Donald Trump was discussing his dynasty.

It was last Tuesday, before a would-be assassin’s bullet sliced through his ear, and he was surrounded by his family onstage at a rally at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. One by one, he shouted out his grandkids and his three sons: Don Jr. (“very tough”), Eric (“somebody who’s fantastic”) and Barron (“he might be more popular than Don and Eric!”).

Then the former president mentioned one family member who was not there that day.

“You like Lara, right?” he asked the crowd, sounding like a salesperson at a product launch. “Lara is only the head of the Republican Party,” he said of Eric’s wife. “She’s upwardly mobile.”

Lara Trump’s rapid ascent — from apolitical tabloid television producer to party boss — is on full display this week as Republicans convene in Milwaukee to nominate Trump. As the party’s co-chair, she is also the host of this four-day Trump-fest. On Monday, she sat directly behind her father-in-law as he made his emotional first appearance since the assassination attempt. On Tuesday, she is scheduled to address delegates for nearly 15 minutes, longer than elected officials like South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin or even Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene were given onstage.

This is probably what Donald Trump had in mind when he pushed her to take the job in March. In the time since, Lara Trump, 41, has become one of the campaign’s most visible defenders in the media, putting a smiling spin on some of the darkest aspects of her father-in-law’s campaign for the White House.

But with great airtime comes great risk — at least in Donald Trump’s orbit. Aides who fail to execute his vision can get tossed aside; some who succeed have ended up indicted. Lara Trump acknowledges the unusual, dual pressures of being both operative and in-law. If Donald Trump wants her help subverting an election, what would she do?

“The ante’s been upped in a lot of ways,” she said when asked in an interview with The New York Times last week.

“I always say to Eric, I’m like, ‘I hope we win. I don’t know what my standing in the family will be!’” she joked, with a nervous laugh.

Doing Things That Scare You

It was six months ago that Donald Trump asked her to run for co-chair of the Republican National Committee, which controls the party’s electoral machinery and its finances, and puts on the convention. “When he called and talked to me initially about it, I was shocked,” she said. She had helped out on his presidential campaigns in the past, but, she said, this was “a big job.”

There had always been a power struggle between Trump and the RNC, which had been run by Ronna McDaniel since 2017. He wanted one of his own people in there. But Lara Trump was trepidatious.

“I said, ‘I don’t know; that’s a lot right now,’” she recalled, telling him “this might not be a great time for me,” since she has two young children, ages 4 and 6. He told her to think about it and he would call back in a couple of days. Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, called to encourage her, she said.

“You should probably do things in life that scare you,” she said, explaining why she said yes.

In March, McDaniel was pushed out and Lara Trump was unanimously elected as co-chair alongside Michael Whatley, a party official from North Carolina. Donald Trump’s critics said that he was trying to use the party to pay for his personal legal bills. Lara Trump and Whatley promptly fired dozens of employees and effectively fused the organization with Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. It’s all under his thumb now.

Lara Trump was never much interested in politics before her father-in-law ran for office. “None of us in the Trump family were,” she reminded me. She grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said, “I certainly knew my parents voted Republican, but there was never a major discussion about it.”

She attended North Carolina State University, worked as a bartender and a waitress for a bit, and then moved to New York City to attend the French Culinary Institute in SoHo. (Eventually, she landed in television, working as a producer for “Inside Edition.”)

Six months after moving to the city, she met Eric Trump at a party. “He’s a tall drink of water; so am I,” she said. “We saw each other across the room. It worked out.” (She’s 5 feet 11 inches before the stilettos.)

She baked him a heart-shaped cake for his birthday, painting a camouflage pattern, a bird and an assault rifle into the icing, because she knew he liked to hunt. “I don’t know anything about guns, so obviously you’re not shooting any birds with an AK-47, but I put it on there,” she said.

“I thought it was fun and cute. Immediately the next day, there was an article,” in Gawker, making fun of her new beau and his cake.

It was an “awful” first brush with being in the media, she said, but now “we’re all calloused.”

She is quick to defend the Trump women who have fled the spotlight just as she has stepped into it. She said Ivanka, her sister-in-law, has backed away from politics because of the media scrutiny. “I know it was really hard on their kids,” she said. “I think for them, there was just incoming every day. There was just so much criticism.”

And what of the phantomlike Melania Trump? “I think Melania will be out whenever it’s appropriate for her,” Lara Trump said.

(One hope she has for a second Trump term is that “the fashion magazines have learned their lesson.” Melania Trump did not appear on the cover of Vogue as first lady. Jill Biden, by contrast, has been on the cover of the fashion bible four times. “A travesty,” remarked Lara Trump.)

Trump says she identifies with her husband’s mother, Ivana Trump, who died two years ago. Ivana Trump told her daughter-in-law all about her “role in the Trump organization, her role in Atlantic City, with the casinos, with the Plaza Hotel, and all those things,” she said. Ivana made clear to Lara that if she wanted to succeed as a Trump woman, she had to be ambitious.

“I think that’s probably one of the reasons my husband connected with me so well, because they say you marry your parents in some sick way, but I have a lot of those same qualities,” Lara Trump said.

Notably, Donald Trump viewed his ex-wife’s work differently, once describing it as the reason their marriage fell apart. (“I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing,” he said in 1994, citing that as “the single greatest cause of what happened to my marriage with Ivana.”)

Asked about Donald Trump’s view, Lara Trump said simply: “Right, there’s a balance.”

Echoing Trump

Trump has stepped into her new role with gusto, often repeating her father-in-law’s false claims about elections or ominous warnings about retribution — albeit with less edge.

She frequently travels the country promoting what the party describes as its “election integrity” program, a variety of efforts that are preparing the groundwork should Trump try to subvert the outcome of the election as he did in 2020.

In the interview, she did not state directly that she believes the 2020 election was stolen but did spread suspicion about fraud. “I believe that if every legal vote is counted, there’s no question Donald Trump will become the 47th president,” she said. “If it is a free and fair election — and that is our intention, every day, to make sure of that — then there will be no problem. And we won’t have any questions on the other side of it.”

Donald Trump’s own attorney general said Trump’s theories about the 2020 election being stolen were “nonsense.” Audits, recounts and investigations found no evidence of significant fraud.

Lara Trump said her father-in-law calls and texts her regularly about the election integrity unit. But sometimes he calls just to tell her he is listening to one of her songs. (Trump is an amateur singer best known for her cover of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”)

She had a front-row seat Jan. 6, 2021. “It’s my husband’s birthday, by the way,” she said, recalling how a rally crowd sang him happy birthday before marching to the Capitol and stormed the building. “It was actually a really lovely experience to be up on that stage, and the positive energy there, I think, was amazing,” she said of the rally before the attack.

Trump allowed that “anyone who broke the law should be held accountable,” but mostly, when she looks back on that day, she said she saw “thousands and thousands of people who were devastated that the election had not gone the way that they expected.”

She pantomimed her father-in-law on other topics, too. On Donald Trump’s threats to use the Justice Department to investigate targets of his choosing, Lara Trump said there should be “a big change” at the department: “If that’s something he feels is necessary as a president, I think he should absolutely do that.”

In April, she promised “four years of scorched earth if Donald Trump retakes the White House.” Asked what exactly that would look like, she explained that Trump “had to learn about a lot of things” during his first term in office. “I think he very quickly learned, you can’t trust a lot of people in D.C.,” she said. “People who he thought were his friends were not his friends.”

The New York Times News Service