevent Mary from getting a larger amount of the inheritance. Mary had said in a probate case that she and her brother should have received an amount closer to what would have gone to their father, if he had lived.

On another matter apparently related to Fred Sr.’s will, Barry told her niece that she and Donald had a rift so serious that “he didn’t talk to me for two years.”

Barry received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College, a master’s from Columbia University and a law degree from Hofstra University. After being a homemaker for 13 years, and having eschewed the Trump family’s real estate business, she became one of only two women out of 62 lawyers in the office of the United States Attorney in New Jersey, where she worked from 1974 to 1983.

Barry has avoided talking publicly about her brother’s presidency while she was on the federal bench. In a rare public appearance, she used empathetic language far removed from her brother’s tough rhetoric.

“Success can be as simple as the warm feeling you get when you smile at a stranger, someone you know must be lonely, and having that stranger return your smile,” Barry said in a speech to graduates of Fairfield University in Connecticut in 2011.

The president, meanwhile, has publicly spoken glowingly of his sister, saying in 2016 that, “We do have different views a little bit,” while adding, “She's a very, very highly respected judge.”

‘I will level you’

In one of the taped conversations, however, Barry revealed how a deep animosity developed between her and her brother.

She recalled how she turned to him for help when she wanted to be nominated by then-President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. She believed that help could come from his attorney: Roy Cohn, who had played an infamous role in the 1950s as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Cohn was “like kissing buddies” with Reagan, she said.

“He had Roy Cohn call Reagan about needing to appoint a woman as a federal judge in New Jersey,” Barry told Mary. “Because Reagan’s running for reelection, and he was desperate for the female vote.” Then, she said, “I had the nomination,” and Donald Trump never let Barry forget it.

According to a recent documentary film, Where’s My Roy Cohn? Cohn had been in regular touch with Reagan. Donald Trump met with Reagan at the White House on Aug. 4, 1983, according to presidential records. Reagan talked with Barry on Sept. 13, 1983, and nominated her the following day, according to Reagan’s daily diary.

“He once tried to take credit for me,” Barry said of her brother, quoting him as saying, “Where would you be without me?”

Barry said she told her brother: “You say that one more time and I will level you.” She told Mary that it was “the only favor I ever asked for in my whole life.” She said that she deserved the nomination “on my own merit” and that she was subsequently elevated to higher judicial posts without her brother’s intervention.

“Donald is out for Donald, period,” Barry said.

Mary questioned Barry about what he had accomplished on his own.

“I don’t know,” Barry said.

“Nothing,” Mary responded.

“Well he has five bankruptcies,” Barry said. (Trump’s companies filed for six corporate bankruptcies but he has never declared personal bankruptcy.)

“Good point. He did accomplish those all by his self,” Mary said.

“Yes, he did. Yes, he did. You can’t trust him,” Barry said.

Maryanne said on another occasion that her brother kept asking about Fox News. One day, Barry said, the president called her and said, “Did you watch Fox News?”

“No,” Barry said she told the president.

“Why not?” he said.

“I don’t watch much television at all,” Barry said she responded.

“What do you do?” the president asked.

“I read,” Barry replied.

“What do you read?” the president said.

“Books,” Barry said.

The president was incredulous. “You don’t watch Fox?”

Around the same time the conversations were being conducted, an internal investigation was underway of whether Barry violated judicial conduct rules regarding her role in working with her siblings in determining their tax liability. The investigation stemmed in part from an action that Mary Trump had taken: She had provided boxes of family tax records to the New York Times, which published a Pulitzer Prize-winning report in 2018 that found the president had engaged in suspect tax schemes that increased the family wealth.

Barry retired shortly after the investigation was launched, which ended the probe.

One of the most emotional conversations between Mary and her aunt occurred when they discussed the 1999 funeral of the family patriarch, Fred Sr., at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City. During that ceremony, Donald spoke more about his own accomplishments than his father’s life, Barry said.

“Donald was the only one who didn’t speak about Dad,” Barry said. She told Mary that “I don’t want any of my siblings to speak at my funeral. And that’s all about Donald and what he did at Dad’s funeral. I don’t know. It was all about him.”

“I remember,” Mary responded.

Mary Trump said she has not talked to her aunt since the book was published. She said in the Post Live interview that she would not be surprised “if she never contacted me, and I think that’s fair. I understand why she would not want to.”

