From The Magazine

Can Donald Jr. and Eric Trump Really Run the Family Business?

Although outshone in many ways by their sister Ivanka, Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric are thoroughly their father’s sons. Charting their battles, to the inevitable lawsuits in their wakes, William D. Cohan investigates whether the boys can handle the empire.
BROTHERS-IN-ARMS Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at the Old Post Office, now a Trump hotel, Washington, D.C., July 2014.
Photograph By Paul Morigi/Wireimage.

The Clinton campaign nicknamed them “the Storm Troopers,” on account of their slicked-back hair and their resemblance to the elite World War I German soldiers. Others have referred to them as Uday and Qusay, a nod to Saddam Hussein’s vicious and extravagant sons, who were killed in Mosul in July 2003, after a fierce gunfight with American forces. On the campaign trail the Trump brothers—Donald Trump Jr., 38, and Eric Trump, 32, the oldest sons of our 45th president—actually referred to themselves as “the brutes.” Together with their sister Ivanka, 35, they are slated to take control of their father’s far-flung, billion-dollar real-estate and licensing business, after years of serving as his apprentices, both in real life and on television, in their father’s hit show, The Apprentice. What role Trump Sr. ends up playing in the Trump Organization remains to be seen, but if the first weeks of the transition period give us any clue, he won’t be letting go easily, or anytime soon. “The only thing that matters to me is running our country,” he told The New York Times, on November 22, but then confusingly added, “In theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent,” because, he said, “the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” The next week, he tweeted that he was leaving his business “in total” even though by law he did not have to do so.

Thanks to her position as the apple of her father’s eye, Ivanka is better known than her two brothers Don junior and Eric. (They were far less visible than Ivanka on the campaign trail, especially early on.) After his well-received speech at the convention, Don junior began considering a 2017 run for mayor of New York City, but his father quickly quashed that idea, although the drum continues to beat for him on Twitter. While they were raised mostly by their grandparents and their mother, Donald’s first wife, Ivana, they have become close to their father as adults. Herb Kolben, an executive at Ullico, a private insurance company that has lent to several Trump real-estate projects, says Donald senior “is a real family man. I know what he’s been through, with the wives and so on, but I can tell you, in the 15 years I’ve known him, whenever I’ve been in his office, he takes [his kids’] phone calls . . . . I can just see it, when I’m with Ivanka or Donald junior or Eric, the attention and the parenting that he gives them.”

Read Vanity Fair’s The First Family: The Women, Part I

By many accounts the Trump sons are polite and respectful. Still, they are their father’s sons, and we’ve learned by now what that means. Like him, they became known during the campaign for their insensitivity and penchant for making head-scratching gaffes. Don shares his father’s passion for social media. During the campaign he Instagrammed a photo of his father with running mate Mike Pence, controversial talk-radio host Alex Jones, and Pepe, the green cartoon frog that has become a symbol of the so-called alt-right white-supremacist movement.

A few days later, speaking to a Philadelphia radio station, Don complained that the mainstream media had become apologists for Hillary Clinton. “They’ve let her slide on every discrepancy,” he said. “If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.” Then he sent a tweet of a photo of a bowl of Skittles, comparing them to Syrian refugees. “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”

Eric has also made his fair share of boneheaded moves in the media. In the early-morning hours of July 11, a few days after a lone gunman killed five police officers in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter rally, Eric went on a hunting Web site to see if anyone wanted to trade some guns. “Want to trade my Remington 40X in 22-250,” he wrote. “The gun is a lazer [sic] and shoots small little groups using 50gr V-Max bullets and 37.0 gr H-380. Im looking for a new Ruger Precision Rifle, Accuracy International AE MIII Folder (ill add cash) . . . ”

Then there were the unfortunate online photographs of the two brothers taken during a 2011 hunting trip to Zimbabwe. There’s a picture of Eric holding a large dead leopard with Don standing next to him. Both men are smiling broadly. Another picture shows Don holding up the severed tail of a murdered elephant. He took to Twitter to defend his exotic hunting trip. “[I am] not going to apologize because some eco nuts want me 2,” he wrote. He added, “I can assure you it was not wasteful the villagers were so happy for the meat which they don’t often get to eat.” As for cutting off the elephant tail, he tweeted, “I went along with it they thought it was a cool pic. Take it up w them.”

Don junior in Briarcliff Manor, New York, 2014.

By Bobby Bank/Wireimage.

