How Lara Trump found her place in the family business

Dominguez, a delegate from Orange County, was one of a dozen California Republicans who’d lined up early to meet Lara Trump at their state party convention in mid-May. Delegates, having just been released from an afternoon of workshops on poll-watching and lawfare, flowed into the basement of the Hyatt near the San Francisco airport, forming a long queue by the reception room that would host Lara’s cocktail hour. Most had traded their bedazzled MAGA hats and Donald Trump mug shot T-shirts for California-inspired formalwear: evening gowns with sandals, suits without ties. Some had stopped by the bar and were now sipping liberal pours of “Republican Red.”

They had paid a pretty penny to share a moment with the former president’s daughter-in-law — though few claimed to know much about her.

An hour later, onstage in an adjoining ballroom, Lara, 41, was onstage doing a credible impression of her father-in-law asking her to run for RNC co-chair. “Honey, we need you. We need you there,” she said, channeling his nasally New York baritone. “You know, everybody wants this job. If you don’t want it, though, I don’t want to pressure you — but you’re the only one who could do it.” The crowd let out a long, appreciative laugh.

What Trump wants, Trump gets. “Sometimes, the only people you can trust are family,” Lara said in a July 5 interview with The Washington Post. “For him, that’s been the case, sadly, more often than not.”

She’s scheduled to speak Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention — which was expected to take a different tone than originally planned, after the shooting at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday that left her father-in-law with minor injuries to his right ear. (In the aftermath of the shooting, Lara posted an illustration of Trump being touched by Jesus, along with a Bible verse: “Fear not, for I am with you.”) She’ll be the first family member convention-goers and television-watchers will hear from after the incident.

Lara ran unopposed at the RNC’s March meeting in Houston and won with no dissenting votes. Beth Bloch, a West Virginia committeewoman who nominated her, warned her fellow RNC members against overvaluing titles and experience. “God does not call the qualified. He qualifies the called,” Bloch told them. “Lara Trump is the embodiment of this truth.” Her election accomplished one-third of Trump’s takeover of the RNC: North Carolina Trump booster Michael Whatley became chairman, and Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita was named its chief of staff, effectively merging the party’s operations with the president’s reelection effort.

Under the RNC’s new leadership, the committee fired dozens of employees in what they said was an effort to build a leaner, more efficient operation. Lara had floated the controversial view that Republican voters would like to see the RNC help pay Trump’s legal bills. (The idea was quashed by Trump campaign officials, who said emphatically that the RNC would not do that.) “It made me nervous that these changes were being made so close to the election,” said Burns, the Contra Costa County GOP chair.

Not that those feelings colored how he viewed Lara: “She strikes me as somebody who’s pretty sharp — you know, well put together, in terms of her communication and everything else,” he said. Plus, “she’s a tall drink of water, I’ll tell you that!”

The RNC’s overhaul was the direct result of Trump’s frustrations with its former chair, Ronna McDaniel, whom he dinged for over-investing in get-out-the-vote programs and underinvesting in Trump’s obsession with “election integrity.” MAGA loyalists, meanwhile, grumbled that McDaniel hadn’t shown sufficient fealty to the former president. “The Republican National Committee had lost the confidence of the lion’s share of the grass roots in the states over the last two years,” LaCivita said. “Part of Lara’s role was to come in and reestablish that trust.”

“On top of the fact that she’s a Trump,” he added, “which gives her instant credibility with the base.”

RNC co-chair is a job well-suited to a nepotism hire. The role carries no real authority or responsibilities, per the party’s bylaws. Typically, the co-chair is just dispatched to raise money and glad-hand at GOP gatherings, “like a best supporting actor or vice president,” said Sean Spicer, who spent six years as a senior RNC staffer before serving as Trump’s press secretary.

“I don’t think, outside of Republican Party geeks, anyone could name a previous co-chair,” Spicer added. “Lara is what party officials dream of when they think of this role.”

Lara headlines state conventions, like the one in California, and fundraisers, as she did with her husband, Eric Trump, the former president’s second-oldest son, at Trump’s golf club in Westchester County, N.Y., in late June. She’s the face of “Protect the Vote,” an RNC effort to recruit 100,000 volunteers to monitor the November elections so that, as Lara puts it, “2020 can never, ever happen again.” She routinely defends her father-in-law (Lara almost always refers to Trump as her “father-in-law”) in network TV hits — joining CNN, for example, soon after his conviction on 34 felony counts to declare that the outcomes showed “the judicial system being weaponized” against the former president.

