Raising Trump

there are those who have fame thrust upon them, and those who thrust themselves upon fame like an invasion force. It is the latter troupe of shameless, relentless thrusters that occupies us here, the Trump and Kardashian clanships. Until fairly recently, family dynasties - whatever skeletons they may have had in their closets - thrived on a mantle of achievement handed down from generation to generation, whether we're talking about the Adamses, Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, Bushes or Flying Wallendas. Such a quaint ideal and needless effort this service obligation seems now, when exhibitionism in the pseudoraw is what gets rewarded, thanks in large measure to the phony theatrics of reality TV, which turned the social theorist Daniel Boorstin's notion of a celebrity - someone famous for being famous - into a terrarium thronged with dance moms, mob wives and Honey Boo Boos. It has elevated into omnipresence those who would have otherwise played out a normal cycle in public awareness and then disappeared to pester us no more. Without "The Apprentice" and its successor, "The Celebrity Apprentice," Donald Trump would have remained an egregious real estate self-promoter and gossip-column fixture, and his children minor adjuncts and boardroom props; without "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," the brood bearing that name would have been living footnotes to the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Instead, one family wields incalculable political power, the other pervades pop culture and fashion like an incurable virus. The two books under review offer peep-show views of preening lives and impostures before they went panoramic. "It's so many freaking Trumps," marvels Ivana Trump near the end of her memoir, "Raising Trump," our author glowing with maternal pride at the fruitful multiplying of the three bundles of delight she and her ex-husband Donald produced - Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric - who in turn begat nine grandchildren: "Nine little monsters!" A self-proclaimed "Glam-Ma," Ivana did a pretty nifty job rearing the three primary heirs, if she says so herself. And she does, numerous times, taking satisfaction in not raising a dreaded Kardashian or two. Where so many spoiledrotten brats of the superrich spiral into drug rehab, jail, divorce court or a shoddily produced sex video, the Trump children, she proclaims, grew up to be faithful spouses, superb parents, accomplished business people and sterling assets during their father's presidential campaign. "1 believe the credit for raising such great kids belongs to me. 1 was in charge of raising our children before our divorce, and 1 had sole custody of them after the split. 1 made the decisions about their education, activities, travel, child care and allowances." The Donald, as she immortally dubbed him during their marriage, was too busy being a big shot to attend to such domestic trifles. He had casinos to open, bankruptcies to declare. "If Donald wants to write a book about fatherhood," Ivana says, "1 would be happy to read it, but 'Raising Trump' is my story, from my perspective, about what 1 did, and still do, for my family." The title, then, is a misnomer, ft should be "Raising Trumps," plural, ft's a book about child-rearing, not husband-wrangling. And in this 1 fear Ivana has mistimed her memoir and misread the mood of the troubled country, which isn't interested in heartwarming holiday tales, family recipes, cute anecdotes about her trying to order a glass of Chablis at a Taco Bell, tips on teaching kids manners and the grown-up kids' rote testimonials reiterating throughout the text what a swell mom she was and is (fvanka's initial entry has all the warmth and personality of a ribbon-cutting ceremony). We're past the point of indulging hokum with a high thread count. Uppermost on the reader's inquiring mind is how fvana's intimate perspective might help us unlock how the slick wheeler-dealer who charmed and courted her when she arrived in Manhattan in the 1970s - "an allAmerican good guy," her instincts told her - mutated over the decades into a president so seething with ignorance, malice, prejudice and destruction. Some hints, that is, of how we got into our present predicament of being held hostage by a throbbing blister. And here Ivana is little help whatsoever. The Trump at the center of this mystery melodrama is mostly a phantom, a fitful gust of pique and an offstage rumble. "Raising Trump" does offer a glimpse into the