The Heir

A message from McAfee.

I'd say howdy, but I'm not a real cowboy.

And I'm not a real alien.

We're deep fakes, and because of fakes like us, it's hard to tell what's real.

Unless you have McAfee.

McAfee's scam detector automatically identifies text and email scams.

And even deep fake.

And it works everywhere, even out on the range.

Yeah!

But you're not even a real cowboy.

If they're faking it, they're not making it past us.

Get award-winning scam detection today.

McAfee.com/slash keep it real.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This week, Democrats were debating how they'd take on Trump.

But regardless of what happens in 2020, we may never reach a post-Trump era.

American politics has always had its dynasties, and no family seems more intent on building one than the Trumps.

Let's talk politics now in campaign trail mix.

Today we have predictions of a new political dynasty.

Last few decades, the Trump family business has been real estate, but for the next few decades, the Trump family business might be Republican politics.

Trumps will be a dynasty that will last for decades, propelling the Republican Party into a new party.

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscal got into some trouble over the weekend, saying the Trumps will be a dynasty that lasts for decades.

And as it happens, my colleague McKay Coppins has spent the last few months reporting out what that dynasty might look like.

Which of the Trump kids is the heir to the hair?

And how has that battle for succession played out in the move from Manhattan to Washington?

His story is on the cover of this month's magazine and available online this week.

McKay, thanks for joining us here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks for having me.

So Brad Parscal, who is the Trump re-election campaign manager, he is a friend of Jared Kushner, close with the family, at least parts of the family, said at an event in California over the weekend that the Trumps will be a dynasty that lasts for decades.

Is it weird to be projecting a dynasty?

One of the responses that came back from Lou Dobbs, who's the Fox business commentator, a Trump favorite, he tweeted, this may be one of the dumbest things a campaign manager for a populist candidate ever said.

Yeah, it's certainly not a populist sentiment that we're building something here where generations of Trumps are going to inherit

political influence and office.

That said,

the Trumps have been extremely kind of deliberate for actually a couple generations now about their eagerness to build a dynasty.

This goes back

several generations.

I write in the piece about Friedrich Trump,

the first Trump to kind of come to America from Germany and build his fortune on it during the gold rush by, you know, building restaurants and brothels and things like that.

But more recently, Donald Trump, the president, has always kind of pitted his children against each other in a quest to

pick an heir, to choose somebody who would inherit the Trump empire.

Now, when he was in business primarily, it was who would be the next face of the Trump organization.

Now that it's politics, it's who will be his political heir, who will inherit the MAGA base.

And you're right that it's not a very popular sentiment, but it is something that the Trumps have been pretty unabashed about.

As with kind of everything they do,

they don't waste a lot of time on pretenses and subtext.

And I think that the fact that Brad Parscal is out there saying this just kind of confirms that this is the way the family is thinking.

Right.

It is not, as you point out in your piece, a normal thing for presidents to have their children working for them in the White House.

But when

Trump, as president-elect, was not confirming that Ivanka Trump would work in the White House, and in fact, for the first month or two, she was not working in the White House, it was always seen as just a matter of time and that Jared Kushner would work in the White House, and that, of course,

Donald Trump Jr.

and Eric Trump would run the business.

Nobody who has watched the Trumps for more than 10 minutes was surprised by any of those.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, even during the campaign,

the Trump campaign, which was kind of famously volatile and

constantly in kind of various states of chaos, went through a lot of different aides and advisors and campaign officials.

But the one constant was his kids were always to one degree or another involved, right?

That's partly a function of Donald Trump's personality.

He is somebody who inherently distrusts people, but assumes that if you're blood,

you have a better chance at them not screwing you over, frankly.

And so he's always kept his children close in that regard, but he's also always kind of pitted them against each other to compete for his affection and respect and approval.

And so it may have only been a matter of time before Ivanka and Jared enter the White House, but really all of his adult children, to one extent or another, are involved somehow.

They're involved in the business, they're involved in the politics, the campaigning, the White House, the policymaking, and that's how he likes it.

You spent a lot of time on this topic of succession, what is going to happen.

Why do you think it matters when we think about it beyond just, okay, who will have the rights to the brand, essentially?

Who will be deciding where one hotel goes versus another?

What is it about this topic that specifically, when we think about the future of American politics, the future of American life, this makes a difference in?

