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ENTRÉE

There’s a story that Ivanka Trump once liked to tell, about her six-year-old self—brown-haired, puffy-cheeked, gap-toothed—given a Christmas gift she didn’t like. Chrismas 1987 capped the year of peak Donald Trump. It came a month after the publication of The Art of the Deal, but before Trump’s marriage to Ivanka’s mother Ivana flamed out in a blaze of tabloid headlines and his debt threatened to swallow his empire.

“I remember one of my earlier Christmas gifts was a Barbie and I was devastated, because my brothers had gotten Legos and Erector Sets, so to me this was traumatic,” Ivanka told Conan O’Brien in a 2007 interview. “So I ended up taking my younger brother’s Legos, bringing them into his room, to add insult to injury, locking him out, taking my mother’s super-glue from the 1980s—there was plenty for her nails—and gluing the Legos together in a model of Trump Tower.”

When she told this story on national television at age twenty-five, a bronzed and glowing Ivanka recalled the incident with great specificity and confidence. Wearing a large gold necklace and a black halter top over black flowing pants, Ivanka said, “So my father, in scolding me, also, was never so proud. So you know my little brother is crying—he’s saying, ‘Ivanka, that’s terrible,’ but at the time he looked very proud.”

Conan and Ivanka riffed on this for a while, “So your father comes in the room and he sees that you’ve built a skyscraper—” Conan said.

“A skyscraper of Legos,” Ivanka jumped back in, gathering steam, “ruined the Christmas present completely,” her voice nearly breaking with glee, “but one of the most amusing things that I think is so typical of him and his parenting style and just how he is, is that four days later he actually came up to me and goes, ‘You know, Ivanka, this has been bothering me’—keep in mind I’m six years old—and I go, ‘What, Dad?’

“ ‘You know the other day when you made a model of Trump Tower with these Legos? You made five setbacks in the architectural facade of the building, there are only four.’ So this had been bothering him for four days,” Ivanka continued. “He was thinking how to tactfully tell me that there were four instead of five setbacks. He could not let it go. He could not let it go.”¹

Except, there never was a Lego tower, no super-glue, no setbacks, no praise from her father. In her 2009 book The Trump Card, Ivanka Trump described a confrontation with her brothers, well into her professional life, who told her she had it all wrong, that they were the ones to glue the Legos together. Ivanka took the matter to Donald for adjudication, who told her they were all wrong; the story was his.² He’d told it to the world in his best-selling book The Art of the Deal. It went like this:

“My brother Robert likes to tell the story of the time when it became clear to him where I was headed. . . . I wanted to build a very tall building, but it turned out that I didn’t have enough blocks. I asked Robert if I could borrow some of his, and he said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’ I ended up using all of my blocks, and then all of his, and when I was done, I’d created a beautiful building. I liked it so much that I glued the whole thing together. And that was the end of Robert’s blocks.”³

Tony Schwartz, the person who actually wrote The Art of the Deal, said that, too, was likely made up. He wrote in an email: “There is considerably less than a fifty percent chance that anything like that ever happened.”⁴

In her own book, Ivanka grappled with her apocryphal tale, acknowledged its falsity, and excused herself for telling it. “It’s not the story itself that rates a mention,” she wrote. “It’s not even the tug and pull over our family legacies that I find so interesting. It’s the way my brothers and I seemed to grab at this memory as emblematic.” It reinforced the idea that “the fuzzy, uncertain eye of memory can sometimes take us to a deeper, more fundamental understanding of how things really were.” She concluded: “Mostly, though, the story stands as one of the first and best examples of how we work together as a family.”⁵

Years later, in October 2013, Ivanka posted a photo on Instagram of her own pajamaed two-year-old daughter, Arabella, next to a beautifully constructed multicolored plastic Magna-Tiles edifice. “She’s a builder!” the post read. “I think it’s safe to say some things are genetic.”⁶

 

Ivana Marie Trump—“Ivanka” is the diminutive form of her mother’s name—was born on October 30, 1981, after President Ronald Reagan, still in his first year in office, had already enacted tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for the poor, after Donald Trump had applied for his first casino license in Atlantic City and been (temporarily) denied his tax abatement for Trump Tower by Tony Gliedman. Both the casinos and Trump Tower would be built during her young childhood.