Czechmates

The brothers learned to like hunting, in Europe, when they were younger. Back then they spent little time with either their father, who was flying around the world building his business, or their mother, who helicoptered to Atlantic City daily to run Trump’s Castle casino. But Milos and Maria Zelnicek, Ivana’s parents, lived with the children in Trump Tower for six months every year, and Don and Eric spent part of the summers with them outside of Zlín, in Czechoslovakia, fishing, boating, and hunting with Milos. By all accounts, Donny—as he was known then—became especially close to his grandfather, who was an engineer. “My father is a very hardworking guy, and that’s his focus in life, so I got a lot of the paternal attention that a boy wants and needs from my grandfather,” Don junior told New York magazine in 2003. (None of the Trump family agreed to be interviewed for this article.)

During the winter of 1990, when Donny was 12, his parents’ messy separation and divorce and his father’s very public affair with Marla Maples became regular tabloid fare in New York City.

“Listen, it’s tough to be a 12-year-old,” he told New York. “You’re not quite a man, but you think you are. You think you know everything. Being driven into school every day and you see the front page and it’s divorce! THE BEST SEX I EVER HAD! And you don’t even know what that means. At that age, kids are naturally cruel. Your private life becomes very public, and I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

He blamed his father. “How can you say you love us?” the 12-year-old asked his father, according to a 1990 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner. “You don’t love us! You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money.”

“DONALD WASN’T INTERESTED IN THE CHILDREN UNTIL HE COULD TALK BUSINESS WITH THEM.”

“I brought up the children single-handedly,” Ivana said at a benefit dinner in Manhattan in October, according to the New York Daily News. “Donald wasn’t really interested in the children until he could talk business with them.” During the scandal she took the kids to Mar-a-Lago, the family’s estate in Palm Beach, to escape the tabloids and the spotlight.

Eventually, they were shipped off to boarding school, to further remove them from the New York scene: Don and Eric went to the Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the nation’s iron industry; Ivanka went to Choate, in Connecticut. Don seemed to thrive outside the limelight. “When I went to boarding school, it all kind of went away—all those inconveniences that I found intrusive,” he told New York.

During the summers, the Trump boys were put to work in the family business—Donny at Trump’s Castle, tying up boats at the marina for minimum wage plus tips, and then both he and Eric were involved in the reconstruction and renovation of Seven Springs, Trump’s spectacular 230-acre Westchester County estate. Eric credits his older brother with helping to raise him. “We were literally riding mowers around, we were mowing all the fields, cutting down trees and fallen trees, cutting rebar and laying marble and doing electrical work, doing demo work,” Eric told Forbes. He and Donny lived in a carriage house on the estate.

Full ScreenPhotos:
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Daddy’s Boys: Eric and Donald Trump Jr.

Is this an endearing moment of Donald squeezing Eric’s cheeks, or Donald checking to see if his thoroughbred son’s teeth are healthy?
Photo: by Ron Galella/WireImage.

Tiffany, Donald, and Donald junior at Donald’s 50th birthday party.
Photo: BY RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE.

Young Eric attends the U.S. Open in 1991, making one of the few public appearances without shellacked hair.
Photo: by Ron Galella/WireImage.

A 10-year-old Eric is not as camera-ready as his mother Ivana. He’ll get there one day.
Photo: by Ron Galella/WireImage.

Don Jr., 38, and Barron, 10, share an inter-generational fist-bump at the Republican National Convention.
Photo: By Carlo Allegri/REUTERS.

Eric and Don Jr., for once not wearing slicked-back hair, pay their respects to their dear father.
Photo: by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at the Old Post Office, now a Trump hotel, Washington, D.C., July 2014.
Photo: BY PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE.

After graduating from Hill, Don matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania, like his father (who had transferred there after two years at Fordham University). He was by all accounts, including his own, an inveterate frat-boy partyer. According to a fellow Penn grad, who knew Donny then, he was “finding himself” in college and was prone to rebellion. According to New York, Don “had a reputation” for getting into “drunken, ‘do-you-have-any-idea-who-I-am?’ fights.” Scott Melker, a Penn classmate, wrote on Facebook, “Donald Jr. was a drunk in college. Every memory I have of him is of him stumbling around on campus falling over or passing out in public, with his arm in a sling from injuring himself while drinking. He absolutely despised his father, and hated the attention that his last name afforded him. His nickname was ‘Diaper Don,’ because of his tendency to fall asleep drunk in other people’s beds and urinate. I always felt terrible for him.”

