This
Is Still Happening: Trump Children Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric
A roundup of Trump
administration malfeasance, part 12.
By JEREMY STAHL
OCT 28, 20206:04 PM
This Is Still Happening is a feature
in which Slate will attempt to offer an update on Trump world corruption, what
could be done to bring anyone to account, and what Democrats are doing in
response (generally, nothing). The 12th installment is about
the three Trump children who are most actively involved in his political
grafting career.
The Figures: Ivanka
Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr.
What Is Still Happening: Trump’s
three grown children from his first marriage—Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr.—have
been the ones most central to his efforts to loot the federal government and
Republican Party for as much money as possible while he’s in office.
Let’s start with Ivanka, who is the only one of the three to
hold a position in Trump’s administration, with the title “advisor
to the president.” Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, is likewise a
White House senior adviser, but that is a different, if related, story of graft. Ivanka’s role in the White House
was initially sold to the public as serving as a moderating influence on her
father, but that almost immediately went out the window when her alleged support for the United States remaining in
the Paris Climate Agreement failed to convince her father not to abandon the
historic deal. Similarly, Ivanka has said that she opposed separating
families who were entering the country, but she did little to actually stop it
from taking effect, resulting in the theft of thousands of children, hundreds
of whose parents still haven’t been located.
Her false branding as a moderating force on her father,
though, is not nearly as important as the area in which she excels perhaps as
much as or more than the rest of her family: public graft. Some episodes worth
highlighting:
• A little more than two months into her father’s
presidency, she was awarded three new trademarks for her lifestyle brand
in China on the same night she happened to sit next to Chinese President Xi
Jinping during an official dinner at Mar-a-Lago. In 2018, she was awarded seven new trademarks that just happened to
coincide with her father promising to save a Chinese telecommunications company
that had previously been punished for violating trade sanctions with Iran and
North Korea.
• Days into Trump’s presidency, counselor to the president
Kellyanne Conway illegally endorsed Ivanka’s fashion brand
during a Fox News interview in violation of the Hatch Act. There were no
repercussions.
• Ivanka herself has been party to dozens of Hatch Act
violations, using her White House position to publicly campaign for her father, endorsing on Instagram
a food product brand whose owner supports her
father’s campaign by holding up a can of Goya beans, and seeming to violate the anti-corruption law eight times
in one single 48-hour period earlier this month.
• Ivanka and her husband came into the White House with a
sprawling series of international conflicts of interest, perhaps most notably
in the Middle East, and her father had to overrule career officials to ensure
they were granted security clearances that otherwise would have been denied.
• In May 2017, the State Department promoted Ivanka’s book on social media.
• As of last month, Ivanka and Jared had visited Trump
properties during their time at the White House, with the accompanying Secret
Service entourages and federal payments to the family business, more than any
other White House officials had, with 36 visits for Ivanka and 39 for Jared.
Ivanka’s stake in the Trump hotel in D.C. generated $4 million for her in 2019
alone.
• During this spring’s shelter-in-place policies that
prevented families from hosting holidays together, Ivanka and Jared traveled to
the Trump property in Bedminster, New Jersey, to hold a family Seder.
• Even after she announced she would shut down her lifestyle
brand to avoid further conflicts of interest, it continued to generate upward of $1 million
in sales for her and she continued to collect new overseas trademarks.
• In 2018 alone, Ivanka and Jared reported as much as
$135 million in income, much of which came from
foreign business.
• Jared and Ivanka likely broke the law when they pushed the
administration to enact tax breaks for so-called opportunity zones, a program
that happened to benefit the couple to the tune of millions of dollars.
• Ivanka and her husband last week threatened to sue the Lincoln Project to try
to force it to take down Times Square billboards that were critical of their
roles in her father’s disastrous COVID-19 response.
Given her and her husband’s White House jobs, Ivanka is
probably the most prolific government grafter of the siblings. But the work of
her brothers—who are putatively running the Trump Organization while their
father is in the White House—in profiteering off their father’s presidency should
not be overlooked. Here are some highlights of Eric and Donald Jr.’s ongoing
activities:
• After promising at the start of their father’s term to do
no “new” international business, the brothers have cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in Secret
Service fees to accompany them on international travel to hawk Trump licensing
deals around the world. The short list of these destinations includes Uruguay,
India, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, and Dubai.
• As reported by the watchdog group Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Eric last year claimed that when administration members and
Secret Service visit Trump properties, “they stay at our properties for free,”
with only nominal housekeeping fees charged. This was false. Taxpayers pay as much as $650 per night
for these stays, with the Washington Post reporting the Secret Service
alone has spent more than $1 million in taxpayer
money at Trump properties. On Tuesday, the Washington Post’s David
Farenthold reported that the amount the government
spent at Trump properties was even more than we knew, amounting to $2.5 million to the Trump family. At one
dinner, Trump and his kids charged the “U.S. government $13,700 for guest
rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral
arrangements.”
• The sons also use their father’s political career to boost
the Trump family brand. In 2017, a Mumbai, India, complex was sold as an “an
opportunity worth its weight in gold” to be associated with “POTUS.” When
Donald Jr. visited India in 2018, he spoke at an event that also featured
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The New York Times further reported that Indonesia is “helping to build
a major new highway that will make a new Trump development more accessible”
after a launch event in Jakarta attended by Donald Jr. and numerous
local government officials. The Times also reported that the Aberdeenshire
Council in Scotland dropped local development requirements to allow the Trumps
to build. And during Trump’s impeachment, Eric used House hearings as an opportunity to hawk Trump wine.