Ivanka’s mother was, like Donald, an object of gawking press attention: for her Czech accent, her blond beehive, her extroverted personality, her work renovating the Plaza Hotel and as president of one of Trump’s casinos, but mostly for her proximity to her husband.

Ivanka likes to remember her childhood as one where her mother would allow her the run of the Plaza Hotel and where she danced a child part in New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker. She was, she said, introduced by her parents at an early age to construction, hotel, and casino management, in an upbringing bolstered by two Irish nannies, Bridget and Dorothy, and by Ivana’s parents on their visits to the United States.⁷ She recalled a childhood in which her father would always “stop whatever he was doing, at least for a few precious moments, whenever I called.”⁸ Other than that, former Trump Organization employees said in interviews that Donald showed little interest in his young children.

When Ivanka was eight, the New York Post featured one of its most infamous covers: “Marla boasts to her pals about Donald: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD.’ ” During her parents’ raucous divorce, Ivanka went with her mother, Ivana, and her brothers to their vacation home in Palm Beach, Florida—Mar-a-Lago. Her brother Donald Trump Jr., aged twelve, wouldn’t speak to his father for a year.⁹

Not too long after, Ivanka began appearing frequently in public at Donald’s side. Paparazzi spotted her, aged nine, wearing a gold dress to the black-tie “Maybelline Look of the Year” party, surrounded by models and movie stars; joining her father at the US Open; wearing a white lace dress at the opening of the Galeries Lafayettes. Magazines showed Donald and eleven-year-old Ivanka, brown-haired, leaning against a Harley at the grand opening of the Harley-Davidson Cafe.

Ivanka Trump attended The Chapin School on the Upper East Side, then boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, which had also graduated, years earlier, John F. Kennedy, the future president. “It was a given, in our house that we would reach for the very top rungs of the private school ladder and, looking back, I suppose my father assessed the accompanying tuition bills in much the same way he looked at construction costs. He always used the finest materials,” Ivanka wrote in The Trump Card. “Not that we couldn’t get a perfectly fine education in a public school setting. . . . But he wanted the best for his children so that we might realize our full potential.”¹⁰

This was a running theme for Ivanka: that her parents were strict, that they made her and her brothers work for their money; that, unlike the other rich kids, they were neither bratty nor spoiled. Contra their image, Ivanka said in interview after interview, both her parents had a meticulous attention to detail and one of those details was to instill in their children the value of earning what you have.

As a teenager, proud of her Trump name, Ivanka became a model, a career she pursued from boarding school in Connecticut. She was on the cover of Seventeen, walked down catwalks, appeared in ads for fashion lines like Tommy Hilfiger. Ivanka was green in those days; she cohosted the 1997 Miss Teen USA contest in a cringeworthy performance. (“I can guarantee my brothers were loving that,” she said after the bathing suit contest.)

At the end of the decade, Ivanka left for college, first Georgetown, then Wharton. During college, she was interviewed for the documentary, Born Rich, a film that challenged the premise that America is a meritocracy. Ivanka comes across as one of the more sane of the young elite, even as she introduced what would soon become her old saws. “My grandfather . . . built more housing units than anyone else has ever done in New York” (which was not true). She also told of preferring Legos to Barbies, and another story, which would become familiar, about her father instructing her in the meaning of debt, after seeing a homeless man sitting outside Trump Tower. “I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know that guy has $8 billion more than me,’ because he was in such extreme debt at that point.” (The number was more like $800 million.) Ivanka said she didn’t understand it until she thought about it around the time she was leaving for college. “It made me all the more proud of my parents, that they got through that.”¹¹

At Wharton, Ivanka, was, by all accounts, a serious student. A little aloof, perhaps, but no one really expected otherwise, given her exceedingly public life. She graduated, cum laude, in May 2004, not summa cum laude, as it said on her book jacket, and as she would frequently affirm when asked by reporters.¹²

In her final semester of college, Ivanka appeared on Oprah, bubbling over appealingly about her plans for a post-college life. “Ivanka will graduate this spring, and what do you get the girl who has everything?” Oprah asked.¹³