Melker described how one day Donald senior showed up at his son’s dorm room to take him to a Yankees game. Don was dressed in a Yankees jersey. When he opened the door to his father, “without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor in front of all of his classmates. He simply said, ‘Put on a suit and meet me outside,’ and closed the door.” A spokesperson for the Trump family says this story is “completely false.”

After graduating from Penn, Don defied his parents by moving to Aspen and becoming a ski bum. He stopped talking to his father. He hunted, fished, and camped, lived out of the back of a truck, and bartended. Eventually, he had had enough. “I had a great time,” he told New York, “but your brain starts to atrophy.” In September 2001, he returned home and joined the family business full-time. “When they turned 21,” Ivana said of her children, “I handed them over to him and said, ‘Here’s the finished product. You can take them from here.’ ”

FATHERS AND SONS Tiffany, Donald, and Donald junior at Donald’s 50th-birthday party.

By Ron Galella/Wireimage.

It’s not exactly clear what brought Donny back into the fold. “It would be pretty hard not to want to join a business that had a great name and was moving forward and expanding in many different areas,” says Howard Lorber, the C.E.O. of the Vector Group, who has known Trump for 30 years. “And so I think it was sort of a natural for Donny.” By all accounts this was when Donald senior kicked into high gear as a parent. “They were everything to him,” says a person who used to work closely with him at Trump Tower. “You could argue that Trump’s loyalty quotient . . . is made of tiers. His family is Tier 1 and everyone else is Tier 12—unless, of course, the loyalty part is also convenient.”

But Don junior still wasn’t quite ready to give up partying. Once, in 2002, when he was at the Comedy Cellar, in Greenwich Village, at two A.M., the New York Post reported, he “was becoming loud and obnoxious,” laughing too enthusiastically at the ethnic jokes and apparently spilling beer on a woman at a neighboring table. Then two men at the table threw their beer mugs at Donny, opening a cut on his forehead that required 28 stitches.

IN THE MIDDLE OF A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, DONALD SENIOR SUED HIS OWN SON!

Finally, Donny came to his senses. He gave up drinking completely. “I used to drink a lot and party pretty hard,” Donny told New York, “and it wasn’t something that I was particularly good at. I mean I was good at it but I couldn’t do it in moderation.” The article did not mention that his uncle Fred junior had died of alcoholism, in 1981, at age 42. Many people hadn’t been sure Donny would come back from the abyss, either.

In 2003, at a fashion show, his father introduced a reformed Donny to Vanessa Haydon, a former Wilhelmina model who had reportedly dated Leonardo DiCaprio. Six weeks later, they were introduced again at a birthday party of a mutual friend. Neither one remembered the other. They spoke for an hour before Haydon recalled they had met before at the fashion show. “[You’re] the one with the retarded dad!” she exclaimed. One year later they got engaged. In exchange for the attendant publicity, Donny accepted a free engagement ring from a jeweler in a New Jersey mall. But his father berated him on Larry King Live. “You have a name that’s hot as a pistol,” he said. “You have to be very careful with things like this.” (It has not been reported whether Haydon kept the ring.) In November 2005, they were married at Mar-a-Lago. Eric was Don’s best man. Don and Vanessa now have five children and live in Sutton Place and in upstate New York. In 2011, when Vanessa was breast-feeding their son Tristan, Don tweeted, “If ur a boob guy this whole lactation thing is amazing[.] The sports bra the wife is wearing is losing the containment battle!!!” The couple’s oldest son, Don, is known as “D3.”

Eric and Donald at a campaign event in Las Vegas, December 2015.

From Visions Of America/Uig/Getty Images.

After graduating from Hill, in 2002, Eric headed to Georgetown. One person who knew him well tells me, “Eric was the consummate class clown. My memory of him is that he was hilarious . . . . He was heavy back then, which gave him kind of a jolly quality.” Someone else who knows Eric described him to me as “a lost soul,” who, like his brother, was into drinking heavily. Not so, says Paige Scardigli, a close friend of Eric’s from Georgetown and the executive director of the Eric Trump Foundation, which has given about $12 million since 2006, most of which has gone to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Memphis. “He has always been in check,” she says. “I would never characterize Eric as a ‘party boy’ in college. I would have said he’s spontaneous and fun and up for anything but in a very responsible way.” She recalls that Eric kept a low profile at Georgetown and minimized his relationship with his father. She tells how he once paid for a dinner with his credit card and the waiter asked him if he was related to Donald Trump. “He laughed it off and said, ‘Nope, I wish,’ ” she says. “He never played the Trump card.”