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

"Don't you fucking look at me!"
-Frank Booth, Blue Velvet

Every street has that one bizarro family. Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington is no exception. It's a shame that Dennis Hopper won't be around to play Trump ala Frank Booth from Blue Velvet when the Trump movie gets made. Maybe Christopher Walken will do it. Of course, if it's true to life, it'll be more insane and surreal than "Blue Velvet" ever wanted to be: "The candy coloured clown they call the orangeman." Adderall instead of Nitrous.

It was to be expected that the two grown Beavis & Butthead sons of Donnie Headcase would do anything to emulate and flatter their father, so, when President Daddy flew into a rage and wouldn't shut up about his embarrassing windblown White House lawn photo (below), even calling it fake and "fake news," like he does with everything he doesn't like, we knew that he could count on his sons to express solidarity with dad in yet another couple of "Please Love Me" moments. Try as they might to make their dad's freakshow looks appear normal by adopting the same look, it's just not working. Even if the entire staff of White House freaks does the same, it won't work. Look what happened when Stephen Miller tried to paint on some hair. Kellyanne? Yeesh! Don't go there! Maybe, Beavis & Butthead should just spend five or six figures on facial plastic surgery like Ivanka and Melania.

More on this tomorrow because, well, why not? If it would irritate a big white house full of lunatics, how bad can it be? Until then, "Be a good neighbor!"

Rushin’ To Destruction-2019 In Review, Part 7-- It’s The BeBesters! America’s #1 Most Hideous Family!

-by Noah

Yep. Oranges don’t fall far from the tree. In this case, the tree is a giant round-ish, blubbery mutant orange tree with a vagina neck and orange science-defying flab-padded branches to match its obese cellulite farm legs that are rooted in some long ago god-forsaken hell-hole of a shithole land some call Mar-a-Lago and some just call Florida. As I noted a few days ago, Florida is a mythical land of giant snakes, virus-laden creepy-crawlies and, yes, tens of thousands of examples of a human subspecies known as Florida Man. It's Trump's official home now. Florida is now Trump. Trump is now Florida. Each one the personification of the other. Can his children be far behind?

I repeat because I can. Florida is a place that’s so god-forsaken that Mother Nature has seen fit to wipe the slate clean by ordering daily floods and endless record hurricanes. She has even decreed that the ground beneath its citizens be opened up to swallow them and their housing whole!

Let the gators have the rest. Florida is a state made up of villages of the damned. But, far be it from me to cast aspersions upon Flor-i-duh. For what Flor-i-duh has become is only an advance notice of what is happening to the rest of the country. It’s way too late to amputate the place and push it across the gulf to Venezuela where it always belonged. We are all God’s Waiting Room now, and repenting will get you nowhere.

Now, ask yourself how a man who only likes white can be so orange. It’s clear that, like his freakish “hair,” his complexion can only be a symptom of the inner core of the disease, a disease of insecurity and psychosis born, most likely, of lead-contaminated breast milk and horrific parenting; a disease that, if you check out his offspring, appears to be more than merely hereditary. This is a disease that can only be eradicated by loading it’s hosts into a rocket ship (Call it Space Force #1) and launching it into a far, far away black hole to be crushed and vaporized into nothingness, and even that might not work but it might buy the universe time to fortify itself for the next permutation.

Donald J. Trump is more than a man of 14,000 lies and counting. His cult-like followers and financial supporters worship his every word and his every action. They will follow him and cheer him into whatever hell he drags them, and us. And, no one cheers him more than his own Children Of The Damned, for unlike in the movies, these particular Children Of The Damned did not develop superior mental powers. One wonders if they developed brains at all. They were double damned. Sigh, unfortunately, they could not choose their parents.

Donald Jar Jar Trump has four children that we know of. Baron, Don Jr., Eric, and “Princess” Ivanka, aka “the smart one,” aka “The girl of Daddy’s lascivious dreams.”

To be fair, and as you know, I’m always fair, The Donald’s mutant offspring never had a chance., and, no, that’s no reason to feel any empathy or sympathy for them. They are what they are, evil little twits.

I’ll, more or less, leave Baron out of this discussion. Barron will probably end up the most psychotic, the least intellectually developed, and most dangerous of all. He may have had the worst mother of Trump’s three known wives and he was at the most impressionable age as his father became president and finished his personal journey towards being totally crackers and becoming the president. The word about Baron acting out in school has already started to spread and tales of his schoolboy behavior are quite a series of flashing red lights and sirens.

