Unlike her siblings, Tiffany Trump did not come of age in the garish, gilded penthouse of her father’s Fifth Avenue tower. Instead, the president’s second wife, Marla Maples, raised her only daughter as a Kardashian neighbor in Calabasas, where Trump became a socialite of a different type, befriending the trendy descendants of Henri Matisse and John F. Kennedy while her paternal family lived a separate existence a continent away.
So it comes as little surprise that President Trump’s youngest daughter would have a strikingly less personal appeal to the public at the Republican National Convention. To be frank, she simply doesn’t know him as well (for good or ill) as her siblings. That may be why her speech was markedly more effective than those of her brothers.
“This is a fight for freedom versus oppression, for opportunity versus stagnation, a fight to keep America true to America,” Tiffany said. “I urge you to make your judgment based on results and not rhetoric.”
Where brothers Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. fanned the flames of the culture war, Tiffany Trump focused on the results of her father’s presidency and the foundational American principles that the Left increasingly rejects. She mentioned the First Step Act (criminal justice reform), which she reportedly lobbied her father to sign into law, Right to Try, and school choice. Then, as a recent Georgetown Law grad might be expected to do, she made a concise and compelling appeal to the American values clearly disdained by insurgent Democrats.
“And we believe in the American spirit,” Tiffany said. “A country founded on ideas, not identity. A country where our differences are embraced. And the only country where the word ‘dream’ has been attached to it. Because in America, your life is yours to chart. So, if you are hearing these things and thinking to yourself, ‘That is the kind of country I want to live in,’ well, whether you realized it or not, you’re a Trump supporter.”
This framing will appeal to the suburban women who cannot stand Trump on a personal level but still feel appalled at the idea that random restaurantgoers are being accosted and random car dealerships incinerated, supposedly because a police officer killed a black man a thousand miles away in May. In short, it is the least controversial and most broadly appealing and undeniable case for the president.
Her brothers, of course, chose a different approach. That same night and to prove the same point, Eric Trump branded the Democrats as flag burners and dummies who discounted the president’s odds in 2016. The night prior, Trump Jr. lambasted the Left for trying to cancel the Founding Fathers. That is all very right and true, but it appeals more to an already motivated base at the expense of the swing voters needed for the president to win.
The Trump sons likely delivered the speeches they knew their father wanted. Tiffany Trump, who has been open about not knowing “what it’s like to have a typical father figure,” had no such obligation. Instead, she said what needed to be said — and perhaps not what her father wanted. That makes her an effective surrogate, one her father would be wise to keep around.
