The Dangerous, 'Relatable' Appeal of Lara Trump

Like a preacher’s wife, Lara has hitched her star to that of her husband and his family, and she is a true believer—in Trump, in his vision. “I never knew her to say no a single time,” said Kellyanne Conway of Lara’s campaigning. Loyalty is the only currency in Trump world, after all. That’s how the interlopers—welcome, Jared Kushner!—make it, after all. She knows she has to kiss the ring. “He is an incredibly loyal person and never forgets those who are loyal to him,” Lara told Hello! of Trump in 2017.

Lara fills a vacuum in the Trump family—that of the devoted woman who’s willing to defend her father-in-law to the bitter end, but a palatable, family-oriented one with a smile pasted to her face, her blonde hair impeccably curled. Having divorced Don Jr. a year into the Trump presidency, Vanessa Trump, who once reportedly called Donald Trump “retarded,” is no longer in the picture; it doesn’t take a lot to read between the lines and deduce that Don Jr.’s turn towards the most noxious forms of rightwing racism and assholery (not to mention the fact that he was a notorious cheapskate as well as the many rumors that he cheated on her) played a role in her exit. Ivanka, as complicit as she is in the Trump administration’s cruelties and for all of the chirpy cheerleading of her pet projects, has no desire to sully herself by spearheading campaign rallies. And Tiffany, bless her, has generally stayed out of the picture, largely taking part in only ceremonial events. Melania is simply too robotic to convincingly play the part; Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.’s girlfriend, a touch too rabid.

Cue Lara, whose devotion comes from inside the house. Ever since she met Trump, she’s been a fan. She has said it over and over and over again in interviews and on the campaign trail, telling the story of how the two met for the first time at the U.S. Open and he bought her an ice cream cone and it was, as she put it to a crowd of women in 2016 shortly after the Access Hollywood tape became public, “so normal.” It really, “just blew my mind,” she said. (White) America first, family first is the mantra of this down home girl, and Donald is incredible, and the Trump family is incredible, one of, she’s said, the “best families I’ve ever met in my life.” If it’s obvious that Lara needs the Trumps, it’s just as clear that the Trumps need her, too.

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In January, Lara generated a brief flurry of criticism after she mocked Joe Biden’s stutter while campaigning for Trump in Iowa. Despite her prominent role in the campaign and despite her frequently inflammatory comments and actions, Lara has largely avoided the bad press that surrounds Ivanka and Jared Kushner, Don Jr., and to a lesser extent, her husband Eric. It’s all relative, but according to E! in 2018, Lara and Eric are “the Most Normal, Least Controversial Trump Couple,” based, as far as I can tell, on little more than the fact that they have babies and a couple of adopted dogs.

This is by design—Lara has consistently worked to make Eric, and by extension, the Trumps, seem like a well-adjusted family, talking up how Eric is the “cool uncle,” and confiding that Trump was “so excited” to become a grandparent again when she was pregnant with the couple’s first child. Lara has cannily used her appearances on softball lifestyle press outlets to drive this narrative home, like in her 2017 appearance with Eric on The Dr. Oz Show, where she talked about how she deals with stress (“For me, if I’m stressed and having a bad day, I’ll go for a run”) and her ongoing campaign against puppy mills. “It’s unfortunate that anybody would do that, but it’s about money for people,” she said. Months later, perhaps taking a cue from her sister-in-law, Ivanka used Dr. Oz’s show to reveal her struggles with postpartum depression. And here they are in Westchester magazine, in June 2018, perched on their sofa, their rescue beagles and son cuddling in Eric’s lap as Lara looks on, her mouth agape in what is meant to be a smile of happiness and wonder. “Eric can fix anything,” she exclaimed at one point during the profile. “He’s much handier than anyone I’ve ever dated!”

Even before Trump began his run for office, Lara’s mere presence served to soften some of the family’s jagged edges. In the photo accompanying a 2014 People magazine announcement of her marriage to Eric, there she is, clutching their beagle puppy Charlie instead of her shark-like husband, wearing a red plaid flannel button-up and sitting in a desiccated field. The flannel, the dog, the backdrop—all of it serves to signal that she’s a wholesome country girl. (Their second child, born in August of this year, is named Carolina, as if to emphasize the point.)

