Trump family values: Are the kids starting to worry about dad’s behavior?
https://www.auntydebbysblog.com/2016/10/trump-family-values-are-kids-starting.html

Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., children of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Photos: Dennis Van Tine/AP, Carolyn Kaster/AP, Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
It was a statement that read as though Donald Trump had drafted it himself.
Last
Wednesday, as the Republican presidential nominee spiraled down into a
week that would ultimately be dominated by his personal attacks on a
former Miss Universe and his seething response to poor reviews of his
debate performance, NBC News reported that among those growing
increasingly concerned about the trajectory of his campaign were his
three adult children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric. The kids, NBC’s Katy
Tur reported, were starting to worry about the campaign’s adverse
impact on the family business.
It
didn’t take long for Trump to respond. On a three-state swing through
Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, the celebrity businessman, who obsessively
monitors media coverage of his campaign, grew irritated as he sat on
his plane watching the report and others quoting anonymous advisers
critical of his lack of debate preparation, according to an adviser.
Soon, via a spokeswoman, emerged a pair of statements — one on behalf of
Trump’s kids and the other a personal response from the candidate
himself.
“They
are happier than ever before, as they should be, given the success in
the polls and in Monday’s debate,” the statement issued on the kids’
behalf read. Any suggestion to the contrary was “a fabricated lie,” the
statement continued, adding that the Trump “business continues to be
tremendously successful” and his assets “among the best in the world.”
Responding
to Tur personally, Trump said, “Your sources, if they even exist, are
probably sources that have been fired long ago and have no knowledge of
what is happening in the campaign. Hard to be unhappy when we are doing
so well.”
Although
the campaign strongly denies it, those in and close to Trump World
describe anything but a happy relationship between Trump and his adult
children in recent days. A source close to the campaign, who declined to
be named discussing the inner-workings of the operation, said the
candidate’s children have been “frustrated” with their father for his
lack of attention to debate preparations and struggle to stay
disciplined, and at Trump’s senior staff who have been unable to control
the candidate from giving in to his worst impulses on the campaign
trail, including his increasingly personal attacks on Hillary Clinton
and his unconstrained use of Twitter to settle personal scores.
Asked
for comment, Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman, strongly denied any
tensions. “There is no truth to this,” she said, adding that “the team,
including the kids,” are working well together.
Closer
to their father than just about anyone, the Trump kids have more than
once stepped in to help right the course of their father’s insurgent
campaign over the last year. The kids, along with Ivanka’s husband,
Jared Kushner, have advised Trump on strategy and key staffing moves —
including the firing of former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski
earlier this year and the hiring of Kellyanne Conway as manager in
August. They have also served as perhaps his most important surrogates
to Americans skeptical of his character and temperament — insisting
their father is more open, caring and constrained than his critics would
attest and offering their own lives as proof. “Judge his values by
those he’s instilled in his children,” Ivanka Trump said as she
introduced her father at the Republican National Convention in July.
Yet
the central struggle of Trump’s unlikely rise from political novice to
the Republican nominee has always been the battle to save the candidate
from himself — and one that his kids are said to be increasingly
frustrated by.
After
a period in which the GOP nominee saw his poll numbers rise by sticking
with carefully prepared remarks that offered a more conciliatory
message aimed at women and minorities, Trump has reverted back to old
destructive habits in recent days, going off script to attack Clinton
and other critics in increasingly personal ways.
Campaigning
in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the candidate imitated Clinton’s stumbling
into a van at a 9/11 remembrance ceremony last month. “She’s supposed
to fight all these different things, and she can’t make it 15 feet to
her car,” the GOP nominee sneered — a complete reversal of his initial
reaction, in which he simply offered best wishes for Clinton’s recovery
from pneumonia.