Aaron Powell, this was actually one of the issues that I knew we would have to address coming into the story, which is that the idea of a Trump dynasty will seem absurd on its face to some readers.

The idea that Trump will be anything other than kind of this fluke in electoral politics will be met with a certain amount of skepticism.

I try to make the case in this piece that people should drop some of that skepticism.

Trump has only been on the political stage for a few years, but in that brief amount of time, it's been remarkable how much influence he's had, especially on the Republican Party and conservative politics.

I mean, I think about, and during the transition, Stephen Moore, the economist who was going to be appointed to the Federal Reserve before he had some problems that caused him to pull back, he said in a meeting with people on the Hill, Republicans on the Hill, this is the party of Trump now.

And people, Republicans, oh, how could it be?

What are you saying?

And that was maybe a month after Trump had won election.

I talked to Moore that afternoon, and he said, I don't know why this is so complicated for people.

It was the party of Reagan.

Now it's the party of Trump.

He's the president.

But even then, I don't think anybody would have been able to predict just how much and how quickly Trump has redefined the entire Republican Party around him and his personality and his politics to the extent that he has clear politics.

Well, right.

And you could say that this is a cult of personality, that these are just people who are excited about Donald Trump as this kind of unique figure.

And once he's gone, everything will revert back to normal.

But I do think that Donald Trump,

whether it was on purpose or on accident, laid out a new playbook for Republicans.

And it's based in nationalism and nativism and

a certain brand of Republican politics that does break from the orthodoxies of the past.

And if you need any indication of whether Republicans are embracing that, you can read this piece.

There's a whole section where I have pretty high-level Republican officials kind of falling all over each other to praise Don Jr.

as the future of the party, somebody who has a bright future.

He could run for office.

He could be chairman of the RNC.

I mean,

these ideas that Don Jr.

is going to be this major player in Republican politics would have been preposterous just a couple of years ago.

But the fact that he is being heralded as kind of the next generation of Republicans says a lot about where the party is and why this kind of succession battle matters, because the consequences, I think, will reverberate well beyond just the next couple of years.

It'll be what the Republican Party continues to stand for.

And, you know, on top of all of that, the Trump's business holdings, their media prominence, all of that stuff will make them a fixture of American life for a while.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, you have in your piece that there was some polling done of Don Jr.

maybe running in a Western state that is not obviously a place where he lives.

But the possibility of that happening seems at least conceivable.

And then if he were to run, if he were to win, then he would be a governor or senator, and that's it.

Then he is part of the political world in his own right.

That's right.

And, you know, people who don't follow this stuff very closely probably assume that Ivanka is the one who's going to be the heir, right?

She's always been Trump's favorite.

She's the one in the White House.

She was the one who was the co-star of The Apprentice, essentially.

That's right.

And during the campaign, she was much more visible than Don.

But what we've seen over the last couple of years is Don has really kind of emerged as this MAGA celebrity.

He's out on the campaign trail constantly.

He draws big crowds.

People go crazy for him.

And he really mimics his father.

Whereas Ivanka is much more cautious and polished and cares still about kind of approval from the elites.

Don Jr.

is 100% replicating what his father does on the campaign trail, which is he goes out there and he makes crazy jokes and he has applause lines and he kind of whips up the crowd into a lather and that's made him this kind of interesting figure

in conservative politics and has made it so that he really is kind of positioned now to take advantage of his father's base in a way that Ivanka may not be.

Aaron Powell, so is that what makes a political dynasty different from a business dynasty?

If Trump had not run for president, if he'd not been elected president, would Ivanka Trump be in the stronger shape, you think?

And it's just as the politics of Trump have taken root and transformed politics of the Republican Party in the country, that that's where it's turned more to Don Jr.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, what's happened is the Trump family business effectively changed in November of 2016.

They were a family that was built on business and real estate and especially television.

That was kind of their main money maker at that point.

And what happened was Trump won the election, shocking everyone, including some in Trump's orbit.

And then the family business changed.

And so now it's politics.

And whereas, you know, I spoke to Stephen Hess, who's a scholar at the Brookings Institution who studies political dynasties in America.

And he made this point to me, which is that in corporate dynasties and business dynasties, the patriarch can kind of just choose his heir and anoint that person as the next CEO of the company, right?

