It’s official: Donald Trump will be returning to the White House after pulling off a staggering political comeback to defeat Democrat candidate Vice President Kamala Harris at the polls.
This time around he might cut a lonesome figure in the White House, as it is thought his wife Melania may not join him full-time at the address, with a source telling People Magazine that the 54-year-old would split her time between “her private living apartment [in Washington D.C.], and she has her home in New York, and her home at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.” Meanwhile the couple’s only child, 18-year-old Barron, is attending university in New York at Stern School of Business.
Though over the years Trump’s brood, which includes four children from his previous relationships with Ivana Trump and Marla Maples, have largely stayed close to their father and courted the limelight working with him in real estate, by appearing in his reality shows or by acting as advisors to him in his previous role as 45th president of the US.
From his turbulent relationship with Don Jr, to Ivanka Trump’s exile from New York, here is everything you need to know about the Trump dynasty.
Donald Trump Jr
At 46, Donald Trump Jr is the eldest son of the president-elect, and one of three children he shares with his first wife Ivana (who passed away in 2022). Widely referred to as Don Jr, he is also a friend of JD Vance and is credited with helping convince his father to pick the Ohio Senator as his running mate.
Despite being his father’s namesake and close ally now, the pair have had a turbulent relationship in the past. In a 2017 memoir, Ivana Trump recalled her then-husband’s hesitation to name a child after him: “You can’t do that! What if he’s a loser?” Their pair’s relationship would become fractured when as a 12-year-old, Don Jr. reportedly didn’t speak to his namesake for a year. This was after his parents’ split in 1989: their marriage came to an abrupt end as a result of Ivana learning that Donald had been having an affair with model Marla Maples.
In college, a notable reported conflict between the pair allegedly saw Trump smack Don Jr in the face for failing to adhere to his baseball-game dress code (a suit). According to a former college classmate of Don Jr, who wrote about the anecdote in a Facebook post, the president-elect “slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor in front of all of his classmates,’. He simply said ‘put on a suit and meet me outside,’ and closed the door.”
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, his father’s alma mater, he spent a year in Aspen, a ski resort town in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, attempting to “distance himself from family complications”, where he hunted, fished, camped and lived out of the back of a truck.
Don Jr has also had a run in with the law, like his father. Over a decade before his father was elected president in 2016, the younger Don was arrested for public intoxication in New Orleans. He spent 11 hours in jail before being released on a $300 bond.
Don and his father clearly put this behind them, as in recent years, his eldest son has been a core part of the Trump machine, serving as executive Vice President and a trustee of the Trump Organisation, having taken over running the business when his father became president in 2017.
Don Jr is also perhaps the most politically active of the president-elect’s children. He has built a loyal following in the Maga-verse via his Triggered podcast on video-sharing platform Rumble and gained influential allies such as Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA. For a while, there was speculation FROM? that the eldest Trump son would consider a 2024 presidential run, but Donald Jr. said in July 2021 that he hadn’t “personally thought about” it.
Some suspect that Don Jr would be the power behind the second Trump administration. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman and Tea party activist turned Trump critic, told the Guardian: “What I’ve heard is that Junior is hugely active behind the scenes and hugely influential behind the scenes and that, if Trump is to win, Junior’s going to be basically the power broker. He’s going to be the big player in the administration.”
Don Jr has five children, Kai, Donald, Tristan, Spencer and Chloe, with his former wife, Vanessa Haydon, and has been dating the former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle since 2018.
Ivanka Trump
Widely considered to be her father’s favourite child, 42-year-old Ivanka is the second of Donald and his first wife, Ivana’s offspring.
She has been involved with her father’s enterprises from a young age. As a teenager, Ivanka dabbled in the modelling industry, before working for her father after college, and often guest starred on his reality television show The Apprentice. Meanwhile, she was also building her now-defunct business selling clothes and jewellery.
Ivanka is a stalwart of New York media high society: she has attended the Met Gala, regularly socialise with the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Chelsea Clinton, and, in 2009, married real estate investor Jared Kushner, who purchased The New York Observer in 2006. The pair have three children together: 13-year-old Araella, 11-year-old Joseph and 8-yearold Theodore.
Ivanka was a regular fixture during her father’s 2016 and 2020 election campaigns, appearing at rallies, in television ads and on national convention stages. She went on to serve as a senior White House adviser during her father’s presidency alongside Kushner.
However, she has been conspicuously absence in the 2024 election cycle. In 2022 Ivanka issued a public statement stating she no longer “planned to be involved in politics”. The news came after a litany of criminal charges were levelled against her father. “I am choosing to prioritise my young children and the private life we are creating as a family,” she said in a statement.
She and Kushner left Washington, DC for Miami in 2021 with their children, before buying a mansion in Indian Creek Village, a gated island community in Biscayne Bay, sometimes known as Florida’s “billionaire bunker.” Many at the time saw the as akin to a forced exile, after the pair fell out of favour with their New York elite friends and acquaintances for their role in the Trump administration in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection.
However, it appears that she has still managed to retain some friends in high places. Last month, Kim Kardashian posted a selfie with Ivanka on her Instagram story for her birthday, and she was spotted at Kim K’s own birthday party last year. She also attended Jeff Bezos’ 60th birthday in LA in January and the extravagant Ambani wedding in India over the summer.
Eric Trump
Eric Trump is the youngest of Donald Trump’s three children with his first wife, Ivana. He attended Georgetown University and, like his older siblings, joined the Trump Organization after graduating.