View photos Donald
Trump’s children, from left, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump
and Tiffany Trump, at the Republican National Convention. (Photo:
Carolyn Kaster/AP)
At
the same time, Trump, who has struggled to brush off even the tiniest
bit of criticism, has turned back to Twitter to vent and wage war
against his critics. Alone with his phone in the middle of the night
last Friday, the candidate went on a tirade against Alicia Machado, a
former Miss Universe turned Clinton surrogate who went public last week
describing how Trump, at that time in charge of the pageant, humiliated
her when she gained weight.
As
the world, including those close to Trump, woke up on Friday morning to
discover what the candidate had been up to in the predawn hours, the
GOP candidate kept the war going, trashing the “dishonest media” for
using unnamed sources in stories about his campaign — though he often
speaks to reporters as an unnamed source. And he took aim at the growing
list of newspapers telling their readers not to vote for him —
including USA Today, which has never before taken sides in an election —
saying people were “smart” to cancel their subscriptions.
Trump’s
stream of tweets finally came to a close when the candidate flew to
Michigan for a day of campaign events. Instead of taking his
Trump-branded Boeing 757, the candidate and his aides flew on his
running mate Mike Pence’s campaign plane, which lacks television and
offers only spotty access to the Internet. Aides declined to say why
Trump did not fly his usual plane, but Trump landed in Grand Rapids
trying to make light of his tweet-storm. “For those few people knocking
me for tweeting at three o’clock in the morning, at least you know I
will be there, awake, to answer the call!” he wrote.
To
the dismay of his staff and family who have urged him to stay focused
solely on Clinton, Trump’s focus on Machado sucked the oxygen out of
other messages he’s been pushing in recent days, including calling out
his Democratic rival’s cozy relationship with donors and his own effort
to cast himself as a change agent who will shake up Washington and bring
back “jobs, jobs, jobs.”
After
an unquestionably bad week for the campaign, which ended with the leak
of Trump’s 1995 tax forms to the New York Times suggesting he may have
avoided paying taxes for years, the candidate’s aides and children have
pushed him to focus on next week’s debate in St. Louis, where he will
face Clinton in a town-hall-style setting.
But
so far, it does not seem that Trump is heeding the call. Though aides
say Trump will spend Sunday working on debate preparations, the
candidate has so far resisted any additional outside help in coaching
and hasn’t held any practice sessions against stand-in opponents, the
same approach he took before the first debate.
While
Clinton is slated to spend a few days off the trail this week preparing
for next Sunday, Trump is expected to publicly campaign every single
day leading into his second face-off with his Democratic rival. His
itinerary starts Monday with a western swing that will take him through
Colorado, Arizona and Nevada — leaving little time for additional debate
prep.
For
his part, Trump has publicly insisted he doesn’t need to practice more,
citing online surveys that say he won the face-off with Clinton. And he
hinted he might attack Clinton in more personal terms by bringing up
the sexual indiscretions of her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Last
week, Trump proudly talked up his restraint in omitting the subject —
telling reporters in the spin room that he’d wanted to talk about it but
changed his mind because he didn’t want to embarrass the couple’s
daughter, Chelsea Clinton. But some close to the campaign have
speculated there was another reason Trump skipped the topic: his own
kids, who were sitting in the front row.
Old
enough to remember the tabloid circus brought on by their father’s
divorce from their mother, Ivana, as he carried on a public affair with
Marla Maples, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. have both spoken of the pain
they felt at the time — including how Don Jr. did not speak to his
father for more than a year. Though Eric Trump earlier this week echoed
his father in saying he had exhibited “courage” by avoiding the Bill
Clinton sex scandals at Monday’s debate, the children have otherwise
been largely silent on the matter.
But
as he fumes over the Machado flap and other setbacks, that may not be
enough for Trump, who has suggested in provocative ways that the
kindler, gentler candidate of the last few weeks is now gone heading
into the final stretch of the campaign.
Hinting
at a more raucous debate in coming weeks, Trump told the New York Times
that he would push back at Clinton more aggressively than ever. “She’s
nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” he said.
Source;Yahoo News