trivial tyrant power Trump's father, Fred, exercised, expecting everyone at the lunch table to order steak after he does, miffed when Ivana alone breaks ranks and orders fish. "No, she'll have the steak," Fred tells the waiter, but Ivana holds firm. Donald doesn't back Ivana up then or afterward, but rather is displeased that she didn't knuckle under: "Why didn't you just have a friggin' steak?" "Raising Trump" also provides a window into Donald's pettiness when he pulls on fvanka's ski pole during a family race down the slope in order to win - cheating to beat his own young daughter! Pranks, deceptions and convenient absences come to a head in Aspen, when a young hussy swoops down on fvana's restaurant table and introduces herself. "I'm Marla and 1 love your husband. Do you?" Meet Marla Maples, the mistress Ivana refers to as "the showgirl." Ivana divulges nothing of what was said in the heat of the ensuing battle with her husband back at the chalet, one of the many frustrating cloth-drops over the parrot cage in this book. The marital rupture inflicted a string of indignities on Ivana as the New York tabloids engaged in dueling headlines, the most infamous being Maples's "Best Sex I Ever Had" boast on the front page of The Post. With her faint air of Zsa Zsa Gabor and madcap aplomb, Ivana aerated Trump's persona during their marriage - gave his brash, crass excess a dash of dynasty dazzle and camp. Once their partnership was sundered, Ivana took her blithe esprit and comic malaprops to enjoy the high life elsewhere ("In 2006, my yacht was parked at Cannes for the film festival, and I was having a party with two hundred people on it"), a pity since she might have been a more inspiriting first lady than the inscrutable, animatronic Melania. As someone who grew up in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia and witnessed Russian tanks crushing the Prague Spring, Ivana would have been more sensitive and perhaps even resistant to Russian interference than our current White House has been. Hurt and humiliated as she was by Donald's infidelity, however, Ivana remains a loyalist, proclaiming, "I believe he'll be a great president," perhaps the first in a family dynasty. Of Ivanka, she suggests, "Who knows? One day, she might be the first female - and Jewish - POTUS." I'vana throw up. The subtitle to Jerry Oppenheimer's "The Kardashians: An American Drama" evokes the panoramic scope and muted trumpets of a Ken Burns epic, but crack open the book and the whiff of cheese is unmistakable. It's almost comforting knowing that we are in the able, busy hands of a veteran journeyman with few pretensions to subtlety, scene-painting and the stately march of history. The author of biographies of the Clintons, Rock Hudson, Anna Wintour, Martha Stewart, Barbara Walters and other two-legged notables, Oppenheimer doesn't doodle around - he hacks away. The prologue kicks off with a classic bit of ooga-booga involving a Christian prophetess who told the then-obscure lawyer Robert Kardashian that, in his words, "one day my name, the Kardashian name, would be known around the world." And, lo, the curse came to pass. On June 17,1994, the day that the white Ford Bronco chase covered live from coast to coast entered American lore, Robert Kardashian - friend, legal defender and personal exculpator of the former football great and "Naked Gun" co-star O.J. Simpson - read aloud his client's rambling letter of professed innocence concerning the slashing homicides of his wife, Nicole, and her friend Ronald Goldman to a locust swarm of international press. He was identified on TV screens as "Robert Kardashian, Simpson Friend," and from that moment the "Kardashian" name has become pop culture's most persistent rash. Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, Rob and their half sisters, Kendall and Kylie ... all those freaking Kardashians, but the ? who counts the most is, of course, Robert's then-wife, Kris: Kristen Houghton Kardashian and the future Kris Jenner - schemer, dreamer, mother, impresario and "cougar extraordinaire." It was she who would convert Kardashian from an instant household name into a selfperpetuating media brand and meme. It can't be said that Oppenheimer is in Kris's corner as she bops her way to the top. Even as a high schooler she's tagged as a "shallow opportunist," and the chapter where the teenage Kris meets her first lover, a 28-year-old professional golfer, is titled "Hole in One." Her marriage to Robert in 1978 would have been a parodic misalliance under balmier