Emily Jane Fox - Born Trump

ON THE day after the election, most of the staff in Portfolio’s offices were zombies. Some cried all day, taking turns wiping their faces in the bathroom. To them, it was a disaster. They were in complete despair about having this book on their hands. But other executives were elated. What they’d bought as a famous-reality-star-meets-builder-meets-fashion-executive-meets-mom-and-wife how-to was now something entirely different. They had the First Daughter’s book. By accident. And it was scheduled to come out just about one hundred days after her father would take office. “We never thought of canceling,” the person who worked on the book said. “There was the chance for it to be a big hit, and you’d have to be on a suicide mission to cancel the book by a First Daughter, even in this case.”

The looming issue was how to do press around the book. Ivanka had not yet determined what her role would be once she and Jared moved to Washington. She would be some kind of an adviser to her father and his administration. That was never the question. What was at issue was how she would describe her position in marketing the book. She hadn’t intended to officially join the administration until ethics concerns made it nearly impossible for her not to. So how could she go out before she herself answered those questions and have a book publisher try and field the issue, thorny as it was?

The day before Christmas she called the publisher directly, saying she was not sure what her role would be, whether it was going to be official or unofficial, or how she would describe it to people. She wondered if they could move the publication date from March back to May. As it happened, the book was set to go out the following Monday. The wheels were so far in motion that in any other case, it would have been absurd to try to stop them at that point. But this wasn’t another author looking for a favor; it was the incoming First Daughter. They pushed the book back. (Not long after the book was meant to come out, Ivanka announced her official role within the administration, as assistant to the president, advising him on issues related to American families, female entrepreneurship, and workforce development. As an official government employee, she could not market the book herself, which meant no interviews, no tour, no readings, no appearances. Before her attorneys and White House lawyers came down on it, every network had been fighting to get her for the book. “The lineup would have made Princess Diana jealous, had she promoted a book,” one publishing executive said. They had to scrap it all, though. And the reviews, one after the next, panned the book—for what it said, for what it left out, and for what people read between the lines. “She didn’t ruin the year,” the executive said, “but it was a bloodbath.”)

IN THE days following the election, foreign leaders and diplomats flooded the switchboard at Trump Tower. There were protocols for how these calls were supposed to be received and made, of course. Many of them were outlined in the dozens and dozens of binders that members of the Trump transition team had put together leading up to November. Few of the transition officials imagined that these binders would actually get put to use. Donald Trump was such a long shot that their work was more of a just-in-case than a these-will-almost-certainly-help-inform-the-next-president. Even fewer imagined that the binders would be picked apart and summarily chucked in the trash once Vice President-elect Pence took over the transition. Ivanka and Jared, along with her siblings and their father and Pence and his allies, had a deep suspicion of any materials put together by anyone connected to Chris Christie. They were also so disengaged from the pre–Election Day transition work that they had their hand in none of the preparation that the professionals—people with real governmental experience, with actual expertise in national security and on the economy and intergovernmental relations and intelligence operations and diplomacy and how the bureaucracy in Washington functions and what all of these areas need to run properly every day—put together. The Trumps, who worked out of their dad’s office in a building bearing their last name, knew nothing about any of that. What they did know was that, deep down, they trusted only themselves. Anything prepared without their input, particularly by people who they believed were loyal to Christie, who was not always a friend of the family—well, how could it be used?

Transition officials remember Ivanka coming down to the floor of Trump Tower that housed the transition operations to inspect what was going on. She and Jared seemed paranoid to staffers, worried that officials would be more loyal to Christie than to “the family,” which is how, people on the transition said, they referred to themselves—“Like a mafia movie,” one joked. People gossiped about overhearing “the family” talking about burning the place down and starting from scratch.

“They came into this with chips on their shoulder and grudges that a little seasoning and worldliness tells you that they shouldn’t bring to the party,” one transition official who was fired soon after the election recalled. “They brought it to the party anyway.”

It became abundantly clear once foreign leaders began to call. Transition officials had prepared a call book, laying out which calls they knew were going to come in, how to prepare for them, and which to prioritize, based on the traditional protocol surrounding these early days of the transition. All of it got tossed aside. It is unclear whether this was totally intentional; perhaps the Trump operation, as it existed after the election, was simply too overwhelmed and understaffed to keep up with all of the high-level international issues and decisions and processes it was suddenly faced with. For all its bluster, the Trump Organization is not a Fortune 500 company, with huge teams of people and sophisticated communication systems and tons of seasoned assistants crisscrossing spanning offices, ticking off to-dos and putting out fires. It’s a tiny office stuffed with decades-old magazine covers featuring the boss, and, one floor away, his kids’ offices in a sleeker, more modern area. One longtime executive-assistant-cum-gatekeeper, Rhona Graff, who had worked for the company for thirty years, handled all the calls and messages coming in for her boss.

That left Theresa May, the British prime minister, scrambling for a good twenty-four hours to get through to the incoming US president. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi got through earlier, as did Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a diplomatic faux pas deeply reflective of the total chaos within Trump Tower and the transition in the days and weeks following the election. Many lamented that if they had just stuck to the materials the early transition officials put together, this snub of a US ally would not have happened. It is impossible to say, though, whether anything would have really been different; it was Donald Trump who had just been elected president, after all. And Donald Trump, people were starting to realize, was not only unpredictable and erratic but also had a penchant for knocking things off kilter even when trying to stick to protocol. “They all paid for not sticking to what we’d planned,” the transition official said. “Because they looked like bumbling idiots.”

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was the first leader to make the pilgrimage to Trump Tower, less than ten days after Donald won the election. The Trump team left the pool of reporters on duty that day out of the meeting, as they did with American photographers. No one got the chance to ask questions before or after the sit-down, and no official photos were released, either, apart from a Facebook post on Donald’s page that showed him shoulder-to-shoulder with Abe in the foreground, the gilded moldings and marble and cream silk sofas of the Trump residence behind them. “It was a pleasure to have Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stop by my home and begin a great friendship,” he captioned the shot.