This is part of Hello, TrumpworldSlate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
Once upon a time, Ivanka Trump looked like the natural heir to her father’s political cachet. She became one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers in his first term while her brothers stayed in New York and ran the family business. With the Trump name, cookie-cutter beauty, and preternatural poise, Ivanka seemed to be the family’s rising star.
But politics proved too cutthroat for her, and Ivanka and her husband have sought an escape from public scrutiny in the South Florida sun. Now, a different tall, blond Trump is giving favorite-child energy. The family’s future in politics may well belong to a Trump who was not born, but made: Lara.
Once the forgettable wife of ancillary Trump son Eric, Lara has more recently become a GOP darling and a top defender of the Trump family’s interests. Americans can expect to see a lot more of her during Trump’s second term than they did in his first.
Lara never had much of a career before marrying into the Trump family—she spent time as a personal trainer, cake baker, and TV producer—and appears to be unremarkable in every category: intellect, judgment, personality, talent. She claims no membership in any old boys club; she went to a public high school and a state university for chrissakes, a background nigh unheard of in Trump circles. Thus, her father-in-law is her only ticket to relevance, and her personal fortunes depend entirely on the MAGA movement’s continued hold on power. She seems to realize this. With no apparent solo ambitions or agenda of her own, she will be one of the most loyal, least discardable foot soldiers in Trumpworld this time around.
After helping out with Trump’s 2016 campaign, Lara became a public figure in her own right during his first term in office. She made semiregular appearances on Fox News and hosted a Trump propaganda newscast, Real News Updateon which she’d gush about whatever the White House was doing that week. She quickly proved her worth to the family brand, sweetly selling her father-in-law’s every whim and enumerating the evil forces bent on taking him down. But Lara’s rise to GOP stardom really accelerated after Trump lost in 2020. That was when, released from the journalistic convention against paying employees of a political campaign, Fox News hired her as a contributor. At long last, in precise Trump tradition, Lara could finally earn wages on the family name.
As Melania and Ivanka shunned the spotlight, Lara became the family’s chief envoy to women. She was a sought-after surrogate on the 2024 campaign trail and the only female Trump to address the RNC last year. For an outsider, it may be difficult to understand her appeal. She exudes all the charisma of an A.I.-generated character, her makeup-caked rictus unmoving from the lips up. But Lara’s palpable devotion to the family and mere existence in the intersection of “Trump” and “woman” were all MAGA Americans needed to get on board—and she has that Fox News look of belabored femininity to boot. Trump supporters dutifully fell in love with her even before they knew how to pronounce her first name.
Lara’s unexceptional persona and résumé may make her even more appealing to Trump’s fan base—and likelier to stick around. She has no colorful background or even so much as a history of opinions to lend shape to the person she was before she became a Trump, so there are no grounds for Trump or his supporters to question her bona fides. Unlike, say, Ivanka, who had decades to alchemize her inherited money and name into her own stand-alone brand, Lara is known only in the context of Trump as president. She will live and die by his public standing, a perfectly aligned extension of his being whose sole purpose is his (and therefore her) advancement. The second he turns on someone in his inner circle, she will, too.
Already, at Trump’s request, Lara made herself a conduit between him and the Republican Party apparatus, collapsing whatever distance still remained between the two. Last March, she was elected co-chair of the Republican National Committee—a position light on responsibilities, primarily concerned with fundraising—cementing Trump’s full-scale takeover of the party. In the process, she also made herself a legitimate political player. Thanks to a job she got solely because of her relation to Trump by marriage, her Wikipedia page now introduces her as a “politician.” She has never held or run for public office.
But that may change before too long! In 2021, a poll showed Lara as the leading contender for an open Senate seat in North Carolina, her home state, even though she never said she was running. More recently, she topped the short list of possible replacements for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is vacating his seat to become Trump’s Secretary of State. She removed herself from consideration earlier this month, claiming Trump was “upset” that she wasn’t interested—as if she’d ever do anything to upset him!—but life is long. Elections keep coming. She’ll find her opportunity soon enough.
In the meantime, Lara has already quit her RNC job and has hinted that she’ll have a “big announcement” this month about her next moves, which are likely to land her somewhere close to the White House. Whatever role she takes in this administration, she will undoubtedly continue her humiliating journey toward what seems to be her greatest personal desire—a singing career. So far, she’s released a bathetic tribute ballad to firefighters, a wannabe anthem about positive self-talk, and a cover of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” which she sang live at Mar-a-Lago’s annual New Year’s Eve party a few weeks ago.
However bad you might imagine the vocal stylings of an amateur recording artist with a blank check and an inflated sense of her own talent could be, Lara is worse. Her singing voice has the compressed, nasal quality and forced flourishes of a child imitating a favorite pop star. No one, if pressed, could honestly say it’s pleasant.
Which makes her abysmal New Year’s Eve performance possibly the purest distillation of her embodiment of Trumpism. You could see it as evidence of a profound lack of judgment on her part, but I prefer to read it as an entirely self-aware spectacle, the kind of audacity in mediocrity that makes a Trump a Trump. In front of a sea of wealthy conservatives and powerful people hoping to curry favor with the incoming president, Lara’s song functioned as a test of loyalty, daring anyone in the room to intimate that she had no business fronting a live band. In their steadfast silence, clapping along, having lied to themselves and everyone around them, the guests were implicated in the broader charade—just in time for the second Trump era to begin.