Eric joined the Trump Organization in 2006, after graduating with a degree in finance and management. Scardigli says that, unlike his brother, Eric never hesitated about joining the family business. After dating Lara Yunaska, a CBS television producer, for six years, Eric proposed to her on July 4, 2013, at Seven Springs, while they were on a walk in the woods with her miniature beagle. In November 2014, they were married, also at Mar-a-Lago, two weeks after she had broken both wrists in a horse-riding accident. They live in a Trump building on Central Park South and have a house in Westchester. “Eric is extremely warm and friendly, a big wide-open smile, handshake,” Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter, tells me after her post-election interview with the Trumps. “[Eric] comes across as a teddy bear and Donald seems more retiring. It’s almost opposites.”

Even though Don junior and Eric have similar titles at the Trump Organization, they have clearly separate responsibilities. Eric is in charge of the company’s 17 golf courses, plus he is the president of the Trump Winery, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The winery, which produces 40,000 cases of wine per year, is his personal pet project. Don junior has had responsibility for a number of building projects, including the renovation and re-leasing of 40 Wall Street and the construction and sale of condominiums in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. He was also responsible for the renovation of 502 Park Avenue, in Manhattan, the former Hotel Delmonico, and he worked on the re-leasing of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue.

Jeffrey Lichtenberg worked closely in recent years with Don in leasing 40 Wall Street and Trump Tower. Back then, Donald senior did not have the best reputation as a landlord around New York City. He didn’t want to pay broker commissions and changed deals after he agreed to them. Many brokers refused to do business with him. Don junior realized the problem and set about fixing it. “Don would talk to them,” Lichtenberg says. “We could talk about the building one-on-one, and they developed a trust with him.” Don junior and Lichtenberg leased more than a million square feet of office space at 40 Wall Street in two years. At Trump Tower, after the Calvin Klein company vacated its office space, leaving 30 percent of the building empty, Don got it fully leased again. “He’s able to put himself in the shoes of the tenant,” Lichtenberg says. “Most landlords can’t. Brokers like him. They like to deal with him because he’s straight.”

Executives at Saint-Gobain Adfors, the international industrial company, might beg to differ. In 2010, Donny and two business partners created Titan Atlas Manufacturing, in Charleston, South Carolina, and together they purchased, for $1.5 million, an industrial building and four additional acres of land. In November 2011, Deutsche Bank’s private-wealth-management division lent Titan Atlas $3.65 million, guaranteed equally by each of the three partners, including Don. He was listed in the loan agreement as the “key principal” of Titan Atlas, and it specified that he keep “active involvement in the direct or indirect day-to-day management and control” of Titan.

Things started going off the rails for Titan that same month, when the state of South Carolina filed the first in a series of tax liens against the company for unpaid sales and withholding taxes. Federal tax liens would follow, according to the Charleston Post and Courier. In August 2012, Titan, which manufactured construction products, ceased operations; it’s unclear if it had ever got its business off the ground. Don tried to make the best of a bad situation by attempting to find someone to lease Titan’s empty facility.

In January 2013, a division of Saint-Gobain agreed to a three-year lease of Titan’s industrial building to store finished product that had been made nearby. In April 2014, according to a complaint Saint-Gobain filed in a South Carolina court, the roof of the warehouse began leaking and started to damage the company’s products. Saint-Gobain asked Donny to repair the roof. By July 2014, there were 22 leaks and the damage to the stored fiberglass was mounting.

In November 2014, the $3.4 million balance of Deutsche Bank’s $3.65 million loan came due. But by then Titan Atlas was out of business, and a deal to buy its assets had fallen through. Donald senior swooped in and, according to court documents, bought Deutsche Bank’s loan, effectively rescuing his son and his two partners from a likely default on it.

Still, according to Saint-Gobain, Donny never fixed the leaking roof. Instead, he and Michael Cohen, Trump Sr.’s longtime consigliere, informed Saint-Gobain that he would agree to do it only if Saint-Gobain extended its three-year lease on the facility. But Saint-Gobain did not want to extend its lease; it wanted the roof fixed, which was Don’s contractual responsibility. During the first week of October 2015, an extended rainstorm hit Charleston. The roof leaked continuously. Some $4.5 million worth of Saint-Gobain’s fiberglass was damaged and “rendered unmarketable and unsalable,” according to the complaint.

