Daughter-in-law and party chief: Lara Trump’s rise to become one of campaign’s biggest defenders

MILWAUKEE – Donald Trump was discussing his dynasty.

It was July 9, before a would-be assassin’s bullet sliced through his ear, and he was surrounded by his family onstage at a rally at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. One by one, he shouted out his grandchildren and his three sons: Don Jr (“very tough”), Eric (“somebody who’s fantastic”) and Barron (“he might be more popular than Don and Eric”).

Then, the former president mentioned one family member who was not there that day.

“You like Lara, right?” he asked the crowd, sounding like a salesperson at a product launch. “Lara is only the head of the Republican Party,” he said of Eric’s wife. “She’s upwardly mobile.”

Mrs Lara Trump’s rapid ascent – from apolitical tabloid television producer to party boss – was on full display this week as Republicans convened in Milwaukee to nominate Trump as their presidential candidate. As the party’s co-chair, she was also the host of this four-day Trump-fest.

On July 15, she sat directly behind her father-in-law as he made his emotional first appearance since the assassination attempt. On July 16, she spoke for more than 20 minutes, a lot longer than elected officials like South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin or even Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene were given onstage.

“I know what you hear out there about Donald Trump,” Mrs Trump said in a speech aimed at appealing to Trump sceptics. “But when I look at Donald Trump, I see a wonderful father, father-in-law, and, of course, grandfather to my two young children, Luke and Carolina.”

This is probably what Trump had in mind when he pushed her to take the job in March. In the time since, Mrs Trump, 41, has become one of the campaign’s most visible defenders in the media, putting a smiling spin on some of the darkest aspects of her father-in-law’s campaign for the White House.

But with great airtime comes great risk – at least in Trump’s orbit. Aides who fail to execute his vision can get tossed aside; some who succeed have ended up indicted. Mrs Trump acknowledges the unusual, dual pressures of being both operative and in-law. If Trump wants her help subverting an election, what would she do?

“The ante’s been upped in a lot of ways,” she said when asked in an interview with The New York Times last week.

“I always say to Eric, I’m like, ‘I hope we win. I don’t know what my standing in the family will be!’” she joked, with a nervous laugh.

Do things that scare you

It was six months ago that Trump asked her to run for co-chair of the Republican National Committee, which controls the party’s electoral machinery and its finances, and puts on the convention.

“When he called and talked to me initially about it, I was shocked,” she said. She had helped out on his presidential campaigns in the past, but, she said, this was “a big job”.

There had always been a power struggle between Trump and the committee, which had been run by Ms Ronna McDaniel since 2017. He wanted one of his own people in there. But Mrs Trump had trepidations.

“I said, ‘I don’t know; that’s a lot right now,’” she recalled, telling him “this might not be a great time for me”, since she has two young children, aged four and six. He told her to think about it and he would call back in a couple of days. Sister-in-law Ivanka Trump and her husband, Mr Jared Kushner, called to encourage her, she said.

“You should probably do things in life that scare you,” she said, explaining why she said yes.

In March, Ms McDaniel was pushed out and Mrs Trump was unanimously elected as co-chair alongside Mr Michael Whatley, a party official from North Carolina. Trump’s critics said that he was trying to use the party to pay for his personal legal bills. Mrs Trump and Mr Whatley promptly fired dozens of employees and effectively fused the organisation with Trump’s 2024 campaign. It is all under his thumb now.

Mrs Trump was never much interested in politics before her father-in-law ran for office. “None of us in the Trump family were,” she reminded this reporter. She grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said, “I certainly knew my parents voted Republican, but there was never a major discussion about it.”

She attended North Carolina State University, worked as a bartender and a waitress for a time, and then moved to New York City to attend the French Culinary Institute in SoHo. Eventually, she landed in television, working as a producer for Inside Edition.

Six months after moving to the city, she met Mr Eric Trump at a party. “He’s a tall drink of water; so am I,” she said. She is about 1.8m before the stilettos. “We saw each other across the room. It worked out.”

