One of the most important things to know about Donald Trump is that he has no real friends. Never did. Not a single friend with whom he has connected over a long period of time and with whom he has had anything resembling a close relationship. Trump is a loner and has been so lifelong.
As a teenager at the New York Military Academy, he usually disappeared into his room after dinner. Years later his classmates did not remember a single class member “that he was particularly close to.” At Fordham University, where Trump spent his freshman and sophomore years of college, his experience was similar. He was friendly with some of his peers but had no real friends. It was the same at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where Trump finished college. Years later, one of his Wharton classmates recalled that Trump had no one close to him, and that he never “palled around with anyone, quite frankly.”
Things were no different years later, after he became a successful and wealthy real estate developer. Once, in an interview, Trump was asked if there was anyone in whom he confided. He replied, “No… I tend not to confide…. I don’t trust people. I’m a non-trusting person.” One of his biographers, Tim O’Brien, captured the consensus, when he described Trump as “one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met. He lacks the emotional and sort of psychological architecture a person needs to build relationships with other people.” *
If there are any exceptions to this general rule, one could argue, if lamely, they are his first three children, whose mother was Trump’s first wife, Ivana. By all accounts his relationships with his two sons from his marriage to Ivana, Donald Trump, Jr, and Eric Trump, have a history of being fraught, and there is no evidence they ever were personally close. But they have long been in business with their father – they play prominent parts in The Trump Organization – and they were and still are politically active on their father’s behalf.
Not so much though Ivanka, his daughter from his first marriage, who by every account was forever her father’s favorite. It’s hard to exaggerate her role in Trump’s affective life. Until he lost his second campaign for the White House, Ivanka was his Golden Girl, his Golden Child who could do no wrong. By every account it was she and she alone who was singled out for his special attention and affection. Trump admired, and adored, everything about his first-born daughter, from what he saw as her singular beauty to what he deemed her singular brain. (Trump has a second daughter, Tiffany, by his second wife, Marla Maples. Maples raised Tiffany as a single mother with an absentee ex-husband who largely was an absentee father.)
Though Ivanka had no qualifications for the post, none, soon after he became chief executive Trump appointed her Assistant to the President. During his four years in the White House, he would refer to her as “unique,” suggest that if she ever wanted to run for president she would be “very, very hard to beat,” and sometimes call her “Baby” during meetings.
Nor did it suffice to bring Ivanka into his Oval Office orbit; her husband, Jared Kushner, was part of the package. Despite his equally complete lack of relevant experience, Kushner was named Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor. In short order, he became an indispensable presidential aide, a power in his own right, presumed an expert in everything from the criminal justice system to the border wall, to tensions in the Middle East, to politics and the pandemic.
In this case though blood was not thicker than water. After the American electorate voted Trump out of the Oval Office, Ivanka and Jared made haste for the exits. They promptly sought to reestablish their own lives and rebuild their reputations, which inevitably meant distancing themselves from her father and his father-in-law. As they were embarrassed by their past and worried that it would taint them for years to come, It meant pretending that the White House years had never happened. Until now.
Now, as Trump comes close to securing his second Republican nomination for president, Ivanka at least is reassessing her situation. Reportedly she is “warming to the idea of trying to be helpful again” – helpful, that is, to her father – and privately assessing “when it might make sense to reengage with the campaign – and even whether to take a job in the administration if Trump wins.” **
Will Ivanka return to her father’s fold – or will she not? No matter. The transactional nature of her relationship to her father has become painfully apparent. Same with the rest of Trump’s clan, including his wife, Melania, who remains as she did during her four years as First Lady. Largely – and for months at a time entirely – invisible.
Did I mention the leader was a loner? A lifelong loner with no capacity for intimacy with anyone else but himself?
In his private life Trump is deeply, completely alone. To suppose this is irrelevant to his public life is to ignore the intersection between politics and personality.
————————————————-
*The quotes in this section are from Barbara Kellerman, The Enablers (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
** The quotes in this section are in Bess Levin, “Ivanka Trump Has Gotten the Urge….” in Vanity Fair, May 3, 2024.