In December 2015, Donald senior—through a special-purpose company—sued Titan Atlas for the overdue payments on the loan that his son and his partners owed. That means that, in the middle of a presidential campaign, Donald senior sued his own son! In January 2016, he foreclosed on the warehouse and took personal control of it, swapping the debt he had bought from Deutsche Bank for the building and canceling his son’s obligation in the process. Other creditors of Titan Atlas, including the state of South Carolina, are still owed nearly $115,000. In April 2016, Saint-Gobain sued a group of defendants, including Donald senior’s special-purpose company, for $4.5 million, the value of the destroyed inventory. In June, the Trumps, father and son, filed separate motions to dismiss the suit. It is, however, still pending.

WIENERS AND LOSERS Eric and Donald at a basketball game in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in 2007.

By James Devaney/Wireimage.

For his part, Eric can boast about the turnaround he performed at the Trump Winery. He has much less to say about the ongoing disputes the Trump Organization is having at two golf-club projects—one in Jupiter, Florida, the other under the Whitestone Bridge in the Bronx—that he oversees.

In December 2012, the Trumps bought the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club & Spa Jupiter from Marriott Vacations Worldwide for $5 million, plus the assumption of a potential $41 million liability if club members sought a refund of their membership fees and ongoing dues, as was their right under certain circumstances. A few weeks after buying the golf club, the Trumps indicated they wanted to change its membership terms, in an effort to get out of the refund provision. In a meeting held with the membership at the club in December 2012, as well as in a follow-up letter sent to the members three days later, Eric and his father gave members three choices—”but, in our opinion, only one if we want to bring the club to the next level of luxury,” Donald senior wrote.

Members could choose to relinquish their existing right to a refund in exchange for the right to play at other Trump golf clubs, including at Mar-a-Lago, at Doral, and in Palm Beach, and receive a 10 percent reduction in dues at the Jupiter club for three years. Or they could keep the right to a refund, have no reciprocity with other Trump golf clubs, and pay annual dues that would initially be 20 percent higher, with no cap on how high they could go. Or they could stay on what was known as “the resignation list”—members who wanted to leave the club and get their membership deposits back. Under this circumstance, Donald senior wrote in his December 2012 letter, “you’re out” of the club, even though the original arrangement that the Trumps assumed as part of the purchase allowed those members to continue to pay annual dues and use the club until they received their refunds. No more. The Donald wanted to put the squeeze on members who could cost the Trumps real money, regardless of what the contract said. According to a class-action suit filed by three club members in May 2013, those members who were on “the resignation list” were soon prevented from getting access to the Jupiter club because the “transponders” attached to their cars that would open the gate at the club entrance were turned off. The members still had to pay $1,800 a year in food and beverage charges even though they were denied access to the club.

But Eric testified that, regardless of what the December 2012 letter said, the club members who wanted refunds were not forced out and continued to have access. He directly contradicted his father’s letter and testimony. “We actually chose not to do it,” he said. “We chose to, again, maintain exactly what Ritz-Carlton had done prior to our involvement, unchanged, which was an absolute right that we had.” (Last August, the judge in the case held a two-day, non-jury trial. He has not yet ruled.)

Irons in the Fire

The Trumps are also in a battle with New York City about a golf course they operate in the Bronx. On October 7, Eric wrote to Mitchell Silver, the New York City parks and recreation commissioner, asking the city to allow the Trump Organization to expand the 17th and 18th holes of the Trump Golf Links along the water at Ferry Point Park, under the Whitestone Bridge. This, supposedly, would give the golf club a better chance of becoming “a legitimate contender” for a major professional tournament, and this would be “an economic boon” for the city, Eric wrote, generating “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue. “Parks will win, the City will win and, most importantly, the City’s residents will win!” But the Trumps’ plan would have greatly limited public access to the renovated park. Hard hats would be provided to schoolchildren to protect them from errant golf balls.

In her October 17 response to Eric, Alicia Glen, the city’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development, wrote that the city had no interest in “changing direction” to allow for a “cosmetic improvement” to the golf course. She rejected the Trumps’ proposal. “While it is understandable that the Trump Organization should want to benefit from the spectacular waterfront and city views afforded by an expansion into Ferry Point Park, we are committed to keeping the design of the public park intact,” Glen wrote. “We are determined to protect and expand the community’s access to its waterfront, and to not impinge upon it.”