For this post, I’ll concentrate of the three prominent so-called adult children. Donnie Jr., Eric, and Ivanka have all made some wacky news this year, news that such Bizarro World Children are no doubt proud of. Allow me to point out one story for each that represents the absolute idiocy that comes with being a Trump. Describing the Trump spawn as being intellectually stunted doesn’t even begin to cover it. I’m sparing Tiffany because, for whatever reason, she has not sought the spotlight so not so much is known about her character. That doesn’t mean I don’t suspect the worst. It just means that, compared to the others, she wisely flies under the radar.

1. Donnie Trump Jr.- In his recently released book, Donald Trump, Jr. showed his ability to do exactly what daddy does. He made something all about himself when he had no moral justification to do so. In the book, Junior describes how he once went to Arlington National Cemetery and there, surrounded by the graves of those who had sacrificed everything for their country, he saw and felt nothing. He writes that instead, he couldn’t help but think about the sacrifices he, the great Trump Jr. had made during his hard, hard life! Oh! Poor Donnie Jr.! You gave so much! I can only imagine the trial of wondering where your next bottle of 2010 Chateau Petrus is going to come from. My god! You may have to settle for the 2014 vintage! Oh, the pain! The angst! You gave all that time of your busy self-important day to take a limo and come to Arlington and insult the dead and the country they defended with their lives. They defended it against the people your family and your party loves. Some of them defended it against The Confederacy. Some of them defended it against your beloved Nazis and the rest of the Axis Powers. Some of them defended the country against the North Koreans. Oh, poor Donnie!

2. Eric Trump- If his father ran a “Mr. Lights On Nobody Home” pageant, son Eric might stand a good chance of winning, and not just because of the frequently displayed nepotism. I have to say ‘might’ because those lights are only flickering and no one knows how long before Young Eric just turns into a full blown drooling zombie.

But here’s Eric’s big 2019 accomplishment in another Trump contest known as the “Please Love Me Daddy Sweepstakes.” On Thanksgiving, Eric The Small Mind created a hashtag all by himself. The hashtag was #LeaveOurPresidentAlone. Maybe he thought daddy would reward him with some Russian pee hookers, I don’t know, but, Eric Of The Flo-Thru Cranium went all out. He got real original and created a brand new hat for daddy and his loathsome supporters. He decided to abbreviate his sad, woebegone hashtag down from “LeaveOurPresidentAlone” to LOPA, no periods or dashes between the letters. There it was, as you can see, LOPA.

The LOPA hat is a fine demonstration of the Trump IQ. I mean, If you were going to put LOPA on a hat to honor daddy, wouldn’t you check to see if the word LOPA had any definitions that might not convey your message? Sure you would! Eric Of The Malformed Mind? Not so much.

It turns out LOPA means “a thief” in the Slovenian native tongue of his own stepmother, Melania. He could have asked!

It gets better. Turns out that, in Sanskrit, LOPA has a multitude of meanings and synonyms including words that translate to robbing, taking away, plundering, deprivation, loss, destruction, violation, and transgression.

But wait, there’s more: The Urban Dictionary has LOPA as meaning joker or clown or one with a proclivity for oversized shoes and bad hair. So, could it be that Eric The Brainless subconsciously despises his father as so many billions of us around the world do?

Maybe I’ll just agree with one of Eric The Numbnutz’s twitter responders who just says that LOPA stands for Lock Our President Away.

3. Ivanka- Now we come to Ivanka the true heir to the crown of mastery when it comes to the idiot tweet manifesto of her daddy-poo. Eric is bad when it comes to competitive idiotic tweeting, but Ivanka, the T&A of her daddy’s Adderall-hyped eyeballs takes the cake and certainly isn’t going to let anyone have it. It’s hers, hers, hers!

Fittingly, on Halloween, Miss Blonde Imbecile of 2019 tweeted out a quote from Thomas Jefferson, our third president and author of the Declaration Of Independence. She tweeted out the quote because in the howling winds of Ivanka’s head, it showed support for daddy. The quote, followed by her commentary goes like this:

”…surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word that falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.” –Thomas Jeffers’s reflections on Washington, D.C. in a letter to his daughter Martha. Some things never change, dad!