“A great gift that my dad gave me recently is an apartment because I’m graduating and I don’t want to live at home anymore,” Ivanka, said, leaning forward slightly, with an open laugh. Later she would recal­ibrate. In her book, she wrote: “I own a two-bedroom apartment in a Trump building, but no one gave it to me. Nor did I benefit from an insider price. I bought my first apartment in one of our buildings because I believe in the Trump brand.” She continued: “I’m paying a mortgage on my apartment, just as my brothers, Don and Eric, pay mortgages on their apartments in other Trump buildings. Admittedly, I pay my mortgage directly to my father instead of to a bank, but it’s a mortgage just the same, and I’ve never missed a payment.”¹⁴ Though New York City property records do show the sale of an apartment to Ivanka from her father for $1.5 million shortly after she graduated, they do not show a mortgage.¹⁵

Ivanka did not go straight to work at the Trump Organization; her father called a fellow developer, Bruce Ratner, and asked him to give her a job at his firm, Forest City Ratner. Ivanka wrote in The Trump Card that she did not know how to take the subway to Brooklyn, and did a trial run on Labor Day, getting hopelessly lost. The next day, she showed up at work two hours early.¹⁶

Ivanka worked hard at Forest City. She was not given a plum assignment: she had to deal with the least glamorous aspect of real estate, commercial retail. But she was collegial. Her co-workers liked her. She did not come off as arrogant. She worked hard and was eager to learn. “Lovely,” one co-worker described her, admitting a disinclination to like a Trump. “She pulled her weight.”

 

In 2005, a twenty-four-year-old Ivanka went to work for the Trump Organization. This was a time of sharp transformation for the Trump family business: away from real estate development, from actually building buildings, and towards licensing, branding, selling products, and generally capitalizing on the hit television show The Apprentice, which had debuted in January 2004 and immediately rocketed to the top of the ratings.

By the time Ivanka arrived, her older brother had been at the company a few years already. Don Jr. had grown up hunting with his Czech grandfather—to whom he spoke Czech—avoiding his father, joining a fraternity in college.¹⁷ After college, he lived in Aspen, Colorado, skiing, hunting, and tending bar, before returning to New York to work for the Trump Organization. He was assigned at first to work as an assistant to his father’s employees. He was thought of as a “good kid.”

By the time Donald Trump launched The Apprentice, he had come very near to personal default and his casinos had already filed for bankruptcy protection. But in the show opener, featuring a shot of the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle, at the southwest corner of Central Park, Trump proclaimed that he was “the largest real estate developer in New York,” and that, after being “billions of dollars in debt” he “fought back, and I won, big league.” He continued, “I’ve turned the name Trump into the highest quality brand,” over a shot of “Trump Ice” water (the only brand allowed on set, people who worked on The Apprentice said). “As the master, I want to pass along my knowledge to somebody else. I’m looking for The Apprentice.” The bassline thrummed, the O’Jay’s intoned “Money, money, money, money.”

“He is not the largest developer in the New York, nor does he own Trump International Hotel and Tower,” New York Times real estate correspondent Charles V. Bagli wrote in the story “Due Diligence on the Donald,” greeting the show’s debut. The opening sequence didn’t include the lyrics of the O’Jays song that went, “I know that money is the root of all evil / Do funny things to some people,” morphing it, as Bagli wrote, “from a warning about greed, gold, and celebrity into a paean to them.”¹⁸

Donald Trump was furious and threatened to sue Bagli, complaining falsely to his editors that Bagli had once tried to shake Donald down for US Open tickets. The Times responded that Bagli had attended the tennis match as part of his coverage of a story. The matter was eventually dropped.¹⁹

But far beyond the reach of the New York Times, The Apprentice beamed an image of Trump: successful entrepreneur, deal maker, patriarch. Its first season finale hit number one in the Nielsen ratings.²⁰ “I like it when critics slam a movie and it does massive box office,” the show’s founder, Mark Burnett, once said. “I love it.”²¹ The Apprentice would set indelibly in the minds of customers and voters. What Trump had, they wanted. If he was involved, it was going to be exciting; it was going to be good.

 

In 2004 and 2005, as The Apprentice phenomenon was taking hold, and as Ivanka was joining the company, foreign wealth surged into New York real estate. NAFTA and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act had enabled money to move without friction around the globe. A loophole in the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks, made it even easier. The PATRIOT Act had several measures designed to curb money laundering, which was viewed, correctly, as a key aspect of international terrorism. But real estate was exempted, as Franklin Foer wrote in his Atlantic story “How Kleptocracy Came to America.” “Every House district in the country has real estate,” Foer wrote, “and lobbyists for that business had pleaded for relief from the PATRIOT Act’s monitoring of dubious foreign transactions. They all but conjured up images of suburban moms staking FOR SALE signs on lawns, ill-equipped to vet every buyer.” The result: “for all the new fastidiousness of the financial system, foreigners could still buy penthouse apartments or mansions anonymously and with ease, by hiding behind shell companies set up in states such as Delaware and Nevada.”²²

By the time Ivanka Trump was elevated to the post of vice president of development and acquisitions, powerful financial incentives were pushing Trump’s business to become increasingly international in scope, increasingly dependent on customers, financing and business partners from overseas, particularly from the former Soviet Union, where Russians made rich by denationalizations were looking for safe places to store their money.

