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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © Emily Jane Fox 2018
Cover designed by Milan Bozic
Cover photographs, from left: © Manny Hernandez/Getty Images; © BERND VON JUTRCZENKA/AFP/Getty Images; © Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images; © DOMINICK REUTER/AFP/Getty Images
Emily Jane Fox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008292492
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008292478
Version: 2019-05-09
To my mom, dad, and sister, who gave their unconditional and selfless, protective, and present love so freely and with such ease that I had little inkling of what it would be like to grow up any other way. I am grateful for that now more than ever.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Inauguration
Chapter 2: Campaign/Transition
Chapter 3: Election Day
Chapter 4: Born/Married/Divorced/Married/Divorced/Married/Raised Trump
Chapter 5: Meet the Mini-Voltrons
Chapter 6: Ivanka—Voltron Number One: The Media Mastermind
Chapter 7: “Bashert”
Chapter 8: You Are Who You Marry
Chapter 9: Don Jr.—Voltron Number Two: The Attack Dog
Chapter 10: Eric—Voltron Number Three: The Builder
Chapter 11: Tiffany—The Voltron from Another Universe
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
IVANKA TRUMP and Jared Kushner hustled themselves and their children up to the second floor of the residence in the White House, to the southeastern corner of her father’s new sixteen-room home. She was still in the white Oscar de la Renta pantsuit she’d worn all day—through the rain washing over her father’s swearing-in ceremony and the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue marking his inauguration—and chilled to her bones. She would soon change into a glittery champagne gown for the inaugural balls. Her hair would be teased and swept and sprayed into an ornate knot at the nape of her neck. She would prick teardrop diamonds into her ears and slather highlighter onto her cheekbones and underneath her eyebrow and onto her bare clavicle, exposed by the deep V of her dress.
All of that would have to wait. The Trump-Kushners sped into the Lincoln Bedroom, where they had stayed through her dad’s first weekend as the president of the United States of America. The traditional parade flirted dangerously close to sundown, which, on January 20, 2017, fell at 4:59 p.m. eastern standard time. As practicing Modern Orthodox Jews, Ivanka and Jared needed to light Shabbat candles as day turned into night in order to observe their own tradition, which Jared had been doing his whole life and Ivanka had joined him in when she converted, years earlier, before they married. She had arranged with the White House usher to have candlesticks waiting in their borrowed room. Usually she would have brought her own, as she typically did for a weekend away, but this weekend, in just about every way, was not typical for the Trumps. She figured the White House must have suitable candelabras lying around. She was correct.
The immediate family of five formed a semicircle around the White House’s candlesticks, and Ivanka struck a match to light the wicks. There they were, in a room Abraham Lincoln had once used as an office; which the Trumans had rebuilt in 1945, Jackie Kennedy had spiffed up in 1961, Hillary Clinton had freshened in the 1990s, and Laura Bush had again refurbished in 2004. The eight-by-six-foot rosewood Lincoln bed, with its six-foot-tall carved headboard—the bed that Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge had slept in—was at their backs; a holograph copy of the Gettysburg Address, one of only five signed, dated, and titled by Lincoln, sat on the desk nearby. Ivanka covered her eyes and recited the blessing over the candles: “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel at.” Blessed are You, God, Ruler of the universe, who sanctified us with the commandment of lighting Shabbat candles.
It was the first time Shabbat had been welcomed this way in the history of the residence.
SOME FIVE hours earlier, as light sheets of rain fell over Washington, DC, Donald J. Trump had pressed his right hand to two Bibles on the West Lawn of the Capitol and became the forty-fifth person to recite the oath of office, as prescribed by Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution. One of the Bibles he chose was used by Lincoln when he was sworn in at his first inauguration in 1861, as the nation hung on the precipice of the Civil War. The other had been given to him by his mother in 1955, two days before his ninth birthday, just after he graduated from the Sunday Church Primary School at the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens. Its cover is embossed with his name and, on the inside, signed by church officials.
After taking the oath, Trump turned his back on the crowd and swung his arms open toward his family, who had encircled him as he made his vow to the American people. He first locked eyes with Ivanka, who had positioned herself directly at the center of the