Born Trump

CHAPTER 3

Election Day

POLICE SHUT down Fifty-Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues midmorning on Election Day for the Trump motorcade. The cars slid up in front of Public School 59, a school turned polling station for the day, just blocks from Trump Tower. Red and blue lights flashed against silver barricades set up to hold back the dozens of people who’d gathered outside to get a glimpse of the candidate and both cheer and boo him before he cast his ballot. He and Melania stepped out of a black SUV, Ivanka, Jared, and their daughter Arabella following seconds behind. They all went down to the school’s gymnasium, filled at that point with agents in boxy suits and earpieces, cameramen clicking away, and reporters shouting questions at the Trumps. The family, in all neutrals, popped against the gym’s baby-blue-and-banana-yellow walls. Apart from Donald, who’d walked in wearing only a suit jacket, all of them kept their coats on inside. Melania’s Balmain coat, with its wide lapel and gold buttons, hung on her shoulders, leaving her arms free. Ivanka kept her cream trench coat belted tightly over her black turtleneck and pants. Jared’s green utility coat remained over the gray V-neck he’d layered over blue button-down, black jeans, and white Common Project sneakers.

Ivanka approached the registration table first. “Here you go,” the lady behind the table told her. “What you’re going to do is fill out the ballot in one of the privacy booths behind you. When you’re done with that, you bring it to the scanner under the basketball net.” The woman asked Arabella if she wanted a sticker, and Ivanka smiled and brushed her daughter’s hair back as she thanked the woman. She picked up the ballot and showed it to her father. They locked eyes. This was really happening. Melania was next to approach the table, followed by Donald himself. Jared went up last. “Last name Kushner,” he told the woman.

Don Jr., his wife, Vanessa, and four of their five kids showed up to the same polling station a little while later.

Election Day happened to be Eric and Lara’s second wedding anniversary, and the two voted a few blocks south, at the Fifty-Third Street Public Library. Eric proudly took a photo of his filled-in ballot, and tweeted it out to his followers. It is, of course, illegal to take photos in the voting booth in New York, a fact that many of his nearly two million followers were quick to point out. He later deleted the tweet.

They all wound up back at Trump Tower. Don Jr. did a bunch of local radio hits. They made calls to supporters and took calls from busybodies wondering what the mood was like inside. By around five o’clock, when the first dismal round of returns started rolling in, the three eldest kids started calling in to local stations in battleground states to make a last push. Jared made calls to a few media friends. He asked one high-up executive at a major media organization who’d known Kushner both professionally and personally for years what he was hearing about Florida, which at that point was their last hope for any path to victory that night. The executive told him it didn’t look great, but what did he expect? “Did we get your support?” Jared asked. “No,” the executive told him. “No you did not.” Jared hung up and called Matt Drudge, another macher in the media circle he’d accumulated. The media had been off about the Trump campaign the whole time, Drudge told him. Wait until the next couple rounds of exit polls come out, he said. That’s when things could start to shift.

Since before five o’clock that morning, campaign officials had been huddled on the fifth floor of Trump Tower—essentially an expansive unfinished utility closet with concrete floors and no heat, which staffers in the early part of the campaign used as a makeshift headquarters. By the time the sun set that evening, dozens of people packed the room as then national field director Bill Stepien zeroed in on the campaign model, mostly focused on Florida, and Jared and Ivanka and Eric and Don began milling about, poring over maps and models and numbers coming in from their guys on the ground and officials in Florida feeding them what they knew. Donald was up in his triplex atop the tower until after eight o’clock, when he called Ivanka, asking where she was. He told her to leave the fifth floor and come up to the fourteenth—the official headquarters—and he would meet her there.

They looked like sardines, the lot of them. Donald, Melania, the kids, Pence, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Chris Christie, Mark Shot—the whole MAGA mod squad, stuffed into that corporate-looking office, cramped around giant screens and projections and TV screens as campaigners explained the numbers coming in and the New York Times prediction needle shifted slightly in Donald’s direction. They stayed there until after eleven, when networks and wire services called Florida for him and the tide started turning in other battleground states. They took the executive elevator straight to the triplex—the family, the Pences, Conway, Christie and his son Andrew, Bannon, Stephen Miller, Priebus, Dave Bossie. The rest either stayed on the fourteenth floor or started to make their way a few blocks west to the victory party at the Midtown Hilton.