Calling herself a “deal junkie,”²³ Ivanka began forming limited liability companies during this period. She received check-writing privileges and joined the board of the Trump foundation. People would call—journalists, politicians, potential partners—and Trump would put Ivanka on the phone. “Talk to Ivanka,” he would say. “Here’s Ivanka.” Just as his own father had done for him.

Ivanka made her professional Trump-world debut in December 2005, just a few months after starting at the Trump Organization. She glittered on the red carpet at The Apprentice Season 4 after-party at Planet Hollywood in New York, wearing a black and white–striped chinchilla jacket. The awkwardness of her teen years was gone, replaced by a noticeable polish.

When not appearing on red carpets, Ivanka was traveling the world. In The Trump Card, she told of some of the places she’d gone for work: Dubai, Colombia, Panama, Jordan, Israel, and Kazakhstan, where she was presented with a meal of boiled horse meat and fermented camel’s milk, neither of which she could abide. “I’m determined not to be one of those ugly Americans who leaves her hotel only for meetings and eats only room-service hamburgers,” Ivanka wrote, “so I dug right in . . . I took pains to disguise my lack of interest from my hosts.”²⁴

She also traveled, quietly, to Moscow.

The winter of 2006, Ivanka and her brother, Donald Trump Jr. flew to the Russian capital where they were photographed—Ivanka wearing the same chinchilla coat—with a broker and a business partner for Trump properties in Sunny Isles, Florida.²⁵ Moscow was a growing market for the Trumps by 2006: the Trump World Tower, and Florida’s Sunny Isles—known as “Little Moscow”—were propped up by Russian buyers.²⁶

During this trip to Russia in 2006, Ivanka and Don Jr. were squired around Moscow by a business associate of their father’s: Felix Sater, a deep-voiced, sharply dressed Jewish Soviet émigré who by then was working at Bayrock Group, a real estate developer with offices in Trump Tower just below Trump’s own. Sater grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a father who was convicted of small-time mob activity.²⁷ He was friends as a teenager with another young Jewish boy, from Long Island, the son of a Holocaust survivor, named Michael Cohen. Sater tried to make a career for himself on Wall Street, but this line of work was derailed when he got into a bar fight with a man in Manhattan, slashing his face with the broken stem of a margarita glass. Sater served time in prison; got out, and was then convicted for his role in a $40-million pump-and-dump stock scheme. Rather than go to prison, Sater began cooperating with various US intelligence and law enforcement agencies. For over a decade, much of which time he was working as a Trump business associate, he turned over information to the US government on five Italian mob families and the Russian mob.²⁸ He started going by the name Satter to avoid detection, and tried to reinvent himself as a Trump business associate.

In Moscow, in 2006, Sater took Ivanka and Don Jr. on a tour of the Kremlin. As BuzzFeed News reported, “Sater, as would be the case over and over in his life, had an inside connection. He phoned an old friend, a Russian billionaire, whom he knew through his Bayrock connections. The billionaire sent a fleet of cars and guards to escort them through the Kremlin, and when a tour guide pointed out Putin’s office, Ivanka Trump asked if she could sit in his chair at an antique desk. One of the guards said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”

As Sater later described it, he said “ ‘C’mon, she’s a girl, what is she going to do, steal his pen?” Ivanka “sat behind the desk, spun in the chair, and that was that.”²⁹ Later, they went to the extravagant home of the man who had set up the Kremlin visit: Russian-Azerbaijani businessman Telman Ismailov. They ate white caviar, produced by albino sturgeons, orders of magnitude more valuable than regular caviar. Ivanka Trump did not discuss her Moscow trip until 2017, when asked about it by the New York Times. “In a statement,” the Times wrote, “she said that during the 2006 trip she took ‘a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin’ as a tourist. She said it is possible she sat in Mr. Putin’s chair during that tour but she did not recall it. She said she has not seen or spoken to Mr. Sater since 2010. ‘I have never met President Vladimir Putin,’ she said.”³⁰

