“They came into this with chips on their shoulder and grudges that a little seasoning and worldliness tells you that they shouldn’t bring to the party,” one transition official who was fired soon after the election recalled. “They brought it to the party anyway.”
It became abundantly clear once foreign leaders began to call. Transition officials had prepared a call book, laying out which calls they knew were going to come in, how to prepare for them, and which to prioritize, based on the traditional protocol surrounding these early days of the transition. All of it got tossed aside. It is unclear whether this was totally intentional; perhaps the Trump operation, as it existed after the election, was simply too overwhelmed and understaffed to keep up with all of the high-level international issues and decisions and processes it was suddenly faced with. For all its bluster, the Trump Organization is not a Fortune 500 company, with huge teams of people and sophisticated communication systems and tons of seasoned assistants crisscrossing spanning offices, ticking off to-dos and putting out fires. It’s a tiny office stuffed with decades-old magazine covers featuring the boss, and, one floor away, his kids’ offices in a sleeker, more modern area. One longtime executive-assistant-cum-gatekeeper, Rhona Graff, who had worked for the company for thirty years, handled all the calls and messages coming in for her boss.
That left Theresa May, the British prime minister, scrambling for a good twenty-four hours to get through to the incoming US president. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi got through earlier, as did Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a diplomatic faux pas deeply reflective of the total chaos within Trump Tower and the transition in the days and weeks following the election. Many lamented that if they had just stuck to the materials the early transition officials put together, this snub of a US ally would not have happened. It is impossible to say, though, whether anything would have really been different; it was Donald Trump who had just been elected president, after all. And Donald Trump, people were starting to realize, was not only unpredictable and erratic but also had a penchant for knocking things off kilter even when trying to stick to protocol. “They all paid for not sticking to what we’d planned,” the transition official said. “Because they looked like bumbling idiots.”
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was the first leader to make the pilgrimage to Trump Tower, less than ten days after Donald won the election. The Trump team left the pool of reporters on duty that day out of the meeting, as they did with American photographers. No one got the chance to ask questions before or after the sit-down, and no official photos were released, either, apart from a Facebook post on Donald’s page that showed him shoulder-to-shoulder with Abe in the foreground, the gilded moldings and marble and cream silk sofas of the Trump residence behind them. “It was a pleasure to have Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stop by my home and begin a great friendship,” he captioned the shot.
The Japanese government had a different plan. They handed out more revealing photos of their prime minister’s time in Trump Tower to the waiting press. In one, Donald and Abe sat facing each other on that silk cream couch, flanked by two interpreters and a dizzying array of crystal chandeliers and sconces and marble statues and mirrors. Facing them across a gilded coffee table topped with a gold candelabra holding unlit candlesticks, Ivanka Trump sat cross-legged in a beige armchair. Arms crossed at the wrists, she leaned back in her shift dress, black stilettos digging into the cream carpet. In another photo she stood beside Abe and Jared, who wore a slender gray suit jacket buttoned over a slim black tie. In a third shot, the couple stood smiling behind Donald and Abe as they shook hands.
Immediately, alarm bells rang over the ethics and the optics of it all. First, what business did a daughter and son-in-law who had no governmental experience—or even, at that point, a plan to join the government—have at that meeting? Everyone still had faith then that the country would be run as a democracy and not a monarchy, that the First Family would never be a royal family. But these photos were enough to shake that faith. Second, the fact that neither Ivanka nor Jared had security clearances raised some eyebrows. Third, perhaps most concerning, Ivanka was still heavily involved with the Trump Organization and with her own eponymous product line, both of which did deals around the world. The image of her having a cozy meeting, in a diplomatic position of power, with a world leader raised concerns. What, if any, boundaries would be drawn between Trump Tower business and foreign relationships within 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Would the family use its newfound political circumstances as a marketing opportunity?
Ivanka’s brand had already been hit hard for marketing off her campaign appearances. The Ivanka Trump social media accounts had posted buy links for the sleeveless pink Ivanka Trump dress she wore to introduce her father at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and for the gold bangle bracelet she wore on 60 Minutes, taped alongside her father and siblings two days after the election. Both times, Ivanka made it clear behind the scenes that she herself had nothing to do with the posts. Not only did she know better, but she was so much more focused on the bigger-picture issues she now had a chance to influence. Selling dresses and bracelets wasn’t taking up much space in her brain during that period; it was lower-level Ivanka Trump brand staffers who’d thought up the whole thing. Could she blame them? No way. They were just doing their jobs. Was she going to take the blame? Again, no. She had a very different sort of job.
Concerns continued to mount. Soon afterward, the New York Times reported that while Ivanka sat across from Abe in her childhood apartment, a two-day private viewing of her collection—including the sleeveless pink dress she wore to the convention—was taking place in Tokyo to shore up a licensing deal with a Japanese apparel company. Talks between the Ivanka Trump brand and Sanei International had been under way for years, and did not stem from Ivanka herself. The largest investor of Sanei’s parent company happens to be a bank owned by the Japanese government.
The apparatus around Ivanka spun it as a rookie mistake. “Any meetings she’s in is because it’s always been a family-focused environment and she has always been invited by her father to attend every meeting,” one person explained at the time. “But she is very committed to being respectful of different boundaries and it’s clear that it’s going to take some getting used to the changes that need to happen. They all understand that there’s a need to evaluate everything, and in the next couple of weeks, we will have a better sense of how she is going to separate from that.”
BUT THE Trump kids did not separate. In fact, despite the months of preparation carried out by professionals and policy experts, the Trump campaign’s hallmark chaos bled into the postelection process, Donald’s three adult kids made themselves at home on the transition’s executive committee. They took seats at the table in the first official transition meeting in Trump Tower in the days after the election, alongside Trump loyalist and Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, his chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, and a handful of others. So began the exercise of trying to fill top agency positions and, most importantly, decide on Cabinet nominations—a tedious process for anyone, let alone an incoming president with no governmental know-how and little to no attention span.
Eric Trump had worked for his father as a Trump Organization employee for about a decade and as his son for thirty-two years. He knew that Donald could derail the whole thing if he thought he could appoint anyone he wanted, including his friends, who had even less business serving in top agency positions than Donald did. Nothing would ever get done if Donald believed there were an unlimited number of possibilities—or worse, if he thought those roles could go to anyone he thought fit. Eric asked the transition staff to come up with short lists of potential nominees who had a shot at getting confirmed, and present these to his father. “We have to lead him to believe that this is who he has to choose from,” he told people. “He’s got to think those are the only guys.”
This is where some of the tension between Eric and Jared came from. Where Eric saw Donald’s weaknesses, he tried to work around them,