“Inventing where facts fail them.” No less that George Conway, husband of Kellyanne Conway, the Queen of Alternative facts, grabbed on to that one and tweeted back at Ivanka, “Inventing facts? Have you met your father?” Seemingly thousands of others joined in in a virtual tweet slam. One wrote “Comparing your father to Thomas Jefferson is particularly brain dead.” Another responded with another Jefferson quote, “When speech condemns a free press, you are hearing the words of a tyrant.” Still another respondent pointed out that Jefferson worked his whole life to ensure the president was not above the law. Another tweeted extensively on Jefferson’s disdain for nepotism. In short, Ivanka’s tweet had instigated a near novel sized tutorial on the horrid truth of what her father is. In that, she had topped even Eric.

There it is. Case closed. Clearly, their momma ate a cereal bowl of lead paint flakes for breakfast every morning during her pregnancies. If it was up to me, I'd send them on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney.

Of Course Trump's Family Is More Disgusting-- But, Sorry, That Doesn't Excuse Biden's Family Corruption

I was happy to see a George Washington University Politics Poll Tuesday morning showing Biden cratering. The two progressives in the race are tremendously outpacing the 3 corporate Dems still in contention:

• Elizabeth Warren- 28%
• Bernie- 21%
• Status Quo Joe- 18%
• Mayo Pete- 5%
• Kamala- 5%

I'd like to think it's all about the platforms the various candidates are running on. Bernie and Elizabeth are, for example, vigorously backing Medicare-for-All. Biden, Buttigieg and Kamala all oppose it with foolish pretend-plans that would cripple it in birth. But I think it's not just policy. It's also the hit Biden has taken, particularly among independent voters, because of the swampy nature of his disgusting Trump-like family. The repulsive Biden family-- and not just Hunter-- have traded on Joe Biden's elected positions to bring millions of dollars into the family coffers.

Neither Biden nor Trump have anything to offer the American people and would just as soon fight an election over which one lies more, which one is less incapacitated by the onset of senility and which one has a less disgusting and corrupt family. Hunter Biden attempted-- and failed, of course-- to paint a pretty picture of his own legalistic corruption in a disastrous interview with ABC News’ Amy Robach.

“In retrospect, look, I think that it was poor judgment on my part. Is that I think that it was poor judgment because I don't believe now, when I look back on it-- I know that there was-- did nothing wrong at all," said Biden. However, was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is...a swamp in-- in-- in many ways? Yeah.”

"I gave a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That's where I made the mistake," Hunter Biden told ABC News in an exclusive interview. "So I take full responsibility for that. Did I do anything improper? No, not in any way. Not in any way whatsoever."

"Did I make a mistake? Well, maybe in the grand scheme of things, yeah," he said, again referring to fallout from his overseas business. "But did I make a mistake based upon some ethical lapse? Absolutely not."

Biden said, "I take-- full responsibility for that. Do I-- did I do anything improper? No, and not in any way. Not in any way whatsoever. I joined a board, I served honorably. I did-- I focused on corporate governance. I didn't have any discussions with my father before or after I joined the board as it related to it, other than that brief exchange that we had."

Even so, the 49-year-old has maintained a low profile in recent months as the president and his allies have targeted Hunter Biden for his professional endeavors in Ukraine and China.

...Hunter Biden reiterated that he never discussed his foreign business dealings with his father, and made it clear he has no interest in becoming a political football as congressional Democrats haul witnesses in for depositions as part of their impeachment proceedings.

"I'll let Congress handle that," he said. "And I'll let you guys in the media handle that. And I'll let my dad's campaign handle that. And the only thing that I'm looking to handle is to make certain that I get up every day and do the next right thing. And that really is the way that I've been trying to live my life."

Despite his desire to stay out of the spotlight, ethics experts told ABC News that Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian oil and gas company called Burisma, while his father fronted U.S. foreign policy toward Kyiv, could present an ethical conundrum-- an allegation Hunter fervently disputed.

Biden spoke with conviction when asked about how much information he shared with his father and even whether he was qualified.

“[My father] read the press reports that I'd joined the board of Burisma which was a Ukrainian natural gas company. And there's been a lot of misinformation about me, not about my dad. Nobody buys Dad. But-- by this idea that I was unqualified to be on the board,” said Biden.

“I was vice chairman of the board of Amtrak for five years,” he continued. “I was the chairman of the board of the U.N. World Food Program. I was a lawyer for Boies Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in-- in the world.”

“I think that I had as much knowledge as anybody else that was on the board-- if not more.”