It's kind of a clean, obvious way of doing things.

As long as you can get the board in agreement with you, that's what you do.

But with politics, you don't have as much control.

We've seen examples through recent history of voters kind of upending the best-laid plans of political patriarchs.

The Bushes are a prime example.

The Bushes always thought Jeb was going to be the next in line.

He was kind of the smart one, the well-behaved one.

And then George W.

shocked everyone by beating him to the White House.

And starting by in 1994, when Jeb Bush lost the Florida governor's race and George Bush won the Texas governor's race.

And then they had to start turning to George W.

But yeah, that was

the whole drama of the Bush family.

And I think you could see a similar dynamic now playing out within the Trump family, whereas Trump always saw Ivanka as the next in line.

Don kind of went out there on his own and built his own fan base and now is taking advantage of that, while Ivanka is sort of in the White House trying to appeal to geopolitical power players and world leaders and Wall Street Street Titans.

And a lot of those people don't take her as seriously as she would like.

And she occasionally kind of has these headlines that make her look less than savvy.

And all of that happens in a way that really kind of upsets her, but also upsets the expectations that the President had for who was going to take the mantle after he was gone.

And the President, of course, is watching this very closely.

There's a line in your piece that I'm going to quote from here because it just feels like it captures so much of the Trump presidency and politics right now.

You're comparing to the most famous American political dynasty.

But if Camelot was always a romantic facade, the Trumps would drop the ennobling pretense.

Like a funhouse 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.

Watching Trump's children appear on Fox News, one gets the sense that they're still auditioning for their father's affection.

That is how this works, that these are people who

this is their father, he is the president, he is their boss, and they're going on TV to get him to think nice things about them based on their performances.

That's right.

And, you know, there is a tragic element to this story.

Another editor at The Atlantic compared it to a modern King Lear.

And I think there are certain kind of tragic Shakespearean elements of this story, but at its core, this is a story about children who want their father to respect them and show affection to them.

And there's a lot more at stake for the rest of us than in a lot of other families where that similar dynamic plays out.

But it is a human story.

And

I think that one of the especially tragic characters in all of this is Don Jr.

Because whereas Trump has always kind of doted on Ivanka, and part of that is transactional.

Ivanka has been very good at getting him positive press coverage over the years.

Don Jr.

has been seen as a screw-up, right?

He didn't go straight into the family business.

He bummed around Colorado after graduating from college.

He's had his kind of scrapes in the tabloids, and, you know, more recently, had a high-profile divorce, kind of echoing his own father's history.

But Don, more than anything,

wants his father to respect him and approve of him.

And I write about the famous Trump Tower meeting during the campaign.

And I quote somebody who says that this was his bid to kind of take over the campaign, or at least to have more influence in the campaign, to show his father he was up to the job.

And of course, it ended up blowing up in everyone's face.

And I write about later when the coverage of the Trump Tower meeting is happening, Trump is watching it from the West Wing, and he kind of shakes his head wearily and says of Don Jr., he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

And that really is kind of how Trump has traditionally seen his son.

And all of these old grievances and rivalries and kind of ancient family dynamics underlie what's going on in the White House, what's going on in the First Family, and the effects kind of have rippled across national politics in a way that affects all of us.

All right, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with more with McCaige Hoppins in a moment.

This episode is brought to you by Onit.

Want to know the secret to staying locked in?

Onit Alpha Brain.

This daily supplement is jam-packed with clinically studied ingredients that support focus, memory, and mental speed.

Whether you're in your daily grind or deep in the zone, Onit Alpha Brain helps you stay razor sharp.

Visit Onit.com for 15% off, subscribe and save, and see what your brain can really do.

We're back with McKay Coppin, staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of the cover story in the latest print edition of The Atlantic about the Trump family succession.

McKay,

I thought back when I was reading your story to a conversation that I had with an editor the the day before the 2016 election, whatever that was, November 7th.

And the editor said to me,

as we were planning for the likely Trump loss and Clinton win, you should do a story that's about the next Trump.

Who is that person?

We've got to find that person and explain how that person emerges.

And I said to the editor, there isn't someone else.

There's no one like this.

And

you think about how

he was in the pop culture, who he was as a figure in the news long before he ever started running.

And I think maybe most importantly, the skills he has at understanding people, reading people, knowing how to ride the media and how to

affect what gets written about him and about other people.

