This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
You’d think that being one of the more ignored children of Donald Trump would be an ideal scenario. Eric Trump, had he any sense of self-preservation whatsoever, would stop vying for his father’s love and buy a pontoon boat on which to live out the rest of his years unburdened by the need to impress a ruthless patriarch. It’s always been the eldest kids who were the most respected by their dad: Don Jr., and then, of course, beautiful Ivanka.
And then there is Tiffany. Poor, blond, oft-forgotten Tiffany. The sole child of the early-’90s union between Trump and former pageant co-host Marla Maples, named after Tiffany & Co., trotted out sparingly and usually clumsily at few Trump events: Tiffany is the garish lava lamp of all the siblings with whom she shares a last name, and contrasts in particular with her sister. Ivanka has long been praised—in the media, and by her father, often creepily—for being poised and glamorous and capable of bridging the gap between her unsophisticated and brutish father and regular-degular rich people like whoever is hanging out with the Kushners. Tiffany has mostly been ignored as both a political heir and as Trump offspring, despite being the only one of the bunch to have gone to law school (Georgetown—no Ivy, but still pretty good!). The most we heard from Tiffany was in 2020, when she gave a disastrous 10-minute-long speech at a Pride event in Tampa. “Prior to politics, he supported gays, lesbians, the LGBQIA+ community, OK?” she said, thoughtfully leaving out the T in LGBT. When she was barely a year old, Trump talked about her baby-body, saying she inherited Maples’ legs but the jury was still out on whether she’d get her breasts, too. Suffice it to say that Tiffany has rarely been taken seriously by her dad, never mind the entire country.
But this second Trump term seems to be made for the neglected Trump children. Eric is regaining footing through his wife, Lara. And with Ivanka conspicuously absent from the campaign and, so it seems, their father’s reentry into the White House, the field is wide open for Tiffany to take the throne as President Father’s Favorite Girl.
In the last few months of her father’s campaign, Tiffany proved useful to Trump’s renewed political aspirations. Her father-in-law, Lebanese American tycoon Massad Boulos, has been named as Trump’s incoming Mideast adviser while also perhaps lying about exactly how much money he’s worth. Meanwhile, at an October campaign stop in Detroit, he announced his daughter’s pregnancy before Tiffany herself could make the news public. A new baby in the family will surely help make Trump seem less like a dictator and more like a real, human person whose cells will inevitably be passed down for generations to come.
If there’s anything Trump appreciates about the women in his family, it’s the way they soften his jagged edges. Maybe it’s Tiffany this time around, and not Ivanka, who will do the heavy lifting of humanizing her father to a populace that seems to have elected him out of a wicked combination of boredom, exhaustion, and rage. Ivanka didn’t always pull this off—and frankly, in some ways, she aided her father in seeming even more out of touch. And so maybe it’s Tiffany’s turn: sweet, slightly weird, somehow off-putting Tiffany, who seemed to always want to be a part of the family business but never seemed to know how to best enter it. Who knows if she’s up for the challenge, but it’s clearly her turn.
After all, aside from newly legal Barron, Tiff is the only of Trump’s adult children to not be named in a lawsuit by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Finally, some justice for middle children everywhere.
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