Bonding over bricks, mortar, politics

wanted something, we could have it, but we had to work for it. We always had to have jobs.”

For all the talk of familial love, admiration and discipline, the Trumps are no prototypical Norman Rockwell family.

By his children’s own admissions, the thrice-married Trump was never the kind of dad who played baseball with them, built sand castles and read bedtime stories.

“We were definitely a more go-look-at-property kind of family,” Eric once told CNN.

Trump himself has struggled to recall when he ever changed a diaper.

And there was plenty of turmoil when Trump’s 1990 divorce from first wife, Ivana, played out like a tawdry serial in the New York tabloids and word of his affair with Marla Maples became public.

Nine-year-old Ivanka found out her parents were divorcing when she saw a picture of them with a rip down the centre splashed across the front of the New York Post.

After their parents split, the children lived with their mother in Trump Tower, tended to by nannies, while their father moved to another floor in the building.

In the heat of the divorce battle, Ivana Trump was quoted as saying of her husband, “Donald has gone weeks on end without seeing the children at all.”

But Ivanka, in a 2004 interview with New York magazine, said the breakup ultimately brought the three kids closer to their father.

“Every morning before school, we’d go downstairs and give him a hug and kiss,” she said. “We didn’t take his presence for granted anymore.”

Maples had already given birth to Trump’s fourth child, daughter Tiffany, by the time she and Trump married late in 1993.

Tiffany, 22 and a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was largely raised by her mother in California. She was five when her parents divorced in 1999.

“I don’t know what it’s like to have a typical father figure,” she told DuJour magazine last year. “He’s not the dad who’s going to take me to the beach and go swimming, but he’s such a motivational person.”

A typical father, for one, wouldn’t be likely to speculate on the future breast size of his toddler, as Trump once did on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” when he was asked what Tiffany had inherited from her mother.

Maples once said of her marriage to Trump: “There weren’t any sacred moments. Everything had to be done in front of a camera, or everything was for the business.”

Trump’s youngest child, son Barron, 10, was born to his third and current wife, Melania, who has largely stayed off the campaign trail to raise their son.

“I want to thank Barron for putting up with the fact that I never see him anymore,” Trump said in May.

Trump’s other children are making the most of their moment in the spotlight. There’s been speculation that Don Jr. has his own political aspirations, and he hasn’t ruled out running for office. But his father was clear there will be no 2017 run by Don Jr. for New York mayor.

The day after she delivered a speech vouching for her dad at the Republican National Convention, Ivanka Trump’s fashion line marketed the dress she wore at the podium: “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech.”