Miller sheepishly approached a few of them and told them he had prepared an exquisitely drafted concession speech. “What do we have on the victory speech?” someone asked Miller. “Bullet points,” he said.

So they pulled out a laptop, and Miller, Pence, Ivanka, Jared, Don, Eric, and Christie started writing. Ivanka pointed out that it would be a great opportunity to reach out to women, who undoubtedly would need it after watching the first female major party candidate lose. Maybe we can mention parental leave or child care credits, she suggested. “Vank,” Jared interrupted. “This isn’t the speech for that. We have plenty of time to get to that later.” The rest of the people around the table exchanged glances and took a breath. If anyone could say that to her, it was Jared. They were just glad he had.

Donald had been watching the returns on the small TV set up in the kitchen, repeatedly calling to check in on the victory speech he would have to give in a few hours. “We’re just polishing it!” they yelled to him, though, technically, there was not yet a fully formed speech to polish. “The truth is, we were cramming,” one of the people around the table said. “But we couldn’t let him know that.”

Once it became clear that things were going in his direction, the mood shifted to a mix of giddiness and shock. Jared threw his arm around Christie, saying “We did this.” Conway kept repeating, “Can you believe this?” Melania looked shocked, and mostly concerned with Barron, who seemed whip-tired on the couch. It was well after midnight at this point, and she focused on keeping him awake on the couch. Donald remained stoic, and Pence seemed a little more celebratory. Karen Pence, one observer noted, looked as though she were at a funeral.

The ride over to the Hilton took less than ten minutes. There they waited in a tiny holding area off to the side of the main stage. That’s when the Associated Press officially called the race for Donald Trump, at about 2:30 a.m. Huma Abedin’s name flashed on the screen of Kellyanne’s iPhone, which she had on silent. A day earlier, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, had emailed Conway with Abedin’s number. If Donald should win, he’d written, they would call him within fifteen minutes of the AP’s call. Abedin would be her point of contact.

Pence had already gone onstage to address the crowd, telling them that they were sure they had won, but were waiting for a Clinton concession and an official call. After Donald took the phone and accepted Clinton’s concession and congratulations, Pence walked over to his wife Karen and told her that they’d done it. They’d won.

“I know,” she told him coldly.

“Well, how about a kiss?”

“Mike,” she said, turning to him, “you got what you wanted.”

DONALD, NOW officially the president-elect, walked onstage just before the clock struck three in the morning to talk for about fifteen minutes. “To Melania and Don and Ivanka and Eric and Tiffany and Barron, I love you and I thank you,” he said about halfway through his speech, after thanking his parents and siblings. “Especially for putting up with all of those hours. This was tough. This was tough. This political stuff is nasty, and it is tough, so I want to thank my family very much. Really fantastic. Thank you all. Thank you all. Lara, unbelievable job. Unbelievable. Vanessa, thank you. Thank you very much. What a great group.” Incidentally, and accidentally, he forgot to thank Jared, the de facto shadow campaign manager, a body man meets yes-man, bound to him in law and desire to make their families as rich and powerful, at least outwardly so, as possible.

They got a few hours of sleep before Jared started making calls to close friends and campaign associates. Many of them had told him that November 9 would be a day of reckoning. They’d spent months warning him that people thought of him as a psychopath for supporting this campaign, or at best an asshole. They drilled into his head that no one was going to want to talk to him after the election, and that he’d face a steep uphill climb to rebuild his reputation and that of his family. What they called his “big real estate reboot” would begin on the morning after Election Day. “Prepare yourself,” they would say. “You’re going to get back to earth, and it’s not going to be the same place you left it.” His response to all of it was a quiet, repetitive “I know.”

That morning played out differently. The big real estate reboot was scrapped. They had all been so woefully wrong. He and Ivanka had prayed for the right outcome in the election, he told his friends, and that his father-in-law was going to be a great president.

