Trump niece: Ivanka would be first to flip on dad
Donald Trump may have showered Ivanka Trump with adoration all her life and given her a job in his White House, but none of that would stop her from cooperating with prosecutors if it would keep her out of prison, said Mary Trump, the former president’s niece.
“She’s much less likely to stay loyal than Allen Weisselberg,” Mary Trump recently told the Daily Beast’s “New Abnormal” podcast. Mary Trump, who famously shared Trump family secrets in her 2020 book, “Too Much and Never Enough,” was referring to the Trump Organization CFO who was indicted last week on tax fraud charges related to the former president’s real estate development company.
Prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office want to get Weisselberg to flip on his former boss, but Mary Trump said her cousin Ivanka would have even more motivation to cooperate with prosecutors than the longtime CFO. Before working for her father in the White House, Ivanka Trump worked with her brothers, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, as an executive vice president for the family business.
While Mary Trump said it’s hard to believe that Ivanka Trump would turn on her father in such a “low rent” Shakespearean move, she noted that all relationships between Donald Trump and his four adult children are “transactional and conditional.”
“Allen had a pretty cushy gig where he was,” Mary Trump said on the podcast. “And I think kind of in the grand scheme of things, as counterintuitive as this might sound, I think Ivanka has, one, more to lose and, two, more to hang on to. Her husband’s family is legitimately very wealthy.”
Ivanka Trump is married to Jared Kushner, with whom she has three young children. Kushner has a reported net worth of around $800 million, and his family real estate, Kushner Companies, owns and operates $7 billion worth of real estate assets around the country.
Meanwhile, the Trump sibling least likely to flip on the patriarch is his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., Mary Trump suggested. In the past four years, Trump Jr. has become one of his father’s most fervent political supporters and a popular exponent himself of conservative MAGA ideology.
Beneath all Trump Jr.’s Twitter bravado, he’s “broken” because of the way his father treated him growing up, Mary Trump said.
“It is never a good thing in the Trump family to be the oldest son,” Mary Trump said. “Donald had this fascination with Ivanka from the time she was little, and had no use for his sons. … Like his father before him, Donald was very, very hard on Donnie.”
For Trump Jr., it still may be important for him to get the attention he always “craved” from his father, which is why he may stay loyal, Mary Trump suggested.
Another Trump biographer also has said that Ivanka Trump could be in serious legal jeopardy. In fact, she’s potentially facing the same sort of trouble as Weisselberg because she allegedly did the same kinds of things the CFO is being prosecuted for, author Michael D’antonio told CNN’S Jim Acosta.
“The other person who I think is in peril is Ivanka Trump,” D’antonio said, explaining that the Trump family business more resembles an organized crime operation than a regular company.
“One of the things that Allen Weisselberg is in trouble for is taking money as a contractor and then claiming self-employed status so that he can get some of the retirement benefits that the tax code allows for self-employed people,” said D’antonio, author of the 2015 book “Never Enough.”
“Well, we know that Ivanka Trump got quite significant sums paid to her as non-employee compensation,” D’antonio said on CNN. “That freed the Trump Organization from paying part of her taxes, and it put her in a status that I think the IRS would have lots of questions about. So, these folks don’t know how to play the game straight. I think everything they do is crooked.”