Ever wondered what the Trump family children were like as tiny tots?
Excerpts from Ivanka Trump’s 2009 self-help book The Trump Card (endorsed by Anna Wintour, no less) have come to light, thanks to an intrepid journalist at The New Yorker.
And they will make you see her in a completely new light.
For example, this, on opening a lemonade stand as a child: “We had no such advantages,” Ivanka Trump wrote in the book, referring to the fact that she was forbidden to set up her stand outside Trump Tower, then her childhood home. Ivanka and her brothers Eric and Donald Jr settled instead for stumping outside their summer home in Connecticut, but soon realised a grave error: the neighbourhood was so fancy nobody was walking around on the streets.
“As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard that summer,” Ivanka added. The New Yorker adds that the Trump children “persuaded” their bodyguard, driver and maids to “[dig] deep for spare change,” and buy their lemonade. All the kids learnt an important lesson that day, Ivanka noted. “[To make] the best of a bad situation.”
And then there’s this, on attending the elite private school Choate in Connecticut: “[It was an opportunity] to look at the world from a whole new angle. Even if it meant living in a building names for someone else!”
The New Yorker goes deeper into the book, identifying the moment in the book when she says she decided she had to become financially independent (when her mother forced her to fly economy to the south of France for a holiday as a child). Ivanka also names Roger Aisles – disgraced former Fox News executive fired for sexual harassment – as a mentor. Andrew Cuomo, “New York’s great attorney general” apparently chillingly advised in the book that “e-mail is the key to prosecuting just about everyone these days.”
The Trump Card was by no means the end of Ivanka’s career as an author. The First Daughter has a new book out next year – Women Who Work: Rewriting The Rules For Success – and we can’t wait to see what gems will be unearthed from its pages…