She can speak in Trump’s vernacular, but she can also modulate. In the spin room after the first presidential debate, Lara eschewed the temptation to mock Biden’s bad performance, choosing instead to emphasize his “bad policies and bad decision-making” in crisp sound bites. When a British reporter asked her whether Trump — who, during the debate, accepted no responsibility for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — was rewriting the day’s history, Lara responded coolly. “In what way?” she said. “In the way that he said, peacefully and patriotically, to make your voices heard? That’s what he told the people of the country. So no, I don’t think so at all.”

Lara is “an extremely accomplished communicator,” LaCivita says. She “articulates the message of the campaign — and the message of the party — in a very clear, concise and easily understood manner.”

“She has the trust of the president, she has excellent TV presence, she has a sense for politics,” says Kellyanne Conway, a former senior White House counselor to Trump who remains close to his campaign.

“She’s upwardly mobile!” Trump said of his daughter-in-law at a rally in Doral., Fla., last week, praising her as “head of the Republican Party.”

Lara seems to know that most people haven’t thought much about her imprint on the 2024 campaign beyond her family lineage — though she’s quick to remind them that being part of that family lineage is, in fact, a qualification, given that the Trumps are now on their third presidential campaign. When asked about what she offers besides her last name, she points to the RNC’s recent fundraising successes — more than $280 million since she joined the organization in March — and how the organization is now laser-focused on election integrity.

“I hope, maybe if people haven’t known me before now, that this is their introduction to me,” Lara told The Post. “I’m a person who, once I set my sights on something, I will do everything in my power to make sure that I do it the best way I possibly can.”

Lara Yunaska grew up in Wrightsville Beach, N.C., a seaside community on the state’s southeastern shore, to parents who were socially conservative but not particularly political. She was a cheerleader in high school and at North Carolina State University, where she studied communications and aspired to be a sportscaster. She modeled throughout college and briefly thereafter, winning a handful of bikini contests. She’d moved to New York in 2005 to attend pastry school and briefly operated her own cake-decorating business.

She met Eric Trump at a Manhattan bar in March 2008. She was drawn to him not because of his last name — which she claims to not have known — but his height: At 6-foot-5, Eric would still be taller than the 5-11 Lara in heels. In 2012, she began working for the TV tabloid show “Inside Edition” — mostly behind the camera, only occasionally in front of it, as an associate producer. Life with Eric fell into a rhythm of charmed New York privilege, as documented on Lara’s Instagram: Weekday sunrise over Central Park from their condo in Trump Parc East. Weekends playing golf at Trump National Golf Club Westchester. Holidays with her in-laws at Mar-a-Lago, where the couple married in 2014. They have two children, ages 4 and 6.

Lara didn’t have much of a role when Trump launched his campaign in June 2015. Her father-in-law first recognized her political potential, she says, when Trump caught an interview she’d given in the fall of 2016. “I’m actually still unsure which interview it was I was doing. He says Chris Wallace,” Lara recalled in her interview with The Post. Trump, flying on his private plane, had the television on in the background and liked what he heard — not realizing Lara had been the one speaking. “Then he looked up and he’s like, ‘Oh my God, that’s my daughter-in-law who’s doing that!’” Lara said. “That’s the moment that he was like, ‘Wait a minute, there’s something else here.’”

She did a rally with Trump in her home state of North Carolina that fall. It went well; afterward, Trump turned to her and said, “All right, you’re going to be in charge of the state. You’re going to win it for us.” In the campaign’s final weeks, she led a “Women for Trump” bus tour aimed at softening Trump’s misogynistic image.

“Every time we did a stop, she had no problem staying a little bit longer — shaking hands, meeting people, talking to people, and she always followed up,” says Ashley Hayek, a former Trump campaign adviser who worked closely with Lara on the tour. “She’s just a nice, down-to-earth person who I think people feel like they can connect with.”

“The president’s view of Lara has evolved into utter respect for her,” says a former senior Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss internal Trump family dynamics. “He doesn’t view her as just Eric’s wife anymore. She is the conduit between his family and the politics proper.”

Trump’s enterprises — whether real estate, television or politics — are always family affairs. Ivanka had been the face of the next Trump generation when her father first ran for president. She’d been the one to introduce him as he descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015. But Ivanka has removed herself from much of the 2024 campaign — as has former first lady Melania Trump, who has hardly been seen in public, let alone on the campaign trail.

Lara calls her mother-in-law an “elegant, incredible first lady” and her sister-in-law “one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.” Early on in her courtship with Eric, she’d wondered whether she should be more like them. “Do I act like Ivanka? Do I act like Melania?” she once recalled on an episode of her podcast, “The Right View.”

“It’s funny, because I viewed myself very much as an outsider coming into the family,” Lara told The Post. “The irony now is that we are the two people who are in politics in the family: my father-in-law and me.”