Even so, on Sunday the Biden campaign released details of a proposed government ethics plan, which included a stipulation designed to "rein in executive branch financial conflicts of interest"-- an apparent response to allegations lodged against the Biden family. And while he cited being a lawyer at a prominent firm and his record serving on several boards as qualifications for the job, in his interview with ABC News, Hunter Biden acknowledged that his last name likely played a role in his Burisma board appointment.

"If your last name wasn't Biden," Robach asked, "do you think you would've been asked to be on the board of Burisma?"

"I don't know. I don't know. Probably not, in retrospect," he said. "But that's-- you know-- I don't think that there's a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn't Biden."

“Because my dad was Vice President of the United States. There's literally nothing, as a young man or as a full grown adult that-- my father in some way hasn't had influence over. It does not serve either one of us,” Biden continued.

On the same day the Biden campaign rolled out their government ethics plan, a lawyer for Hunter Biden announced that his client would step down from the board of directors of a Chinese-backed private equity company by the end of this month-- and commit to halting all work with foreign entities if his father wins the White House in 2020.

"I'm taking it off the table, Amy," Hunter Biden said of his decision to step away from any foreign businesses. "I'm making that commitment. Let’s see if anybody else makes that commitment. But that's the commitment that I'm making." “Look, I'm a private citizen,” he said. "One thing that I don't have to do is sit here and open my kimono as it relates to how much money I make or make or did or didn't. But it's all been reported.”

In a press conference over the weekend, Joe Biden said the decision "represents the kind of man of integrity [Hunter] is."

Well, I'm afraid that Biden is right there... the whole thing shows exactly what kind of integrity Hunter and the Biden family have been brought up in. They're defending all this because they have no choice if Biden Sr. is going to claw his way into the nomination, which they see slipping from his grasp, a blow to a family that aspires to be billionaires, not just mere millionaires. Meanwhile, predictably, Señor Trumpanzee "took the opportunity to recast the decision as Hunter 'being forced to leave a Chinese Company.' ... 'The Biden family was PAID OFF, pure and simple!' Trump tweeted earlier this month, echoing an accusation raised by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The president and his allies have accused Hunter Biden of banking $1.5 billion from the joint investment firm, a figure Hunter Biden called 'crazy' and 'has no basis in fact in any way.' Reports at the time indicated Hunter Biden's firm sought to raise $1.5 billion from the deal-- not that either he or his firm pocketed $1.5 billion from the deal." This is exactly how Trump can win reelection-- fighting over the swamp, not policies that could help ordinary American family. It's why Biden is the candidate he talks about most-- and in so doing encourages Trump-hating Democrats to support him. Trump wouldn't stand a chance against Bernie or against Elizabeth Warren. He'd wipe the floor with Biden. This is his kind of battle:

"They feel like they have the license to go out and say whatever they want," Hunter Biden said. "It's insane to even -- it feels to me like living in some kind of, you know, "Alice in Wonderland," where you're up on the real world and then you fall down the rabbit hole, and, you know, the president's the Cheshire Cat asking you questions about crazy things that don't bear any resemblance to the reality of anything that has to do with me."

Despite Hunter Biden’s dismissal of the $1.5 billion figure attached to his investment in the firm, ethics experts have said his connection with the Chinese-based corporation again raises the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly in light of the fact that Hunter Biden flew with his father to Beijing aboard Air Force Two in 2013-- around the time the deal was negotiated.

"I've traveled everywhere with my dad," Hunter said. "And I went [to China in 2013] because my daughter was on the trip too."

Hunter Biden’s lawyer said he has yet to receive a financial return on investment, adding that he only became a minority stakeholder in the company in October 2017-- after Joe Biden was no longer vice president. Prior to then, he served as an unpaid director.

Again, Hunter Biden insists he never spoke of his professional dealings with his father on the 13-hour flight. And while he insists he did not engage in any business during the visit, he told the New Yorker in July that he did meet with a business partner, Jonathan Li, and even organized Li to shake hands with his father.

Asked about that interaction, Hunter Biden said he could not remember it specifically, but said he "probably" introduced them, and in fact "hoped" he had-- adding that he had been friends with Li for 13 years.

"Whether I'm in New York, or whether I'm in Washington, D.C., or whether I'm on the campaign trail in Nevada, or whether I am in Iowa with him-- [and] a friend and a business associate is in the hotel, and my dad's staying there-- is it inappropriate for me to have coffee with him?" Biden asked rhetorically.

