Not Ivanka: Which Trump family member is truly ‘excited’ about his campaign?
It sounds like it’s not so good to be Donald Trump anymore, even as he claimed in a new report that there was so much “great energy” in the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago when he announced he was running for president a third time “in order to make America great and glorious again.”
But as New York magazine reported in a new cover story on Trump’s “sad, lonely, thirsty, broken, basically pretend run for re-election,” the 45th president seemed “bored” during his 64-minute speech on Nov. 15. People in the crowd checked their watches and, in a possible sign of a lack of family engagement in his third presidential run, three of his children, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Tiffany, failed to attend the event.
“There’s nobody around him who wants him to do it,” an anonymous Trump adviser told New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi about how people in his family really feel about him running for president again. “Forget Jared and Ivanka — Don Jr. doesn’t want him to do it!”
According to Nuzzi, only one family member is truly excited about the twice-impeached Trump running again, especially after his demoralizing loss in 2020 and as he faces extensive legal jeopardy, including for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“The only person who wants him to do it is Eric’s wife, Lara, because she’s so ambitious,” the insider told Nuzzi.
Lara Trump led buses emblazoned with “WOMEN FOR TRUMP” through swing states in 2020, and considered her own campaign for Senate in North Carolina, Nuzzi said. She had remained in the public eye as a paid contributor for Fox News from 2021 until early this month, when the network enforced its long-standing policy barring paid political commentators when they — or in this case, a family member — announce a political campaign.
Images of Trump surrounded by his four oldest children at campaign events in 2016 and 2020 sent a powerful message — that he couldn’t be such a horrible person if his children who “were functional adults still loved him,” Nuzzi said.
Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. were arguably Trump’s strongest source of family support during those campaigns. Ivanka Trump brought her socialite flair to softening her father’s bellicose image on the campaign trail and in the White House, where she and her husband served as senior advisers. Trump Jr., meanwhile, become one of the loudest and most popular proponents of Trump’s MAGA politics.
But Ivanka Trump issued a statement before her father’s Nov. 15 announcement, saying she “will always love and support” him, but that she would stay out of politics in order to focus on her family. Presumably, Tiffany Trump was on her honeymoon, having married in a lavish ceremony at Mar-a-Lago the weekend before.
Meanwhile, Trump Jr. was on a hunting trip out West and couldn’t get a flight back to Florida for his father’s speech “because of bad weather.” The timing for Trump Jr’s hunting trip, and his excuse for not showing up at his father’s announcement, sounded a bit off. Trump Jr. was at Mar-a-Lago the Saturday before for Tiffany’s wedding, and his father had been saying for days that he would make his big campaign announcement three days later.
The 45th president had to make do with the presence of his wife, Melania Trump, along with Kushner, Trump Jr.’s fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, 16-year-old Barron Trump and Eric and Lara Trump. Nuzzi wrote that the former first lady “lacked her distinct polish” and, “not for the first time,” looked “unhappy.”
As Nuzzi reported,Trump brushed off questions about the absence of three of his children at his announcement.
“I think that all members of my family are with me,” Trump said. “It doesn’t mean that they’re going to work on the campaign, but they’re always 100 percent with me.”
Trump also hit back at Nuzzi’s reporting in the New York magazine story, which quoted numerous anonymous advisers who described a campaign that is all but moribund and Trump as an isolated figure who generally leaves Mar-a-Lago only to play golf.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump dismissed the story as “fake news,” The Guardian reported. He also called Nuzzi “a shaky and unattractive wack job” and said her anonymous sources “don’t exist.”
“I’m happily fighting hard for our GREAT USA!” Trump said.