This is not about Republican versus Democrat, left versus right, anymore,” Lara Trump told a crowd of Republicans in Macomb County, Mich., on a recent June evening. “It’s about good versus evil.”

She had just finished singing a verse of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” in a duet with country singer Mark Mackay, which had drawn a standing ovation. Now she was reciting verses of Trumpist folklore. She brought up Trump’s mug shot — “the greatest mug shot in the history of the United States, ladies and gentlemen” — and described how Trump’s criminal convictions helped voters realize “the system that has been taking them down is trying to take him down.” She echoed her father-in-law’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.

“It’s amazing that the Trump family drew someone like that,” said Mark Forton, chair of the Macomb County GOP, marveling over Lara’s performance at his group’s event. “You’d think she was blood.”

Forton believes that the 2020 presidential election was stolen in Michigan and is devoting the majority of his county party’s resources to reelecting Trump. “They say politics is local, but not this year,” he said. Lara had been Forton’s first choice — well, really, his only choice — to headline the group’s annual Lincoln Day dinner fundraiser: On the RNC’s form to request a speaker, he’d put Lara’s name in all five slots. He didn’t know much about her, but he liked what she represented. “Lara’s made sure the RNC and the Trump campaign are one and the same,” he said. “We thought if we could get her here, it could be a unifying thing.”

Patti Cammarata, a member of the Macomb GOP, left the event thinking Lara’s role could be “humongous — can I say that in all-capital letters?” she said, carrying a sequined MAGA clutch. Lara felt especially important, Cammarata said, given Ivanka and Melania’s absence. “She’s the brand. She epitomizes everything the movement is.”

“I believe she will be the voice for the conservative movement for years to come,” said Tamra Szacon, 65. She wants to see Lara stay with the RNC for a few years before running for Congress.

“I read a little bit about how she tried to transform his image,” said Karen Beck, 68, who hadn’t closely followed Lara until the Macomb fundraiser. “It’s good to have a family member like that, trying to help his campaign who knows him personally. But there’s nothing he could do to change my vote — I mean, unless he killed his children and his wife.”

Lara returned to New York that night and was in the gym early Thursday morning, posting a video of her handstands and bear crawls on social media. But by Friday, she was back in Michigan — this time in Oakland County, 30 miles north of Detroit — to recruit volunteers for the RNC’s new election integrity unit, which she promised would restore confidence for voters who “had a lot of unanswered questions” in 2020, she said.

“She’s a good front-line face for the Republican Party,” said Diana Mannino, 59, a former automotive executive, after the event. “I watch her on TV all the time. I was very happy to see her today. She looks just like she does on TV.”

“She’s so beautiful. She’s like a model,” one female bystander gushed as Lara disappeared into her SUV with a wave.

Whether Lara sticks with the family business after Nov. 5 remains unclear. She has considered a position in the second Trump administration, should it come to pass, or a run for office in either Florida or North Carolina. She’d flirted with running for U.S. Senate in North Carolina in 2022, but ultimately passed. Ron Kaufman, the Massachusetts RNC member and former adviser to Mitt Romney, had encouraged her. “She’d be a great candidate — and not because she’s his daughter-in-law,” Kaufman said. “Because she’s just really good.”

Onstage at the California GOP convention, however, she seemed to be looking ahead only to Election Day. Her 10th wedding anniversary is just three days after the election, she told the room, and she said she’d like to take the African safari they’d planned for their honeymoon but never took. (Lara had broken both her wrists in a horseback riding accident just before the wedding; she’d worn “some very nice early-’90s ladies fingerless glove situation” to cover the casts at the reception.)

The privilege to hear that story cost $400 — $500 for preferred seating, $350 for those who’d already paid $400 to attend the photo reception earlier that evening. She was answering one of the soft-focus questions that Howard Hakes, the state GOP’s finance chair, lobbed at her to indulge attendees in a few tidbits from her life as a Trump. She told the room about her first concert (Mariah Carey in Raleigh, N.C.), her perfect meal (blackened salmon; a chocolate dessert), and her dream dinner guest, dead or alive (Elizabeth I: “This lady wasn’t playing around,” she explained — plus, “I’d like to try on some of those outfits”).

But before the levity, as the RNC co-chair, she struck a darker tone. “Listen, this isn’t just about me. This is about all of us,” Lara said. If she and her fellow Republicans failed to reelect her father-in-law, “they’re not just going to come after me — they’re going to come after every one of us,” she warned.

She was here because of her name. But her message to Republicans wasn’t just that she was a Trump. It’s that they were Trump, too.

Voght reported from California and Georgia. Reston reported from Michigan.