That is unique to him, it seems to me.

And so I really push back on this story.

Of course,

the fight that I I had with my editor about it, maybe debate, ended up being moot a few hours later the next night.

And I never did embark on that story because the next Trump was Trump at that point.

But

is there, when you look at any of the children,

do they have what Trump has, what Donald Trump has?

It's a good question.

I think that each of his children, to one degree or another, have elements of Trump's skill set.

You know, Ivanka is kind of as savvy about the media as Trump is, or at least traditionally has been very good at generating positive coverage.

I think that's kind of started to turn since she entered the White House and her whole brand was politicized.

But not as good at sort of playing the media like a piano.

She's a lot more careful.

She's a lot more restrained.

And so, yeah, she has some of the instincts, but is not quite as good at it.

Don Jr.

has the instinct for kind of combat, but may or may not be as skilled at identifying the weak spots of his opponents and kind of honing in on them the way that Trump does.

Eric is much more interested in the business.

He's interested in architecture and construction and kind of the nitty-gritty of the real estate business,

but didn't study at the feet of Fred, who really was kind of this real estate outerborough kingpin in New York, and so may not have the same kind of experience.

And so all of his children are good at certain things.

I don't think any of them are as audacious as Trump.

I don't think any of them are quite as skilled as Trump is, but none of them have

all the things that Trump has.

But you also look at other political dynasties throughout history and often what you see is a kind of procession of watered down versions of the first star of that dynasty, right?

I mean, have we had another JFK in the Kennedy dynasty?

We have Joe Kennedy maybe running for Senate in Massachusetts, trying to maybe be that person.

Sure, but sure.

Sure.

But you're right.

There have been many Kennedys who have been in political life, many Kennedys who've been elected to office, but nobody certainly who has been elected president.

Maybe RFK would have been that, but that in itself was 50 years ago.

And Ted Kennedy was seen as kind of the lion of the

liberal lion of the Senate, but still not, you know, didn't didn't have the same Camelot

mythology built around him that JFK did.

So, you know, I do think that this gets at one of the kind of running themes of

American life, which is that this is a country that's founded in revolt against monarchy, and yet we are very adept at preserving our own royalty.

You know, wealth is passed down from one generation to another.

Heirs get these very kind of big, important jobs that they may or may not be suited for.

And the name goes a long way.

And so even if none of Trump's children have what Trump has, I think a lot of them are going to have a good chance at succeeding just based on the name and the money and the political support that their father has built up.

We leave out of the conversation two people who are mostly left out of your article, Tiffany Trump and Baron Trump, his other two children, both of them through other mothers.

Tiffany Trump is in law school, mostly out of the spotlight.

Baron Trump is still a teenager.

So that's, it seems like they're just not part of the picture.

Yeah, that's right.

And, you know, the three oldest children are really the ones who grew up surrounded by the trappings of dynasty more than the other two.

Don't.

Which is funny because Baron Trump is the one growing up living in the White House.

Yeah, that's right.

And who knows?

You know, who knows what will happen with Barron when he gets older?

But, you know, I chose not to focus on him for obvious reasons.

The three oldest grew up in Trump Tower with their last name stamped across the building.

Their dad was kind of becoming a bigger and bigger New York celebrity and then national celebrity

as they were growing up.

You mentioned in your piece, Michael Jackson, who had an apartment in Trump Tower, used to stop by to play video games.

That's right.

They kind of lived in this bizarre, almost richy-rich style fantasy world where they had all the toys and games and access to to celebrity and they rode around in limousines.

But within the family, Trump kind of cultivated this Darwinian experience where he was

he really fostered competition among the kids.

When they would go on ski trips, they would race each other down the hill and Trump would jab at them with his pole to get ahead of them.

And his favorite kind of maxim was that you should never trust anyone.

And he would test the kids by asking them if they trusted him.

And if they said yes, he would reprimand them.

Didn't they know that they were not supposed to say yes?

I mean, doesn't that game work once?

Maybe, although

I have to believe that the kind of the child's instinct to trust your father maybe leads you to be like, are you sure I'm not supposed to say I trust you?

Anyway, I mean, but that was the kind of family that they grew up in.

And so Tiffany and Baron kind of being separate from all of that were spared largely from that contest.

