Tiffany Trump loves having her father and extended family right down the street. “It’s nice,” she said.
Eric Trump used to see him every day. “Not anymore,” he said forlornly.
So goes the close-knit first family nearly three years since Donald Trump won the presidency and moved to Washington from New York City.
For some in the family, it’s been a bonus. For others, not so.
“Some Trump kids have more time with their famous father now than ever before, others have less,” said presidential adviser and author Doug Wead.
He should know. Wead, who advised former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, told us that he was granted special access to the Trump family and White House for a new book, “Inside Trump’s White House: The Real Story of His Presidency.”
The author of the best-selling All the Presidents’ Children said that the presidency has given 26-year-old Tiffany a chance to hang out with her family after growing up with her mother, Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife, in California.
Tiffany is a law student at Georgetown University, close to the White House. Wead is the only journalist to interview her.
In excerpts of his book debuting Nov. 26 and provided exclusively to Secrets, Wead reported that she regularly stops by the White House and the home of her half-sister Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, both Oval Office confidants who see the president daily.
“I tend to go to the White House to see my dad and stop by to say ‘Hi’ to [first lady] Melania and [half-brother] Barron about every week,” she said. “It’s nice that my law school is so close that I’m able to stop by and see Barron playing soccer in the yard after school,” she added.
For Eric and brother Donald Trump Jr., who run the Trump business out in New York, it’s a different story.
Wead wrote, “I had once pressed Jack Ford, son of President Gerald Ford, on this very subject. ‘But didn’t you live in Wyoming?’ I asked. He said, ‘Yes, but every weekend the White House would send out a jet to pick me up. We spent more time together than ever.’ Eric Trump looked wistful. ‘I would say that we are the opposite,’ he said to me, during an interview over lunch in New York City. ‘We used to see our father every day. Not anymore. Not anymore.’”
The family remains a key sounding board for the president, dating back to his initial thoughts years ago on running for president. “It’s a conversation that has been going on within my family all of my life,” Tiffany said.
In fact, they had expected Trump to run against former President Barack Obama in 2012, but the older children weren’t ready to take charge of Trump Inc.
“It is obvious that he was frustrated,” Eric told Wead. “At that point, Don, Ivanka, and I were not ready to take on the responsibility of the Trump Organization. In 2016, we were, and all of the stars aligned,” said Eric.
So why run at all?
Wead said, “It’s not what you think.”
While pundits and foes like Hillary Rodham Clinton have said ego drove Trump into the race, Trump told Wead that it was the challenge of tackling a problem.
Said Wead in his book, “Trump would tell me in a subsequent interview that it was best to buy a poorly managed business because then you could improve on it and sell it at a profit. Conversely, he explained, one should never buy an expertly run enterprise because if you can’t improve on it you may end up selling it at a loss. This, he insisted, was why he had become president of the United States at the perfect time in history. In Trump’s assessment, unfortunately for America, George W. Bush and Barack Obama had driven the country into economic ruin. Fortunately, for him, it made his economic recovery all the more spectacular.”
