Why does Ivanka Trump visibly cringe every time her father touches her?
The scene in the new Trump family tell-all is familiar: The future president being affectionate with Ivanka, while treating Don Jr. and Eric roughly and even with disdain.
“Too Much and Never Enough,” Mary Trump’s scathing memoir about the dysfunctional family that created her uncle, President Donald Trump, was released Tuesday.
With excerpts of the book having run in major news outlets, many already are familiar with some of the juiciest bits of family gossip that Mary Trump shares. She characterizes her uncle as “the world’s most dangerous man” and describes him as a vicious bully as a child.
She also alleges the former reality TV star hired someone to take his SATs to get into the University of Pennsylvania; allowed her father, Trump’s older brother, to die alone in a hospital; ogled her in a bathing suit at Mar-a-Lago; and tried to cheat his siblings out of their share of their father’s fortune.
But there’s more, including an intimate family scene from the 1990s that depicts Donald Trump’s interactions with his three oldest children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric. The scene describes Ivanka, then likely in her early teens, sitting on her father’s lap, while her father kisses her, pinches her cheek and watches her brothers wrestle on the floor in front of them. At one point, the then-real estate mogul kicks whichever boy is pinned on the floor.
To many readers, the scene is both disturbing and typical. It conforms to various published accounts and Internet memes which suggest that Trump has had unorthodox and even problematic relationships with his children — how he’s shown favoritism towards Ivanka, 38, while treating Don Jr., 42, and Eric, 36, roughly and even with disdain.
Totally agree. pic.twitter.com/481ZlQ92VN
— E Frost (@EFrost54721937) July 13, 2020
The release of Mary Trump’s book, with its unflattering portrait of the president and other members of her extended family, also comes the day that both Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were trending on Twitter with the #ByeIvanka and #ByeDonJr hashtags.
White House senior advisor Ivanka Trump was criticized for touting a new initiative that tells American workers, unemployed in the COVID-19 pandemic, to go out and find new careers.
Later Tuesday, Ivanka Trump was accused by government watchdogs of potentially violating ethics laws by promoting a can of black beans, made by a company whose CEO is an outspoken supporter of her father. Trump tweeted a photo of herself holding a can of Goya brand beans.
Ivanka Trump tweets support for Goya Foods in a move that may have violated federal ethics laws. https://t.co/iyrTUDCmuV
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 15, 2020
On Tuesday, Meidas Touch, the political action committee, also put out another political attack ad that focuses on “the Trump family hypocrisy and corruption.”
Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, wrote that the scene of the president and her cousins took place when he brought his children to a family gathering at The House, his parents’ colonial mansion in Queens, New York. At the time, Fred Trump Sr., the once imposing and brutal patriarch, was suffering from dementia from Alzheimer’s disease.
“My grandfather was having a bad day,” Mary Trump opens the section of a chapter on how Fred Sr.’s cognitive and memory problems prompted Donald, along with his younger brother Robert, to maneuver for control of the family’s real estate empire. Eventually, the chapter comes to this scene:
“Shortly after Donald came in with his kids and Rob’s stepson. With the exception of Eric, they were all teenagers, the boys tall and chubby and wearing suits. Donald went to sit on the chair by the TV, and Ivanka climbed on his lap. The boys started wrestling. Donald watched the action from his chair, kissing Ivanka or pinching her cheek. Every once in a while, he’d stick his foot out and kick whichever boy was being pinned to the floor.”
Mary Trump said her uncle used to get down on the floor and wrestle with the boys when they were younger. She said such fights “basically consisted of his picking them up, throwing them on the ground and kneeling on them until they cried uncle.”
“As soon as they had gotten big enough to fight back in earnest, he opted out,” Mary Trump wrote.
When Ivanka Trump was young, she was often photographed sitting on her father’s lap, with them exchanging kisses or other affectionate touches. During the presidential election, the photos began to accompany news stories, commentary and social media posts about Trump’s uncomfortable tendency to talk sexually about his oldest daughter, who he made a vice president in his real estate company when she was a recent college graduate and who he made his senior advisor after he took control of the White House.
Such stories reported on the time that Trump watched Ivanka Trump, at 16, co-host the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant, according to The Independent. He turned to the then-Miss Universe and asked: “Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?”
Trump also once called Ivanka “voluptous” and told shock jock Howard Stern it was OK to describe her as “a piece of ass.” Perhaps most infamously, there was his 2006 appearance on “The View,” with Ivanka seated beside him, when he said, “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
As for Trump treating Don Jr. and Eric roughly, media accounts and biographies have described him as being tough on all his children, but especially on his sons. That treatment prompted his sons to be especially eager to gain his approval.
Profiles of Don Jr., his namesake, have talked about how he and his father have had an especially fraught relationship, which may explain Don. Jr.’s eagerness to follow in his father’s footsteps as a bombastic Twitter presence, as writer Julia Ioffe explained in GQ in 2018.
According to Don Jr.’s mother, Ivana Trump, her ex-husband was never keen on giving his name to his firstborn son. “You can’t do that!” Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana’s memoir, “Raising Trump.” “What if he’s a loser?”
The scene Mary Trump presents of Trump with his three children is followed by another in which the future president and his brother, Robert, treat their ailing father dismissively.
“Later Donald and Rob huddled together in the breakfast room, their shoulders close and their heads down,” Mary Trump wrote. “My grandfather stood nearby, leaning forward almost on the tips of his toes, trying to hear what thy were saying.”
Mary Trump said Fred Sr. presented them with a page from a magazine, showing a photo of a limousine and asked if they would get the car for him. “Sure, Pop,” Robert Trump said, while Donald Trump left the room.
“Whatever had once tied them together, Fred’s remaining sons had given up all pretense of caring what their father thought or wanted,” Mary Trump wrote. “Having served his father’s purpose, Donald now treated him with contempt as if his mental decline were somehow his own fault.”
This story has been updated to include reports that Ivanka Trump potentially violated federal ethics laws by tweeting a photo of herself, promoting a can of beans made by a company whose CEO is an outspoken supporter of her father.