Naturally, the Trumps are not going down without a fight. A week after the election, they took their case to a community-board meeting in the Bronx.

During the 60 Minutes interview, five days after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, Trump’s three older children made it clear they would be staying in New York to run the business. But one Wall Street banker, who has known Donald senior for years, speculates, “Donald’s going to run the business, O.K.? There’re just not going to be any e-mails that demonstrate it.” During the subsequent weeks, the picture the Trump family was trying to paint of a seamless transition of the business from a father to his oldest children got considerably more muddled.

Out for Blood

One red flag arose on November 17 when both Ivanka and Jared Kushner attended a meeting in Trump Tower with Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan. The meeting with Abe was the president-elect’s first with a foreign leader. Neither journalists nor press photographers were permitted to attend. Although Ivanka is reported to be close to signing a licensing deal with Japan’s Sanei-International, it’s not apparent the Trump Organization does business in Japan. The diplomatic community—and much of Twitter—went nuts over the idea that Ivanka and Jared would attend such a high-level meeting without having security clearance or being expert in Japanese affairs. “Meeting of two heads of state is never an informal occurrence,” Moira Whelan, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for public affairs, told The New York Times. “Even a casual mention or a nod of agreement or an assertion left unchallenged can be interpreted in different ways.” A Trump-family spokesman told the Times that while the meeting with Abe was “very informal” and Ivanka had often attended meetings at her father’s request in the past, “they obviously need to adjust to the new realities at hand, which they will.”

The new realities had not yet kicked in when Trump gave 4 of the 16 spots on the executive committee of his transition team to his three oldest children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then said he would not put the Trump Organization into a blind trust—as other presidents have done with their assets but are not required by law to do—immediately raising questions among legal experts about potential conflicts of interest and whether Trump’s presidential activities might be too easily influenced by the people, especially his foreign partners, with whom he does business. “He’s going to have enough on his plate being the president of the United States, for God’s sake,” says Kenneth Gross, a partner at the law firm Skadden Arps in Washington, who advises his clients on political regulations. “When he makes a decision domestically—or more importantly on foreign policy—that will have the effect of benefiting some company that he may own somewhere. Particularly with regard to an unfriendly country where he has some of these assets, he would be better served to not have that appearance of a conflict.”

A week after the election, about 100 foreign diplomats were wined and dined at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Sliders and Trump sparkling wine were served while the attendees listened to a sales pitch about how they might want to have delegations and V.I.P. guests stay at the hotel whenever they are in town. The hotel, one of the newest in the Trump stable, is five blocks from the White House. The diplomats took to the sales pitch instinctively. One Asian diplomat told The Washington Post, “Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’ ” After struggling to fill its rooms when it first opened, the hotel is now generally fully booked, as it is for the inauguration, when the per-night room rate is five times normal.

There have been other red flags, too: Trump Sr. reportedly asked for help with a stalled permit to build an office tower in Buenos Aires in a conversation with the Argentinean president, Mauricio Macri, a personal friend and business associate since the 1980s. (A spokesman for President Macri denies the report.) Trump also reportedly asked British politician and Brexit advocate Nigel Farage to use his influence to block a proposed wind farm off the east coast of Scotland, near his golf course in Aberdeenshire. (He also tweeted that Farage “would do a great job!” as Britain’s ambassador to the United States. British prime minister Theresa May demurred.) Who knows what Trump proposed to Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan, when they spoke in early December.

Many people have concluded that Trump is merely giving lip service to resolving the substantial conflicts posed by having his children run the Trump Organization in its current form. “Trump has scared the daylights out of a lot of Americans, including myself,” says Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics counsel to George W. Bush. “I’m a Republican . . . . There’s just a lot of concerns about Trump. His running his own business empire out of the White House is part of a pattern of conduct that’s very troubling. It’s part of a pattern of broader conduct that doesn’t seem to want to show any respect for the norms of what we expect out of a public servant.”

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, told NPR on November 21 that her boss’s unconventional approach to campaigning would carry over to the way he governs in the White House. In effect, she said, the American people like him just the way he is, and they elected him to break the traditional behavioral norms. His three oldest children seem to understand that intuitively. “They’re going to support their father as president of the United States the way they’ve always supported his presidential candidacy, and they’ll continue to be supportive,” Conway said. “At the same time, they’ll continue to be wildly successful in the business world.”

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