“I grew up in a middle-class family in North Carolina, and I couldn’t have ever imagined that I would be a part of anything like this,” she told one reporter during this summer’s kickoff for the 2020 Women for Trump coalition. By all accounts her family was quite comfortable—her father for decades owned a company that built fairly expensive boats, including one for Walter Cronkite, and her childhood home in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina perched right on the water is now worth $1,349,900, according to public records.

And while marrying into the Trumps and then launching dizzyingly into the ugliest corners of the rightwing ecosystem is a life few could imagine, Lara comes from good Republican stock, which can be gleaned from her father Robert’s side hobby of writing letters to the editor decrying the Democratic Party and supporting particularly draconian Republican policies. In this one, from 2005, he writes approvingly of then-President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security; in March of last year he wrote that the Democrats “pander and giveaway to whomever you can for their vote; and here’s one from 2018 in which he defends arming teachers as a very good idea. “Would you rather be gunned down in cold blood with 20 of your students than get into a ‘gunfight?’” Yunaska wrote.

Imagine the dinner table conversations at the Yunaska family home, as they gazed out over the sound! After graduating from high school, Lara would go on to North Carolina State University for a degree in communications media, flirting for a time with a broadcasting career, and from there made her way to New York City’s French Culinary Institute in New York City, where she earned a degree in pastry arts—a skill that Lara attempted to monetize for a brief period through her short-lived cakemaking business, Lara Lea Confections. (While she took down the photo of the aforementioned AK-47 cake she made for Eric, photos of her other creations, including this “boob jersey cake” and this one shaped like a Chanel purse, remain.)

She met Eric while out with friends. “I never expected, when I moved nine years ago to New York City, that this would ever happen to me,” she told Port City Daily, a few weeks before her father-in-law was elected. But she’s embraced the role that luck has dropped into her lap. Lara is everywhere in Trump world, recording Facebook videos that rack up hundreds of thousands of views each and hitting the trail in state after state. During the past few months, she has campaigned in Tucson and in Wisconsin, visited a plywood factory in Oregon, and headlined campaign events from Sterling Heights, Michigan to Iowa. In her videos for the Trump campaign, she regularly uses her womanhood as a shield, as she did in a video defending his xenophobic and racist border wall and policies towards immigrants, in which she attempted to spin her father-in-law as a humanitarian who cares about children at the border as well as women who face high levels of sexual assault.

The Trump campaign is now aggressively trying to paint itself as a friend to a certain type of woman

The Trump campaign is now aggressively trying to paint itself as a friend to a certain type of woman—the white suburban mom it so desperately needs—and has amassed a stable of women to help make that pitch. Lara will be at the forefront of those efforts, its blonde, pillow-lipped figurehead. (She’s so popular that a poll from the end of last year shows her handily winning the Republican primary for the seat recently vacated by Representative Peter King in Long Island, a district that she doesn’t live in.) In a recent op-ed, Lara summed up the core of the Trumps’ argument to women in the months leading up to November. Trump, she wrote, “has an amazing message of empowerment for women,” and he “is making sure that women are able to thrive like never before.” She added, “A strong economy and better health care is true female empowerment, allowing women to make choices for themselves and their families,” throwing in some dog whistles about “border security” and “violent crime” to round out her argument. At Politico’s “Women Rule” conference, Lara referenced the work she led in 2016. “We’re replicating that now, but in a much bigger fashion,” she said.

Will it be successful to move the needle just enough? In Washington D.C., I got a glimpse. Before Lara came on stage, I spoke with the woman next to me, a Chanel necklace-wearing blonde who told me that she was really there to see Nancy Pelosi, slated to speak after Lara. By the end of the 20 minutes Lara was on stage, however, she was laughing at her jokes and clapping along, an approving smile pasted to her face.