She baked him a heart-shaped cake for his birthday, painting a camouflage pattern, a bird and an assault rifle into the icing, because she knew he liked to hunt. “I don’t know anything about guns, so obviously you’re not shooting any birds with an AK-47, but I put it on there,” she said.

“I thought it was fun and cute. Immediately the next day, there was an article,” she recalled. The article in gossip blog Gawker made fun of her new beau and his cake.

It was an “awful” first brush with being in the media, she said, but now “we’re all calloused”.

She is quick to defend the Trump women who have fled the spotlight just as she stepped into it. She said Ms Ivanka Trump, her sister-in-law, backed away from politics because of the media scrutiny. “I know it was really hard on their kids,” she said. “I think for them, there was just incoming every day. There was just so much criticism.”

And what of the phantom-like Mrs Melania Trump? “I think Melania will be out whenever it’s appropriate for her,” Mrs Lara Trump said.

One hope she has for a second Trump term is that “the fashion magazines have learnt their lesson”. Mrs Melania Trump did not appear on the cover of Vogue as first lady. Mrs Jill Biden, by contrast, has been on the cover of the fashion bible three times. “A travesty,” remarked Mrs Lara Trump.

Mrs Lara Trump says she identifies with her husband’s mother, Ms Ivana Trump, who died two years ago. Ms Ivana Trump told her daughter-in-law all about her “role in the Trump organisation, her role in Atlantic City, with the casinos, with the Plaza Hotel, and all those things”, she said. She made clear to her daughter-in-law that if she wanted to succeed as a Trump woman, she had to be ambitious.

“I think that’s probably one of the reasons my husband connected with me so well, because they say you marry your parents in some sick way, but I have a lot of those same qualities,” Mrs Lara Trump said.

Notably, Donald Trump viewed his former wife’s work differently, once describing it as the reason their marriage fell apart. “I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing,” he said in 1994, citing that as “the single greatest cause of what happened to my marriage with Ivana”.

Asked about Trump’s view, Mrs Lara Trump said simply: “Right, there’s a balance.”

Echoing Trump

Mrs Trump has stepped into her new role with gusto, often repeating her father-in-law’s false claims about elections or ominous warnings about retribution – albeit with less edge.

She frequently travels the country promoting what the party describes as its “election integrity” programme, a variety of efforts that are preparing the groundwork should Trump try to subvert the outcome of the election as he did in 2020.

In the interview, she did not state directly that she believes the 2020 election was stolen, but did spread suspicion about fraud. “I believe that if every legal vote is counted, there’s no question Donald Trump will become the 47th president,” she said. “If it is a free and fair election – and that is our intention, every day, to make sure of that – then there will be no problem. And we won’t have any questions on the other side of it.”

Trump’s own attorney-general has said Trump’s theories about the 2020 election being stolen were “nonsense”. Audits, recounts and investigations found no evidence of significant fraud.

Mrs Trump said her father-in-law calls and texts her regularly about the election integrity unit. But sometimes, he calls just to tell her he is listening to one of her songs. Ms Trump is an amateur singer best known for her cover of Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down.

She had a front-row seat on Jan 6, 2021. “It’s my husband’s birthday,” she said, recalling how a rally crowd sang him happy birthday before

marching to the Capitol and storming the building.

“It was actually a really lovely experience to be up on that stage, and the positive energy there, I think, was amazing,” she said of the rally before the attack.

Mrs Trump allowed that “anyone who broke the law should be held accountable”, but said that mostly, when she looks back on that day, she saw “thousands and thousands of people who were devastated that the election had not gone the way that they expected”.

She parroted her father-in-law on other topics, too. On Trump’s threats to use the Justice Department to investigate targets of his choosing, Mrs Trump said there should be “a big change” at the department: “If that’s something he feels is necessary as a president, I think he should absolutely do that.”

In April, she promised “four years of scorched earth if Donald Trump retakes the White House.” Asked what exactly that would look like, she explained that Trump “had to learn about a lot of things” during his first term in office. “I think he very quickly learnt you can’t trust a lot of people in DC,” she said. “People who he thought were his friends were not his friends.” THE NEW YORK TIMES