Uhm. right. He had a real hardscrabble upbringing.
Here are some anecdotes from Ivana Trump’s book “Raising Trump”
Ivana admitted that she “avoided play dates like the plague” while they were living at Trump Tower in New York. “The triplex was just too huge and lavish,” she said. And given her recollection of the kids breaking into her humidity and temperature controlled fur vault to use her designer mink, sable and chinchilla coats in games, it’s no wonder.
But only one visitor could come over any time – and he happened to be a global superstar. “The only person who had an open invitation to come to the triplex for play dates whenever he wanted was Michael Jackson,” she said. Ivana added that she never believed allegations of child sexual abuse against Jackson – who lived in Trump Tower at the time.
Birthday parties were OTT
Owning hotels had its perks. Ivana shared that when they owned New York’s iconic The Plaza Hotel, catering would set up a dozen tables in meeting rooms and decorate them with balloons and confetti for birthdays. The cakes, she said, were several tiers tall.
It’s no wonder the standard was so high – Donald’s biographer Michael D’Antonio has detailed how, when the former US president was younger, he would throw cake at birthday parties.
When the Trumps became famous, going trick or treating on Halloween with their nannies supervising wasn’t good enough. Ivana said that they were so worried, they would get their security team to follow them, incognito.
Ivana has admitted that being wealthy influenced the way they took care of their children. “My version of helicopter parenting was to bring the kids to work with me in the Trump chopper,” she joked.
Ivanka detailed in her own book The Trump Card that at the time of her father’s affair with Tiffany Trump’s mother Marla Maples, she was hounded by paparazzi at the school gates, with reporters even asking the then nine-year-old Ivanka about Donald’s performance in bed.
However, Eric insisted in a group interview in 2016 that while Donald “always had thousands of cameras on him”, they were raised as normal kids – “or at least as normal as you could be raised under the circumstances”.
Old childhood friends have claimed that Donald – who was himself shipped off to military school as a teenager – was for the most part absent from supporting Donald Jr. and Eric at their boarding school events, according the The Guardian.
A college friend of Donald Jr. recalled that on the rare occasion the real estate entrepreneur did take his son out to a baseball game, he would make him wear a suit, according to Complex.
Ivana also said in “Raising Trump”:
“I got total custody of the kids when I divorced Donald,” Trump tells The Post. “That was non-negotiable. But even if Donald and I had stayed together, I would have raised the kids.
“Donald was the kind of father who was at the office at 6 in the morning. I would take the kids to his office after the breakfast and they would play on the floor with the Legos while Donald was on the telephone.
“He provided for them and he loved them,” she continues. “But he does not know how to make small talk and he certainly was not going to say, ‘Oh, choo, choo, choo, choo. How cute we are today. Let’s go to the park in the stroller.’ No. That was not his kind of thing. He only started talking to them when they were in university and they could talk business.”
Once, during their brutal, bruising divorce that was on the front pages of The Post and the Daily News for months in 1990, one of Trump’s lawyers said Ivana was a bad mother.
“I was devastated,” she says.
Her husband called that afternoon and told her to bring Donald Jr. to his office immediately. After spending 20 minutes with his eldest son, Trump called his wife and said, “You are a bad mother. I’m keeping Donald Jr.”
Ivana was furious, but this tough lady, who was born and raised behind the Iron Curtain, kept her cool.
“Keep him,” she said. “I have two more to raise.”
Ten minutes later, Donald Jr. was back in her arms in their penthouse in Trump Tower.
“I knew Donald would not know what to do with him,” she says. “It was hurtful, but I could not be intimidated.”
Real, salt ‘o the earth stuff there. Let’s just admit that Trumpie had his boys to the “site” once or twice and let them climb up in the seat of a backhoe a couple of times before they were whisked off to their tennis lesson and then lunch at 21. We know what life they led. Anyone who buys this line of crap from Eric (which Don Jr had also peddled) is a sucker.