circumstances. For most readers, Ira Levin's 1972 bestselling novel "The Stepford Wives" was a satire and cautionary tale; for the future Mrs. Kardashian, the 1975 thriller movie it inspired was a training manual. While dating Kris, Robert insisted that she listen to instructional audiocassettes to stock the bare pantry of her mind with knowledge, mistakenly assuming she would be an obedient helpmate. Unfortunately for this, Kris's favorite mini-series was "The Thorn Birds," that passion-tossed '80s show about forbidden love in the kangaroo outback. Despite these premarital misgivings, they wed and dutifully reproduced, but this Beverly Hills housewife was never going to relegate herself to hostess duty. Living large and spending big, Kris outfitted herself with fake boobs after seeing Nicole Simpson's new pair ("1 thought, I want two of those, please!"), and cheated on her husband with a young soccer player ("You can be a good mother and still be a tramp," as one interested bystander puts it, words to live by). Divorce follows, and Robert Kardashian's life becomes one sad, long, dribbling anticlimax. Basking in the celebrity glory of membership in O. J.'s dream team, after the shocking acquittal he found himself shunned, mocked and blackballed, and a couple of marriages later he died at age 59 from esophageal cancer. Meanwhile, Kris flourishes still, her subsequent union with the former Olympian Bruce Jenner (later Caitlyn) supplying a second-stage booster rocket to the Kardashian brand. Kim's infamous sex tape with her thenboyfriend Ray J provided the initial liftoff. Modestly titled "Kim Kardashian, Superstar," it surfaced in 2007, the same year that the reality series "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" debuted on E!, executiveproduced by the inescapable Ryan Seacrest and with Kris presiding as the "montager" of this ever-expanding family enterprise. One sympathizes with Oppenheimer as he tries to keep track of all these loose marbles, but his chronicle of the Kardashian Kids carries unpleasant racial overtones to which he appears tone-deaf. He mentions Khloe's marriage to "the 6foot-10 black pro basketball player Lamar Odom," cites Kim's divorce from Damon Thomas, "the first of her three AfricanAmerican husbands," and later circles back to Khloe, who "apparently had a real thing about romancing giant-size AfricanAmerican hoop stars" (my agog italics). Composing himself, Oppenheimer covers the controversy over the Kardashians' appropriation of black culture and iconography, as epitomized by Kim's bare-backsided cover shot for Paper magazine (the one that "broke the internet"), but by then it's too late in the book to be affecting a furrowed brow and going all Charlie Rose on us. In the epilogue, Oppenheimer notes that all is not ducky in Kardashiana. The ratings for "Keeping Up" (now in its 14th season) are eroding and Kardashian mugs on the covers of slick magazines have become newsstand underperformers. During Fashion Week in 2016 Kim was robbed of $11 million-worth of jewelry by masked gunmen who broke into her Paris hotel suite and left her gagged - a crime that aroused suspicion that it was all a publicity stunt (it wasn't, according to follow-up reports) and a hardy chorus of schadenfreude across social media. Oppenheimer floats the scenario that the wily Kris has one last shazam! act to pull: a daredevil leap for the biggest prize of all, the presidency. Citing Trump's 2016 victory, he draws the obvious, dreary parallels between their reality-TV roots and social media reach, and explains that Kris and her family "have a big following among young African-American men, a bloc that eluded Trump, and have huge support among millennial women 18 to 34, and support in the transgender community - especially if Caitlyn, a staunch Republican, plays ball and stumps for her ex-wife if she, indeed, runs for elective office as she's suggested." Please, stop. First Ivanka's name is floated, now Kris's, as if the most powerful office in the shrinking free world is a glorious bauble awarded after long devotion to celebrity, self-enrichment and the family brand, public service be damned. Why keep feeding their ravenous egos? Shouldn't their brazen success be enough for them? It'd be nice if the first woman president were someone who'd actually done some good. ? Peep-show views of preening lives before they went panoramic. james Wolcott is a columnist at Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of "Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies New York."