Days earlier, on the Saturday before the election, after sundown when they could once again drive, they’d hopped in a car toward Cambria Heights in Queens, a largely black middle-class neighborhood where, on Francis Lewis Boulevard, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh grand rebbe of the Lubavitcher Hasidic dynasty, was buried alongside his father-in-law in 1994. The site of his tomb is known as the Ohel—the Hebrew word for tent—referring to the structure built around the grave. It is open day and night. Observers and believers have been making pilgrimages up to the Old Montefiore Cemetery in droves for the last near-quarter century because the rebbe, it is believed, will deliver those who visit the Ohel to God. A place to ask for blessings and scrawl prayers on the provided notepaper and toss them into the grave.

It was uncommonly warm that November Saturday, hanging in the mid-fifties even after dark. Jared turned up without a jacket, in a black cashmere sweater, flat-front khakis, and a yarmulke, Ivanka in a slanted black beret, belted coat, and bare legs. In the Ohel, they dropped their prayers into the grave before making their way back home. Friends joked that they weren’t sure exactly what Jared meant when he referred to the “right outcome,” and whether their prayers had in fact been answered or rebuffed.

AFTER JARED made a round of phone calls, he and Ivanka took their eldest children to school, as they often did, at Ramaz, the Modern Orthodox Jewish day school on the Upper East Side. They were a bit frazzled and tired but buzzing, and more apparent, they were a bit late. The school has a separate elevator to take parents up to preschool classrooms, and because they were running behind that morning, the elevator had already gone upstairs. So they waited. They were sitting ducks in a fishbowl. One by one, parents approached the couple, offering their congratulations. The win had stunned them, they told her. It was remarkable. She must be so happy, so proud. Wow, others offered. “She beamed,” one parent remembered of Ivanka. “Graciously, she accepted every last word.”

UNTIL THEN, parents at the school and members of their uptown shul had been split on the couple and their involvement in the campaign. On the one hand, the campaign had ignited a new wave of anti-Semitism and hundreds of dog whistles to white nationalists, alarming the Jewish community. After the president tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton with a Star of David and a pile of cash, one of Jared’s own employees, Observer culture writer Dana Schwartz, wrote an open letter addressed to Jared in his paper, asking him to address the anti-Semitic vitriol spreading in his father-in-law’s name that “applies equally to your wife and your daughter.”

“Mr. Kushner, I ask you,” she wrote, “what are you going to do about this?”

Jared wrote his own op-ed in response, under the headline “The Donald Trump I Know.” He defended his father-in-law as “tolerant” and said that “the from-the-heart reactions of this man are instinctively pro-Jewish and pro-Israel.” He invoked the story of his grandparents, who survived the Holocaust, as proof that he knew “the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points.”

Some of Jared’s own cousins, reigniting a more-than-decade-old family feud that had been punctuated by Jared’s father getting sent to federal prison, took issue with this defense. “I have a different takeaway from my Grandparents’ experience in the war,” Marc Kushner wrote in a Facebook post shortly after, linking to the op-ed. “It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate. Antisemitism or otherwise.” Another first cousin, Jacob Schulder, was harsher. In a comment on Marc’s post, he wrote: “That my grandparents have been dragged into this is a shame. Thank you Jared for using something sacred and special to the descendants of Joe and Rae Kushner to validate the sloppy manner in which you’ve handled this campaign … Kudos to you for having gone this far; no one expected this. But for the sake of the family name, which may have no meaning to you but still has meaning to others, please don’t invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night. It is self serving and disgusting.”

Jared’s parents, Charlie and Seryl, were supportive of the Trump campaign, hosting a couple of open houses at their Long Branch, New Jersey, beach house on Donald’s behalf throughout the campaign. It wasn’t an option not to throw their support behind Donald; in effect, that would mean not throwing their support behind Jared. They were proud of what he was doing, and whatever he needed, they would do. That their son was effectively running a presidential campaign gave them enough naches for them to put their own distaste at some of the campaign nonsense and rhetoric aside.