But that contest between the kids has its roots when they were very young and has really continued today.

Aaron Powell, we've been talking a lot about the dynamics between the president and his children and the children with him.

This, of course, is also about the dynamics between the children.

And since you've identified Ivanka Trump and Don Jr.

as the main combatants in this fight for succession, what is the relationship between them?

How are they going about it, knowing that this is all being watched from

the couch or from afar by the president himself?

This was one of the most fascinating things to me as I was reporting out the story, and it was a question I asked everyone I talked to is kind of what is the actual sibling relationship like between these

people, especially Ivanka and Don, as they are engaged in this kind of high-stakes power struggle.

And I think it's hard for a lot of people from the outside to understand kind of how these wealthy, powerful families work, because it's not as if Ivanka and Don are not speaking to each other, right?

They're still part of the family.

They still are, you know, show up at Christmas or Fourth of July parties and see each other and talk.

But what I found while reporting this story is that each of them, particularly Don and Ivanka, and also to a lesser extent Jared and Eric, have kind of their own orbits of allies and loyalists and advisors who are doing their bidding.

And what I found is that as Don has been ascendant over the last couple of years and Ivanka has at times struggled in the White House,

we've seen their kind of these two camps grow more and more suspicious of each other and the two siblings more and more worried that the other's lieutenants are kind of out there planting negative stories about them or knifing them or whatever.

And that was something that was actually hard for me to navigate as a reporter, trying to kind of talk to people and sussing out who was loyal to whom and who had an agenda against whom and all of that.

Do they like each other as brother and sister or is it just beyond that?

I don't know.

I think that, sure, I think they, you know, they like a lot of sibling relationships, I think it's complicated, right?

I think that they at times, you know,

they share this very intense history together that I think has bonded them in certain ways.

But they also, you know, see the world in very different ways and see their own kind of trajectories in very different ways.

And sometimes they've come into conflict with each other over that.

A few days before the midterm elections, there was this story that was published in McClatchy under the headline, Trump Kids on the Campaign Trail, Don Jr.

Wows, Ivanka Disappoints.

And Ivanka's kind of team was enraged about the story and they thought that Don was behind it.

And then later, Don confronted Ivanka over rumors that her team was undermining him in off-the-record conversations with reporters.

And according to someone familiar with the conversation that I talked to,

he said, tell your people to stop trashing me to the media.

And so that, I think, shows first the kind of unusual nature of this relationship.

This is not a kind of conversation that would happen in very many families in the world.

On the other hand, it shows that they are still talking to each other and are kind of aware of

the jockeying that's going on.

So what does this mean going forward, and how much of it depends on whether Trump is re-elected or is a one-term president?

I think Ivanka's future is much more reliant in some ways on Trump getting re-elected because a lot of her power is derived directly from the jobs that her father can give her, right?

Trump has been out there floating her name for everything from

president of the World Bank to UN ambassador, and in the meantime, has kind of traveled the world speaking at important conferences and appearing with world leaders.

But she's only able to do most of that because her father is president.

If that goes away, I don't know what her future is.

I've spoken to people who think that she doesn't want to go back to kind of hawking handbags and luxury condos.

She wants to be this sort of kind of of international figure with political clout.

And I don't know how realistic that is if her father isn't there to help her achieve it.

Don, on the other hand.

I don't really see

if he is a one-term president in a Democratic administration having much interest in

Ivanka Trump being an international figure.

I'm not sure President Warren is going to be appointing her to any ambassadorships.

On the other hand, Don has built this kind of grassroots following that certainly is helped along by his father, but is not entirely reliant on him.

If he fails to win re-election, you could see Don kind of turning that into a bid to kind of get back at the elites and the people who rigged the election and the ones who never let my, you know, help me finish my father's unfinished business, that kind of thing.

And so I do think, you know, that my story ends on a note of Don kind of having taken the MAGA mantle upon himself.

I don't know what that means for him, whether he actually will run for office, whether he'll just be this sort of self-styled kingmaker traveling the country, endorsing candidates and giving speeches at raucous rallies.

But I don't think that we're going to see the Trumps go away anytime soon, regardless of what happens in 2020.

All right.

McKay Coppins, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks, Isaac.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by John Batiste.

You can find show notes and past episodes at theatlantic.com slash radio.

If you like the show, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Thanks for listening.

See you next week.