Robach pressed the matter, though, asking Hunter what he would say to those "who believe this is exactly why people hate Washington."

"I don't know what to tell you. I made a mistake in retrospect as it related to creating any perception that that was wrong," Hunter Biden said. "My dad has never made a decision about anything, I'm absolutely certain, taking into account anything other than what is best for the American people and what the people that elected him to do. I am 100% certain of that."

...The president is not the only Trump family member to target the Bidens. At a campaign rally, Eric Trump, the president’s son, led a chant of "lock him up," referring to Hunter Biden. In response, Hunter called the Trumps "irrelevant," adding that he does not spend time thinking about them.

“Unlike them, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about them. I really don't. It's all noise. And what they do is they create just an enormous amount of noise. I have to then answer questions-- about accusations made by probably the most unethical group of people that we've ever seen in this republic," Biden said.

"They'll never understand the level for how much I love my dad and how much he loves me," he said, adding later, "They're out of a B movie. I mean, they really are." “I've been through some sh-- stuff in my life. I've been through some real, real stuff. This isn't real stuff. It isn't. It truly isn't. That part of it, that Barnum and Bailey-- you know, say anything, do anything you want, you know, I mean, like, you know, Donald Prince Humperdinck-- Trump Jr. is not somebody that I really care about,” said Biden.

Hunter Biden likened the president to a bully, and said, "I don't feed bullies." In another jab at Trump, Hunter Biden told Robach he takes "no pleasure in this as watching this death spiral of this administration-- this president and the people that surround him."

Coincidentally, the other side of this hideous equation was painted at GQ this week by Jay Willis in an essay-- How Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric Trump Have Profited Off Their Dad's Presidency. Short version refers to the Godzilla vs Mother battle with the Bidens: "No one knows a “clear conflict of interest” when they see it better than the president's children."

Setting aside the alternative facts underlying the Trump kids’ criticisms, however, their decision to wade into this controversy is notable for a different reason: During their father’s tenure as president, Don Jr. and Eric have repeatedly managed to cash in on their newfound positions of political privilege in their business dealings. So, too, have their sister Ivanka and brother-in-law Jared Kushner, both of whom hold senior positions in the administration and whose companies and investment portfolios netted them anywhere between $29 million and $135 million last year, per their financial disclosure forms. Here are some of the highlights of when the family's business intertwining with government affairs constituted the “appearance of impropriety” and “conflict of interest.”

The real estate sales

Days before his inauguration in 2016, Donald Trump announced that he had given “complete and total” control of the Trump Organization to Don Jr. and Eric. In doing so, he dismissed critics who called on him to place his assets in a blind trust, arguing that transferring control to immediate family was sufficient to address any conflict-of-interest concerns. “No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office,” he promised.

Since then, Forbes says, the brothers have sold off more than $100 million worth of Trump Organization real estate. That figure includes a $33 million sale of the company’s stake in a federally subsidized housing complex-- a transaction Secretary of House & Urban Development Ben Carson had to approve-- and a $3.2 million sale of land in the Dominican Republic last year, which Forbes called “the clearest violation of their father’s pledge to do no new foreign deals while in office.” Taxpayers cover the security costs of each business trip the pair makes-- in the first two months of 2017 alone that included $97,830 for a trip to Uruguay, $53,155.25 for a trip to Vancouver, and $16,738.36 for a trip to Dubai, according to NBC News.

In February 2017, the Trump Organization unloaded a $15.8 million Trump Park Avenue penthouse-- a home formerly occupied by Jared and Ivanka-- to Angela Chen, who runs a consulting firm with ties to Chinese government officials and (allegedly) Chinese military intelligence, says Mother Jones. A Forbes analysis found that this price was 13 percent more than that paid for a comparable unit a year earlier, and that it sold at a time when the building’s other units, on average, were selling for 25 percent less.

The disappearing anti-nepotism laws

When news of Jared and Ivanka’s White House employment broke, observers noted the hirings appeared to be clear violations of federal anti-nepotism laws. Kushner, the heir to a mid-Atlantic real estate empire, had no experience that would qualify him for the many tasks to which his father-in-law would assign him: solving the opioid crisis, handling Middle East peace negotiations, modernizing the federal government, and reforming America’s criminal justice system.

