Donald Trump’s children, from left, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump, at the Republican National Convention.
It was a statement that read as though Donald Trump had drafted it himself.
Last Wednesday, as the Republican presidential nominee spiraled down into a week that would ultimately be dominated by his personal attacks on a former Miss Universe and his seething response to poor reviews of his debate performance, NBC News reported that among those growing increasingly concerned about the trajectory of his campaign were his three adult children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric. The kids, NBC’s Katy Tur reported, were starting to worry about the campaign’s adverse impact on the family business.
It didn’t take long for Trump to respond. On a three-state swing through Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, the celebrity businessman, who obsessively monitors media coverage of his campaign, grew irritated as he sat on his plane watching the report and others quoting anonymous advisers critical of his lack of debate preparation, according to an adviser. Soon, via a spokeswoman, emerged a pair of statements — one on behalf of Trump’s kids and the other a personal response from the candidate himself.
“They are happier than ever before, as they should be, given the success in the polls and in Monday’s debate,” the statement issued on the kids’ behalf read. Any suggestion to the contrary was “a fabricated lie,” the statement continued, adding that the Trump “business continues to be tremendously successful” and his assets “among the best in the world.”
Responding to Tur personally, Trump said, “Your sources, if they even exist, are probably sources that have been fired long ago and have no knowledge of what is happening in the campaign. Hard to be unhappy when we are doing so well.”
Although the campaign strongly denies it, those in and close to Trump World describe anything but a happy relationship between Trump and his adult children in recent days. A source close to the campaign, who declined to be named discussing the inner-workings of the operation, said the candidate’s children have been “frustrated” with their father for his lack of attention to debate preparations and struggle to stay disciplined, and at Trump’s senior staff who have been unable to control the candidate from giving in to his worst impulses on the campaign trail, including his increasingly personal attacks on Hillary Clinton and his unconstrained use of Twitter to settle personal scores.
Asked for comment, Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman, strongly denied any tensions. “There is no truth to this,” she said, adding that “the team, including the kids,” are working well together.
Closer to their father than just about anyone, the Trump kids have more than once stepped in to help right the course of their father’s insurgent campaign over the last year. The kids, along with Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, have advised Trump on strategy and key staffing moves — including the firing of former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski earlier this year and the hiring of Kellyanne Conway as manager in August. They have also served as perhaps his most important surrogates to Americans skeptical of his character and temperament — insisting their father is more open, caring and constrained than his critics would attest and offering their own lives as proof. “Judge his values by those he’s instilled in his children,” Ivanka Trump said as she introduced her father at the Republican National Convention in July.
Yet the central struggle of Trump’s unlikely rise from political novice to the Republican nominee has always been the battle to save the candidate from himself — and one that his kids are said to be increasingly frustrated by.
After a period in which the GOP nominee saw his poll numbers rise by sticking with carefully prepared remarks that offered a more conciliatory message aimed at women and minorities, Trump has reverted back to old destructive habits in recent days, going off script to attack Clinton and other critics in increasingly personal ways.
Campaigning in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the candidate imitated Clinton’s stumbling into a van at a 9/11 remembrance ceremony last month. “She’s supposed to fight all these different things, and she can’t make it 15 feet to her car,” the GOP nominee sneered — a complete reversal of his initial reaction, in which he simply offered best wishes for Clinton’s recovery from pneumonia.