• Both Trump sons have used their heightened public
platforms to attack Joe Biden’s son Hunter for profiting off his father’s name,
without a hint of self-reflection. For instance, Eric Trump last year
complained on Twitter about a supposed double standard being applied to Hunter
Biden and less than five hours later posted on Twitter boasting of the local approval of a second golf course at a
Trump property in Scotland.
• The sons also have an extraordinary gig going with the
Republican Party. After initially lying about not making large bulk purchases
of Don Jr.’s book Triggered, the RNC acknowledged that it had
spent about $100,000 in early bulk sales to help pump the book onto the bestseller
list. It pulled the same scam with his most recent book this
summer. This year, meanwhile, the Trump campaign has paid both Eric’s wife and Don Jr.’s
girlfriend annual salaries of $180,000 to support the president. The Post
reports that since Inauguration Day in 2017, the Trump campaign and fundraising
committee has spent $5.6 million at his own properties.
• Trump Jr., whose new political crew has been called the “wolf pack,” has also been active in lobbying his
father’s administration for favors, suggesting Montana’s Ryan Zinke for
interior secretary after a 2016 elk-hunting trip with Sen. Steve Daines. Zinke
resigned after less than two years in office after proving to be one of
the most corrupt officials in Trump’s incredibly corrupt administration.
• Last year, Donald Jr. spent $76,859.36 in taxpayer money
for Secret Service protection on a trip with an RNC donor to Mongolia to hunt
an endangered sheep that he did not have a permit to kill. CREW reports, “After
the hunting excursion Trump met with the Mongolian President and was
retroactively granted a permit to hunt the sheep he had already killed.”
How Long It Has Been Going On: Basically all of their lives. If you don’t believe me,
take a look at Ivanka’s account of a lemonade stand she had as a kid, as reported by Vox’s Matthew Yglesias:
When Ivanka was a kid, she got frustrated because she couldn’t
set up a lemonade stand in Trump Tower. “We had no such advantages,” she
writes, meaning, in this case, an ordinary home on an ordinary street. She and
her brothers finally tried to sell lemonade at their summer place in
Connecticut, but their neighborhood was so ritzy that there was no foot
traffic. “As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard that summer,” she
writes. They persuaded their bodyguard to buy lemonade, and then their driver,
and then the maids, who “dug deep for their spare change.” The lesson, she
says, is that the kids “made the best of a bad situation.”
As children, they literally shook down the help!
More recently, they may have committed a number of federal
and state crimes prior to their father’s elevation to the White House. The
Trump Organization is currently under investigation by state officials in New
York, and Eric Trump recently gave a deposition over questions of fraud at the company. When the
New York Times reported Trump’s tax returns last month, one of the most brazen
apparent tax cheat schemes involved one of his companies secretly paying Ivanka to be a “consultant”
while she was already collecting a separate salary as an employee there. Ivanka
was also heavily involved in the organization’s most questionable licensing and
property deals, including one in Azerbaijan that has been linked to apparent money laundering. Both Donald
Jr. and Ivanka have also evaded previous run-ins with the law. Most famously,
special counsel Robert Mueller refused to charge Donald Trump Jr. with
crimes related to his infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians promising dirt
on Hillary Clinton. Less famously, Don Jr. and Ivanka were under investigation in New York City in 2012 after
they allegedly confessed in emails to fraudulently inflating the number of
sales at a New York property to lure new investors. Manhattan District Attorney
Cy Vance overruled office prosecutors to drop the inquiry after a meeting with
their lawyer, who subsequently donated and helped raise more than $50,000 to
Vance’s reelection campaign.
What Would Normally Happen: We need only look to what the Republican-led Senate
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Finance Committee have
been able to accomplish with their joint investigation of Hunter Biden’s alleged cronyism, which yielded more than 16,000 records from the State Department and
many other documents. That investigation resulted in a report that concluded no wrongdoing on the part of the
Bidens, but the State Department, the Trump Organization, and every part of the
Trump White House have completely stonewalled similar Democratic probes with
the help of the courts, so it’s tough to say what an inquiry into the Trump
children might produce.
What Democrats Have Done: Donald Trump Jr. has had to give testimony in the various
congressional Russia inquiries, with Democrats believing he may have misled one committee over his Trump Tower
meeting to receive Russian dirt on Clinton. The House has been investigating payments to Trump properties. And New York’s
Democratic attorney general has a fraud investigation into the Trump
Organization underway. Ultimately, though, there has been little done to probe
the many, many, many layers of Trump family corruption.
What Is Likely to Be Done: It might depend on the election results, but it seems likely
that the Trump children will escape further scrutiny even if their father
loses.
How Indictable This Stuff Is: It’s really hard to say, because these kids have kept
getting out of legal jams. Thanks to their father’s money, fame, and political
power, we may never get a full investigation of their possible criminal
activity. In a world where Donald Trump’s clout has evaporated, though, odds
seem to be that at least one of the three of them would end up in prison, for
one of these many schemes. 5 out of 10.