Not long after she returned from Moscow in 2006, Ivanka Trump joined her father at a press conference in Trump Tower to promote one of their earliest foreign licensing deals: the Trump Ocean Club Panama. “I really think the time for Panama has come,” Donald Trump proclaimed. According to a newsletter unearthed by ProPublica’s Heather Vogell, Donald Trump “said the Trump organization does have a financial interest in the project but he would not disclose the amount.”³¹ But the Trumps did not have equity. Their purported stake was a ruse to reassure buyers and investors that it was such a good financial deal, the Trumps were putting their own money in.

The false claim was part of the Trump’s financing strategy. Trump’s licensing deal in Panama was written so he would get a cut if he procured the financing, a construction bond from Bear Stearns. But in order to get the financing, the investment bank had to be assured Trump’s partners had presold over 60 percent of the units. The press conference and its attendant sales pitch were designed to drum up those sales.

A few months after the Trumps announced the Panama project, they used the last episode of The Apprentice Season Five to advertise another new building, the Trump SoHo.³² Felix Sater had put together the group to build the Trump SoHo. It included Tevfik Arif, a Kazakh-Turkish investor, and Tamir Sapir, the Soviet émigré who had once sold televisions to Donald Trump, but who by then had become an ostentatiously wealthy developer.

By early 2007, selling units in the Trump SoHo was a key family priority. That January Ivanka Trump appeared in an advertisement for the Trump SoHo in a low-cut white cocktail dress, draped on the floor of an empty room with New York’s skyline pictured on three sides, under the tagline “Possess Your Own SoHo.” The New York Observer, her future husband’s newspaper, called it—in January—“the Real Estate Image of 2007 (so far).”³³

In September of that year, the Trumps held a launch party for the Trump SoHo at the Tribeca Rooftop. According to the New York Daily News, “guests were greeted by doormen in 18th-century French costumes complete with powdered wigs. Ushered into elevators draped in blood-red velvet curtains with gothic mirrors, guests walked onto two floors with five open bars that dished out every flavor of Grey Goose ever made.” There were nine food tables serving “racks of lamb, filets of beef, crab claws, shrimp cocktails, dim sum, sushi and oysters all night. Iced bottles of Perrier Jouet Rosé Champagne rested on blood-red silk tables, waiting to be popped.”

“This party was not thrown to pump sales,” Donald Trump told the Daily News. “We already have a 3,200-person waiting list to see the units. It was thrown to celebrate a new kind of luxury downtown.”³⁴ There was no such waiting list. Ivanka told the Daily News that the “sales office had been flooded by calls from potential international buyers.”³⁵

Not too long after this party, the New York Times’s Charles Bagli got a tip that Felix Satter, Trump’s associate on the Trump SoHo, was actually Felix Sater, convicted felon. “I’m not proud of some of the things that happened in my 20s,” Sater told Bagli. “I am proud of the things I’m doing now.” Trump claimed the news surprised him: “We never knew that. We do as much of a background check as we can on the principals. I didn’t really know him very well.”³⁶ By this point, Trump and Sater had been on marketing trips around the country, including one in Colorado, where they rode in a limo together.³⁷ One former high-level Trump Organization official said in an interview that Sater’s past was known to Trump: a tipster had called the company to inform them. After internal discussion, the Trump Organization decided to accept Sater’s argument he was on the road to reform.

He continued to work with the Trump Organization well into 2016.

 

Right after The Apprentice introduced the Trump SoHo, Donald Trump ousted the Trump Organization employees who had acted as judges and replaced them with Ivanka and Don Jr. On season six, episode one, Donald introduced “my daughter, Ivanka. She’ll be working with me and she went to the Wharton School of Finance, she was a terrific student so she will be my eyes and ears for this and I think you’ll all get along very well with Ivanka.”³⁸

The Apprentice, through all its mutations, had a formula: two teams were assigned a business task, the cameras followed them as they tried to complete it; at some point the judges—in later seasons Ivanka and Don Jr.—would appear to evaluate each team’s progress. One team would win, and the losing team would be called into the “boardroom” (actually, a set in Trump Tower, or for part of the show, in a Hollywood mansion), where Donald Trump, eventually accompanied by his children, encouraged the contestants to call out each other’s weaknesses, to lay blame for specific failures on specific individuals.