On Inauguration Day, however, the Department of Justice released an opinion concluding that the statute does not apply to White House staff, allowing Kushner’s employment to go forward. When intelligence officials held up his application for a top-secret security clearance-- a delay due in part, the New York Times reported, to concerns about Kushner’s foreign business interests-- his place in the administration, theoretically, was in jeopardy. His father-in-law stepped in, though, overruling the officials and ordering then-chief of staff John Kelly to issue Kushner a clearance anyway. Ivanka's résumé was similarly thin for someone taking on a senior West Wing position—a fashion designer, Trump Organization executive, and sometimes-judge on The Apprentice. She also experienced delays in her attempts to obtain a security clearance, and she was also the beneficiary of some timely presidential intervention: According to CNN, Trump pressured both Kelly and then White House counsel Don McGahn to make decisions on Ivanka's clearance "so it did not appear as if he was tainting the process to favor his family." When Kelly and McGahn refused, Trump went ahead and approved his daughter's clearance himself.

Weeks before the CNN story broke, Ivanka told ABC News that she and her husband had "absolutely not" received special treatment from her father during the approval process. "The president had no involvement pertaining to my clearance or my husband's clearance. Zero," she said.

The intellectual property in China

Both Jared and Ivanka, who took a “formal leave of absence” from her eponymous fashion label to serve in her father’s White House, have taken full advantage of the benefits of their new jobs. In April, on the same day she and Kushner sat next to Chinese president Xi Jinping at a White House state dinner, the Chinese government gave its conditional approval for three trademarks granting Ivanka what the AP called “monopoly rights” to sell Ivanka-branded jewelry, bags, and spa services. China approved two more rounds of trademarks in May and June, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan government watchdog.

In mid-2018, Ivanka shuttered her clothing brand altogether, citing a desire to focus on her work in Washington. However, she has since continued to seek potentially lucrative trademarks in China, leaving open the possibility that she could return to the brand after her time in public service concludes. (“As the daughter of the U.S. President, Ivanka Trump has an initial advantage of publicity,” Chinese designer Yang Mei explained to TIME in 2017.) Last fall, in the midst of her father’s trade war with China and his efforts to strike a new trade agreement between the two global superpowers, she won initial approval for 16 trademarks, and added five more to her portfolio earlier this year.

The free advertising

While the company was still active, Ivanka wasn’t shy about using the spotlight that comes with being the president’s daughter to goose sales of Ivanka-branded apparel and accessories. Journalists received a press release promoting a gold bracelet—starting at $8,800 and up to $10,800-- that she wore during a 60 Minutes interview in November 2016. A few months later, Ivanka Trump’s entire line received an enthusiastic on-air endorsement from Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, who called the clothing “wonderful” and urged Fox & Friends viewers to “go buy it today.” The White House said it “counseled” Conway in response.

After Ivanka wrapped a speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention where her father officially became the party’s presidential nominee, she tweeted a link inviting followers to “shop Ivanka’s look”: a pink Ivanka-branded dress that retailed for $138. It sold out within hours.

The miraculous Kushner bailout

For years, 666 Fifth Avenue was the most vexing line-item on the Kushner real estate ledger-- a Midtown skyscraper purchased for $1.8 billion, most of which the family borrowed, right before the 2008 recession. A mammoth mortgage of about $1.4 billion was due in February of this year, leading to speculation throughout Jared’s time in the West Wing about how, exactly, the Kushner family would come up with the cash. Multiple foreign governments seized on this uncertainty, privately discussing ways to take advantage of his business entanglements and financial difficulties when dealing with the United States, the Washington Post reported.

In April 2017, a real estate firm tied to the Kushner family made a direct appeal to the government of Qatar to invest in the troubled building, The Intercept reported. A month later, when a coalition of Persian Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates organized a blockade of Qatar, Kushner was among its most vocal U.S. supporters. According to NBC News, some Qatari officials believed the White House’s position was retaliation for their government’s decision not to make a deal with Kushner’s family. In the months that followed, Kushner developed a close working relationship with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman-- close enough that bin Salman allegedly told confidants that the president’s son-in-law was “in his pocket.”

Fortunately, help for the Kushner family’s financial woes subsequently arrived in the form of Brookfield Asset Management, which acquired a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue for about $1 billion in April 2018. This miraculous timing allowed the Kushners to pay off its existing mortgage and buy out its partner in the venture, Vornado Realty Trust. The buyer was a semi-familiar face in this drama: One of Brookfield Asset Management’s largest investors is the government of Qatar. Both Brookfield and Qatar claimed that Qatar had no advance warning that its money would be bailing out the president’s son-in-law.