When his father was president, Eric and his older brother Don Jr ran the Trump Organization. This has led to both being the subject of a New York State probe into the company’s business practices. In October 2020, Eric was deposed in the case, which he called a “continued political vendetta”.
Despite taking a less active and public political role than his brother, Eric has fiercely defended his father’s political legacy and promoted several conspiracy theories in the process. In May 2020, Eric claimed on Fox News that the Democrats and Joe Biden’s campaign were using stay-at-home orders for COVID-19 as a strategy to hinder his father’s re-election by preventing large campaign rallies. He predicted that “Coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear” after the election.
During the 2020 election vote-counting period, Eric promoted unfounded claims questioning the integrity of Pennsylvania’s ballot-counting process, even sharing a fake video that falsely showed Trump ballots being burned. On January 6, the day of the Capitol riot, Eric spoke at the Save America rally alongside his wife, Lara, and Donald Trump Jr.
Eric has also been a strong defender of his father amid recent legal challenges. In a Fox News interview, he described the raid on his father’s home as a “coordinated attack,” asserting that “Joe Biden absolutely signed off on this.”
Eric remains actively involved in his father’s real-estate business as a trustee and executive vice president. He has been a close adviser to Trump during the election, appearing with his wife Lara at the Madison Square Garden rally. Married in 2014, Eric and Lara have two children - 7-year-old Eric “Luke” and 5-year-old Carolina - Lara has been notably active in Trump’s re-election efforts, serving as co-chair of the Republican National Committee since March.
Tiffany Trump
31-year-old Tiffany Trump is Donald’s only daughter with Marla Maples, his second wife. Named after the jewelry store Tiffany & Co, she was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, but moved to California with her mother after her parents split in 1997.
Maples raised Tiffany as a single mother following her divorce from Donald, and said that she moved to the west coast to keep Tiffany out of the public eye. “That was my choice, raising her outside of the spotlight,” Maples told People in 2016. “Her daddy is a good provider with education and such, but as far as time, it was just me.” The pre-nup between the pair was brutal, leaving Maples with $1 million should they split within five years (they separated, just in time, after four), plus $100,000 childhood support for Tiffany until she was 21 and a restrictive confidentiality agreement.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, her father’s alma mater, she obtained a law degree from Georgetown Law School, graduating in May 2020. Though she and her father reportedly have a “strained relationship,” the former president tweeted his congratulations to his daughter after her graduation. “Just what I need is a lawyer in the family. Proud of you Tiff!” her father posted.
Despite not growing up with her half-siblings, Donald Jr, Ivanka, Eric, and Barron, Tiffany reportedly has a close relationship with them, especially with Ivanka. "We would see each other on all of the holidays and talk to each other frequently," Ivanka told People in 2016. "She's my little sister! I've been close to Tiffany her whole life, and I really love her."
Unlike her older half-siblings, Tiffany does not work for the Trump Organisation and had no role in her father’s previous administration. However, she did make speeches at the Republican National Convention for her father’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Tiffany is now married to Michael Boulos, the Lebanese-American billionaire business heir. The pair met in Mykonos and Boulos proposed in the White House Rose Garden just before Trump left, in 2021.
Barron Trump
The youngest of the Trump children, and the only child of Donald Trump and Melania, many of us remember Barron as the quiet 10-year-old who followed his father around on his infamous 2016 presidential campaign trail.
Growing up in Manhattan with his parents, he and his mother remained on the east coast after Donald was elected in 2016 so that Barron could finish out the school year. In June 2017, he and Melania moved to the White House. During his father’s campaigns and presidency, he was largely shielded from public attention by Melania.
She has recently revealed in her new memoir the effect that online trolling had on Barron when his father was first elected. In one incident in particular, trolls posted a video of the then 10-year-old questioning whether he might be autistic, which was shared by the likes of comedian Rosie O’Donnell. “Barron Trump Autistic?” O’Donnell commented on the video in a post on X, then known as Twitter, in 2016. “If so — what an amazing opportunity to bring attention to the AUTISM epidemic.”
In her memoir, Melania detailed how the ordeal left her son with “irreparable damage,” and suggested he was bullied in real life too. “Barron’s experience of being bullied both online and in real life following the incident is a clear indication of the irreparable damage caused,” she writes. “There is nothing shameful about autism (though O’Donnell’s tweet implied that there was), but Barron is not autistic,” she continued, accusing O’Donnell of “sheer malice.” She added that it was “devastating as a parent” and she felt like her heart “was breaking into pieces.”
Now 18, Barron has made his first foray into politics. He was on the list of official nominees of his father for president during his 2024 campaign, and receiving a standing ovation for appearing but not speaking at one of Trump’s rallies in Florida in July.
But, when he appeared on stage with his parents during Trump’s victory speech on Wednesday, it was something completely unrelated which grabbed the headlines: his height. At six foot seven, he towered over both Donald and Melania, spawning hundreds of memes and confusing social media users. It’s something that Donald has actually addressed in the past: during a campaign event in Iowa back in January, he told the crowd that he had his late mother-in-law, Amalija Knavs, to thank for his youngest son’s height.
“Boy, did she take care of Barron... That’s how he got so tall – only ate her food,” he said. “I said, ‘You’re going to be a basketball player’,” he recalled of one conversation with Barron. “He said, ‘Well, I like soccer Dad, actually’. “I thought... at your height, I like basketball better, but you can’t talk them into everything.”
Barron began his first year studying at New York University Stern School of Business in Manhattan this autumn.
