Party finds ‘Kennedy clan’ in Trump’s kids

Donald Trump unleashed the last of them on Thursday, just minutes before he took the stage to accept the Republican party’s nomination. His children have been his best weapon at the convention.

They have been followed around, gawked at, selfied with, reported about and just generally celebrated. Some Republicans are saying the party may have found its “Kennedy clan”.

“Just look at those kids,” said Buffie Ingersoll, a delegate from Houston, Texas. “We have had the Bushes… but they are…” One of them is based in her state, remember. But the Trump family is like the “Kennedy clan”, she added. And, said another delegate who refused to be identified, “minus the scandals”.

They are not just nice looking, smart and eloquent. They have emerged as important surrogates for Trump at the convention, meeting Republican leaders and donors. And significantly, they have offered the strongest character testimonial for their father.

“In person, my father is so friendly, so considerate, so funny, and so real,” Tiffany Trump, the nominee’s daughter from his second marriage, said. She kept all her report cards from school, she said, because of the “sweet notes he wrote on each and every one of them”, which were about everything and anything but grades. Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, sons from his first marriage, described a father who brought them up to be as comfortable in a construction site vehicle as in their own cars.

And their sister Ivanka, her father’s favourite according to her siblings, was given the task of introducing the nominee at the convention’s most important event, his acceptance speech. letters@hindustantimes.com