How Tiffany Trump's World Diverged From Her Famous Family

Asked in October 2016 if she was interested in joining the family business one day, Tiffany Trump replied, "Of course I'm interested...but I'm applying to law school, though, so I like to bring a different kind of skill set to the company."
At this point, it certainly can't hurt to have a lawyer in the family. If Tiffany is still interested in the family business at all.
Raised by a single mom in California and then all of a sudden thrust into the he-has-five-kids spotlight when her father ran for president of the United States, Tiffany ended up the unwitting poster girl for privileged paternal neglect, the forgotten daughter next to favored princess Ivanka Trump. Two and a half years in, she remains a go-to punchline—not because of anything she has done, but mainly when comedians want to reiterate just how little they think of Donald Trump's family values.
But Tiffany isn't asking for anyone's pity.

 

The 25-year-old Georgetown Law student and businessman boyfriend Michael Boulos were in the south of France where the 72nd Cannes Film Festival is taking place this week, photographed at the 5-star Hôtel Barrière Le Majestic, one of the spots frequented by celebs during the reliably decadent affair.

 

While Ivanka can now only dream of the widely admired, relatively uncontroversial life she led before the 2016 election, Tiffany has managed to avoid that level of scrutiny precisely because, famous last name aside, she didn't grow up with her half-siblings in a gilded penthouse in Trump Tower. (For the brief period she did live there, the other kids were elsewhere with their mom.)
"Since I have grown up on the West Coast, I'm definitely different from all of them growing up on the East Coast," Tiffany told Oprah Winfrey in 2013. "It was great for me getting to grow up as a normal kid just out of the spotlight, versus all of them growing up in New York. They always had that intense media and spotlight on them."
Trump "would say that it's really a miracle that [Tiffany] is as well-adjusted as she is, and that she's accomplished anything," a Trump friend told Vanity Fair's Emily Jane Fox, author of the 2017 book Born Trump. "He gets that he screwed it up when it came to Tiffany, and this is a man who doesn't admit that he got it wrong on anything."

Trump himself has acknowledged that he was always working throughout his kids' childhoods, and wasn't a particularly hands-on dad—for the older Trump kids or for now 13-year-old Barron Trump, his son with first lady Melania Trump. But true to form, Ivanka even quibbled with his modest estimation, telling ABC News' Barbara Walters in November 2015, "He was very available to us."
"Our times together," added Tiffany, by then posing as a full-time member of the fold, "we're learning, you know, playing in his office. He would always sneak me down to get a candy bar in the lobby." (Her mother's a health nut, so that would have been a very real treat.)

Her mom, Marla Maples, married Trump in December 1993, when Tiffany was 2 months old. Howard Stern, O.J. Simpson and Rosie O'Donnell were among the 1,100 people who attended their wedding at the Plaza in New York.
The real estate tycoon had been through an impressively messy split with first wife Ivana Trump, the parents of three waging a tabloid war against each other via the New York Post (his) and New York Daily News (hers) before finally reaching a divorce settlement in 1990, in which Ivana got custody of Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka and Eric Trump.
Trump hadn't been planning to get married again, or have more children, at least not so soon.

"I'm glad it happened," he said on The Howard Stern Show in 2004, per old tapes acquired by Newsweek. "I have a great little daughter, Tiffany. But, you know, at the time it was like, 'Excuse me, what happened?' And then I said, 'Well, what are we going to do about this?' [Marla] said, 'Are you serious? It's the most beautiful day of our lives.' I said, 'Oh, great.'"
Still, Trump called the New York Times 20 minutes after his fourth child was born at St. Mary's Hospital in Palm Beach, Fla., telling the reporter, "We have a perfect little girl, a combination in looks of both of us, to go with my three other wonderful children."
Tiffany, incidentally, is what he wanted to name his firstborn daughter, but Ivana wouldn't hear of it. "Everything involved with Trump Tower has been successful, and Trump Tower was built with Tiffany's air rights," he told the Times, referring to jeweler Tiffany & Co., which was next door on 5th Avenue. "But I've also always loved the name."
For her husband's 50th birthday, Marla commissioned an oil painting of Trump with all four of his children to replace one he had of just him with Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric that hung in his office. The new one featured little Tiffany sitting in Ivanka's lap.

See More