The real estate investments

In June, The Guardian reported that Cadre, a real estate investment company owned in part by Kushner, has taken in some $90 million in offshore funding via an ominously-described “opaque offshore vehicle” in the Cayman Islands since he joined the White House. Some of the money, The Guardian says, came from other tax shelters; some of it came from unidentified sources in-- you guessed it-- Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, as my colleague Luke Darby noted at the time, although Kushner has purportedly recused himself from decisions affecting real estate policy, Ivanka has done no such thing. The president’s daughter was instrumental in the effort to include in the 2017 tax reform bill an “Opportunity Zones” program, which extends lucrative tax breaks to rich people who invest capital in designated less-developed areas. According to the AP, Cadre is raising funds from investors to build Opportunity Zone projects, and the Kushner family already owns at least 13 properties in opportunity zones that could qualify for special tax treatment.

The golf course deals

Last month, in the midst of Trump’s Ukraine scandal and mere hours after Fox News host Jesse Watters asserted that the president’s sons “stopped doing international business deals” when he became president, one of the president's sons hopped on Twitter to celebrate a new international business deal at a Trump golf course in Scotland.

The agreement will allow the Trumps to build 550 new homes in the area, along with a second 18-hole course in the same development. It is a fortunate break for the Trump-owned resort, which finished its seventh straight year in the red in 2018, according to The Independent.

The stakes in Trump hotels

Just down the road from the White House is the Trump International Hotel, located in D.C.’s Old Post Office building leased in 2013 to one of Donald Trump’s holding companies for development as a luxury hotel. It is a federally-owned building on the National Register of Historic Places, which means the president is, in a manner of speaking, now acting as his own landlord on the lease. The property has become notorious for attracting members of Congress, lobbyists, Cabinet officials, interest groups, foreign heads of state, and anyone else looking to curry the president’s favor. In July, the Washington Post reported that an Iraqi sheikh, a few months after writing to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security advisor John Bolton to suggest a tougher position on Iran, spent 26 nights on an eighth-floor suite.

Each of the three eldest Trump kids, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, owns a 7.425-percent interest in the holding company that leases the building. Because Ivanka Trump fills out an annual financial disclosure as a White House employee, we know a bit more about how the that stake is paying off these days: Her most recent filing listed almost $4 million in annual revenue from the hotel.

The hotels that almost were

In summer 2017, the Trump boys were working on developing two new hotel chains: Scion, a line of four-star properties, and American Idea, a line of patriotically-decorated, moderately-priced properties in heartland markets. The New York Times reported that they came up with the idea on the campaign trail with their father, where they relished the opportunity to attend each rally but “were less enamored of the budget-friendly hotels along the way.”

Along with a pair of former campaign donors-turned-business-partners, the Trump Organization struck a deal after the election to open the first Scion hotel in Cleveland, Mississippi. Earlier this year, though, it pulled out of the agreement and shelved its expansion plan indefinitely. “We live in a climate where everything will be used against us, whether by the fake news or by Democrats who are only interested in presidential harassment,” Eric explained at the time. “We already have the greatest properties in the world and if we have to slow down our growth for the time being, we are happy to do it.”

The billion-dollar sales pitch

In February 2018, Don Jr. traveled to India in an effort to sell more than $1 billion worth of luxury residential units built there by the Trump Organization and its partners. According to the New York Times, advertisements heralding Don Jr.’s visit read: “Trump has arrived. Have you?” Rajiv Bansa, a salesman at one of the properties, predicted that the younger Trump would have little trouble moving the inventory on his whirlwind tour of the region. “Everyone in India knows who the U.S. president is,” he told The Times. “It’s a status symbol. This is a big brand, the president of the United States’ name will be on it.”

When The Times asked the White House if Don Jr.’s sales visit presented “even an appearance of a conflict of interest,” the White House declined to comment.

We deserve an election campaign about policies, not about this garbage. Vote for anyone you want to be the Democratic Party nominee-- except Joe Biden. Forget-- if you must-- that Status Quo Joe has an abysmal decades long record of serving corporate power and the military-industrial complex-- and for playing footsie with unreconstructed racists. Like Trump, Biden has nothing to offer the American people but his own neuroses and a vile family. It doesn't matter which family is worse, neither should be anywhere near the White House.

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?