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success depended almost entirely on his father’s, after all. But for the most part, he came from a place of trying to make his father better, and a desire to protect him from himself. Eric didn’t feel like that was where Jared came from in his own dealings with Donald. Throughout the campaign, especially, he told people that he felt Jared took advantage of Donald’s weaknesses, as opposed to trying to neutralize them.

      They put those tensions aside, though, for the initial postelection transition meeting. They had just started working through some of the first steps when Generals Mike Flynn and Keith Kellogg walked in the room. As far as Christie, who was running the meeting, knew, they had not been invited, and this was not a come-as-you-please, anyone-is-welcome affair. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we’re in the middle of a meeting. Can I help you?”

      When Ivanka cut in to say that she had invited both of them, Christie demurred. He told Flynn and Kellogg that since he hadn’t known they would be joining, he had not made printouts of the meeting agenda and materials for them. They would have to look on with someone else.

      The meeting was getting back on track when Ivanka again interrupted. “General Flynn,” she said, turning to him, “you have been so amazingly loyal to my dad. We all love you. How do you want to serve the president-elect? What job do you want?” A few people around the table caught each other’s eyes. Jeff Sessions rolled his, pulled his glasses off the bridge of his nose, and sank back into his chair.

      There were just a few jobs he would be qualified to take, Flynn responded: secretary of state or secretary of defense, or—if not one of those—head of the president’s National Security Council.

      Eric jumped in. He asked if Flynn had been retired long enough to head the Pentagon. Flynn said that if he got a waiver from Congress, it would be okay. Eric turned to Sessions and asked how often Congress issued waivers like that to potential cabinet nominees. “Never,” Sessions replied.

      Later on in the meeting, Ivanka put the same question she had asked Flynn to Kellogg. He would be happy to take on the role of chief of staff, he said.

      “To the president?” Eric asked.

      Yes, Kellogg told him.

      “Well, is there anything else you would possibly want?”

      ON THURSDAY the family sat down for an interview with Leslie Stahl, to air on CBS’s 60 Minutes that Sunday. The interview, taped on the first floor of the triplex in which all the kids—apart from Tiffany—had grown up, and together watched news anchors call states for their father a couple of nights before, would be the first time Donald, Melania, and all five children talked about the changes to come.

      Earlier that day, forty-some stories down, on the twentieth floor, Bannon called Christie into his office and fired him from his role as head of the transition on the spot. On one hand, there was a sense that Donald, who out of superstition had not wanted to know anything about the transition, had been sold a bill of goods about where it stood, despite the months of prep done by true experts who’d filled dozens of binders with useful research and delineated next steps. All of that work had been done by people the family considered Christie loyalists, so how could they trust it? They couldn’t, they thought, which explains why they made a show of dumping tens of binders in the trash in front of the very people who’d prepared them. Those who believed this was about settling the long-simmering Kushner-Christie score saw Jared’s overtures during the campaign—and particularly on election night, when he threw his arm around the governor—as ruthless. Many saw this as an attempt to replace those who’d aligned with Christie to those who aligned with the candidate and his family, which is why the campaign swiftly appointed Pence as its new leader and Dearborn its executive director.

      The move to bring in an incoming vice president to head a transition did have a precedent. George W. Bush had done the same when he was preparing to take office. Christie also happened to be mired in scandal in his own state; two of his former aides had been convicted in the so-called Bridgegate scandal, in which traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Manhattan were closed as political retribution against a political foe in New Jersey, a week earlier. Dearborn would also be a natural liaison between Trump Tower and Capitol Hill, and as usual, the Trump kids would be there to oversee it all.

      But the story that this was just Washington business as usual, without a hint of personal vengeance, became harder to buy as the days went on. Rich Bagger, who’d taken a leave from his job as Christie’s chief of staff and temporarily moved from New Jersey to DC to serve as the transition’s executive, was waiting for Christie when he came up to the twenty-fifth floor after Bannon canned him. They wanted to keep Bagger on, since he was the guy who knew every in and out. Bagger responded by saying he would quit and finished with a hearty fuck-you.

      Bagger still went down to Washington the following day. He had planned a meeting in the DC transition offices in which Bill Palatucci, Christie’s former law partner and the transition’s general counsel, would go over ethics requirements in front of hundreds of staffers. As he made his way to the stage, Bagger got a call from Dearborn, telling him to stop Palatucci in his tracks. He’d forgotten to tell the general counsel that he was about to be fired. They didn’t want Palatucci getting up in front of everyone, and they didn’t want Bagger up there, either. Bagger told them to go scratch, and he and Palatucci ran the meeting anyway.

      By the next week Dearborn had also fired Mike Rogers, the former House Intelligence Committee chairman Christie had hired to run the transition’s national security wing. “I saw this all happening and I said to myself, ‘Holy shit, man,’” one high-up transition official noted. “We all knew this was coming from the family, and these were guys who had put their hearts and souls into this, and they treated them like they were something stuck on their shoes. It was just an ugly, ugly bloodletting, and they didn’t even have the class to make the call themselves. They had Dearborn do it for them.”

      Bannon later admitted that the decision to fire Christie and everyone, in the family’s eyes, associated with him came from Jared. Donald himself insisted that Christie had not in fact been fired, but simply made a member of a bigger team.

      The campaign’s statement said it all. “Together this outstanding group of advisors, led by Vice President–elect Mike Pence, will build on the initial work done under the leadership of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to help prepare a transformative government ready to lead from day one.” Christie would be moved to the role of vice chairman of the transition effort. Jared, Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric were among the members of the executive committee, along with Steve Bannon, Ben Carson, Mike Flynn, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Rebekah Mercer, Steven Mnuchin, Devin Nunes, Reince Priebus, Anthony Scaramucci, and Peter Thiel.

      FIGURING OUT how to untangle everything swallowed up time Jared and Ivanka did not have. Ivanka had to start thinking about whether or how to uproot her kids and move to Washington. As she started to seriously consider the possibility, friends urged them not to. There were two camps of people insisting that she should stay in New York—first, those who said attaching themselves further to such a polarizing political environment would ruin their reputations and their friendships and all the little frills and big comforts they’d known and enjoyed for most of their lives; and second, those who worried about what their businesses would be without them. Don and Ivanka and Eric were the three musketeers within the Trump Organization. People close to the family told Ivanka that if she left and broke up the band, they didn’t know if it would ever come back together again. People close to Jared told him that his association with the White House would place tremendous scrutiny on Kushner Companies and scare off investors who didn’t want their finances run through by the media and government’s fine-tooth combs. There was the added pressure from within the Kushner family, though they fully supported and found great pride in Jared ascending to the West Wing. There were the practical concerns over how the business would run. Jared’s brother Josh had his own company. His sister Nicole was a relative newcomer to the business, and while she had been there, Jared very much ran the show alongside his father. As a felon, Charlie Kushner couldn’t sign anything. As that reality dawned on him, he would often blurt out “I miss Jared” in the middle of meetings, in front of other Kushner family

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