On her Apprentice debut Ivanka pressed the losing team. “Was there a strategy?” she asked. “Because when I got there it didn’t seem like there was any clear direction.” Her voice rising, she queried the “Project Manager”: “Where were you in the first hour?” Her father jumped in. “Who do you blame for losing?” he asked the contestants. “If you were me, who would you fire?”

During Ivanka’s debut, Martin Clarke, an African-American graduate of George Washington University Law School, and Frank Lombardi, an Italian-American real estate developer from the Bronx, had been called to the boardroom. Frank, the project manager, had made some key errors in judgment, but soldiered on. “I’m fighting for my life to stay here, I want to prove myself to you, sir,” he said to Donald Trump.

It was at this point that Ivanka was asked to weigh in. “Martin,” she said, “I don’t see you fitting in with our company, I don’t see you working side by side with me and my father.” Martin disputed this conclusion, as Apprentice contestants were encouraged to do, but Ivanka pushed back. “Martin,” Donald Trump said, “you’re fired.”

Ivanka’s debut was a marketing coup. “The Trump Organization was already the world’s most recognized development company before the show, but The Apprentice has raised our visibility as a family and as a development company to a whole new level,” Ivanka wrote in The Trump Card. “That’s been especially true for Don and me. By appearing on my father’s show . . . my brother and I have become almost instant celebrities.”³⁹

The Trumps fed this celebrity machine. As with her father, who was described in his 1976 New York Times profile as displaying “dazzling white teeth” and looking “ever so much like Robert Redford.”⁴⁰ Ivanka’s own sex appeal was soon on full display, not only to market Trump real estate, but also to sell her growing list of Ivanka-branded products. In each interview, Ivanka was celebrated as young and brilliant, a savvy businesswoman and a knockout. It became a canon.

She was featured in a low-cut bustier-topped dress on the cover of Stuff magazine in the fall of 2006 with the cover line “Ivanka Trumps All! The Apprentice’s Red-Hot Taskmaster,” and inside, in an even lower-cut slip-style dress, lying on a desk with her knee brushing up against a placard that said “Vice President.”⁴¹ Just as she was launching Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry,⁴² she appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in a black bathing suit with high-cut legs, wrists encircled with enormous Ivanka Trump–brand bracelets and ears adorned with prominent Ivanka Trump–brand drop earrings, all while wielding a jackhammer with a backhoe for a backdrop. The cover line touted “The New Queen of Diamonds.”⁴³

In a profile in Marie Claire, Ivanka embraced every part of her image. “On her desk is a copy of the September issue of Trump magazine, and she’s on the cover, flaunting cleavage.”

“I would never have done this a year ago,” she told Marie Claire. “I would have said, ‘Oh, I should be buttoned up’ and whatnot. But once I realized that, ultimately, I’m never going to blend in, and I don’t need to be a guy to succeed in this world, I decided it’s OK to be 25 and have a little bit of fun with it, and still unabashedly walk into a meeting with any banker and not be embarrassed. Because I am in a strange position, and I’ve been enjoying it.”⁴⁴

 

In early 2007, Ivanka Trump was invited to a luncheon by a young businessman, Moshe Lax, who, like Ivanka, worked in both diamonds and real estate. “I was pursuing a lead on a piece of land in Fort Myers, Florida. I didn’t like the deal when it was laid out for me, but I looked closely,” she wrote in The Trump Card.⁴⁵ The Laxes’ primary business wasn’t real estate, it was diamonds. Though the deal didn’t work out, it launched a lasting business relationship. (Years later, the US Justice Department sued the Laxes for tax fraud, charges they denied.⁴⁶) Ivanka Trump’s business luncheon with Moshe Lax launched another lasting relationship: Jared Kushner had been invited too. Ivanka told friends she was smitten.

In April 2007, spotted at the New York Observer relaunch party by the New York Post, Ivanka looked “radiant.” Both she and Jared told the Post they were “buddies” and “close friends.”⁴⁷ The next month, they were spotted kissing at the Bowlmor.⁴⁸ In September, the “lovebirds”⁴⁹ were shot strolling hand in hand through SoHo.⁵⁰ By December, they were being written about in the New York Times.⁵¹ “Introducing the Ivanka,” the article was titled.

In 2008, Jared and Ivanka’s relationship hit a sand trap. Donald Trump didn’t understand why his daughter wanted to marry an Orthodox Jew, and Charlie and especially Seryl Kushner did not want their son to marry a non-Jew. Ivanka pushed back. “I’m a New Yorker, I’m in real estate. I’m as close to Jewish, with a ‘i-s-h’ naturally as anyone can start off,” she later told New York magazine’s Gabe Sherman.⁵² Jew-i-s-h was not enough. The couple broke up. In mid-2008, Rupert Murdoch and his wife, Wendi, by then one of Ivanka’s closest friends, contrived to get Jared and Ivanka back together by inviting each separately to spend the weekend—together—on their yacht.

The next month Jared and Ivanka were spotted by the New York Post’s Page Six, entering Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on East Eighty-Fifth Street in Manhattan.⁵³ Ivanka began studying the Torah. She consented to observe the sabbath, which meant not driving, not checking her cell phone, not working on Friday nights and Saturdays. She learned Kosher cooking, was tested by a religious panel, and took a ritual cleansing dip in a mikvah. By the fall of 2008, Ivanka Trump was undergoing the arduous task of converting to Judaism. The New York Post ran a gossip item with the headline “Shiksa No More.”⁵⁴

 

Inside Trump Tower, Ivanka’s role in the family company was growing. “I’m involved in every aspect of our new construction projects,” she told Portfolio in 2008. In her capacity as vice president, she pointed out, “a lot of what I do is get involved in the acquisition process, from sourcing the potential opportunities and then the initial due-diligence process, but then, of course, I follow the deals through to predevelopment planning, design, interior design, architectural design, sales and marketing, and, ultimately, through operations. One of the things that I’ve done and been very active with since joining the company four years ago is get involved with the ramp-up and the development of our hotel-management company, called the Trump Hotel collection.” When she paused for breath, she added that she’d sold forty units at Trump Ocean Club Panama.

“You did?” the interviewer asked. Well, she answered, “We did, our project,” before adding that the building was 90 percent sold, and that it was selling at a 500 percent premium. The building was not 90 percent sold out, it never sold at a 500 percent premium, and those involved in selling the project couldn’t remember Ivanka selling a single unit herself.⁵⁵

In the early summer of 2008, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric called a press conference for the foreign press at Trump Tower to promote the Trump SoHo. Ivanka told the assembled reporters the Trump SoHo was 60 percent sold. This too, was a lie.

There was another sales promotion event around this time, in San Diego, to sell units for a project in Baja California. Ivanka allowed buyers to believe that the Trump family were developers (they were licensors), that they had equity in the project, and that she was so sure of the resort that she herself was buying a unit. (She did not say she had a special, undisclosed discount.)⁵⁶ “Market conditions simply do not apply to the Trump Ocean Resort—or to any other Trump development,” Ivanka Trump wrote in one communication with buyers, court records show.⁵⁷

But market conditions did apply, the project was never built, and buyers were threatened with a total loss. When that happened, Ivanka backed off the story that the Trumps had been all in on the development. She told CBS News: “We were never the developer of this project, and that was made clear. We never took anyone’s deposit, we never had access to the escrow accounts, we lived up to our obligation under our license agreement.” She added, “I am sorry for everyone but we are in the same boat,” before going on to insist, “the Trump organization has really never been stronger.”⁵⁸ This, too, was a misdirection.

A few months later, Ivanka announced her engagement on Twitter: “truly the happiest day of my life!!!”⁵⁹ In mid-October, she published The Trump Card with an attendant burst of publicity. There was an interview with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate, the ultimate arbiter at the time of a certain kind of society taste, in which she discussed opera. “Peter Gelb told me that you’re a big opera fan,” Lopate said, referring to the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. “I am, I am,” Ivanka answered. “I’ve been a bit remiss over the last year, and I haven’t had the fortune to go last year, but the previous year, I went probably around ten times.” Lopate approved. Then they talked about her book.⁶⁰

A week and a half later, she was married.

Unlike her father, Ivanka Trump, at twenty-seven, was a true child of Manhattan. Donald Trump was gauche, Ivanka Trump was polished; he was unruly, she was disciplined. He was fun, but always a bit of a spectacle, Ivanka had become, to the Manhattan elite, one of us.

Less than a year later, Ivanka Trump was under criminal investigation for felony fraud for lying to buyers of the Trump SoHo.