Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: we have a new episode of “The Children’s Hour,” stories about Ivanka, Don Junior, Eric and Little Tiffany – this week:  “Lives of the In-Laws” – Amy Wilentz will explain. But first: Why Kamala lost: Steve Phillips challenges the conventional wisdom–in a minute.
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Why did Kamala Harris lose? Was there really a shift by the Democrats to the right on election day? Steve Phillips has our analysis. He wrote the bestseller, Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. He also hosts the podcast Democracy in Color, and he writes for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The Nation. His book, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good, is out now in an updated edition. Steve Phillips, welcome back.

Steve Phillips: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

JW: Let’s remember for starters that Trump did not win a majority of the popular vote. He got 49.9%. Harris lost by only 1.5%, which makes it one of the closest elections of the last century. Only 1960 and 1968 were closer. But Trump got 3 million more votes than he had four years ago, and he won dozens of counties across the country that had voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Doesn’t that mean that Trump won because voters switched sides?

SP: Well, if you read The New York Times and you listen to the mainstream analysis, then yes, that’s exactly what it means. But if you dig into the actual data, that’s not what happened at all. Let’s start with the big picture: overall turnout numbers.  Trump did get close to 3 million more voters. Kamala got nearly 7 million fewer voters. So that’s clear.  Even if all of our voters – if that 3 million came directly from Democrats, there’s still another 4 million Democrats who did not vote, who voted for Biden in 2020.
Any person who does math well would see that the bigger issue is the decline in Democratic turnout. So that’s that piece. So then you look at the counties. And at least, it’s a little bit more defensible in terms of the analysis people came to, but it’s still a facile and surface analysis that they looked at. So they looked at counties. There are around at least 50 or so counties that Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024. People look at that and say, ‘Oh, well, all these voters in these counties switched to Trump.’
But what I tried to lay out in the piece in The Guardian is that while the counties flipped, the people in the counties did not. Because in nearly a third of those counties, Trump’s vote declined.

JW: Wow.

SP: And so how were all these Democrats flocking to him if his overall vote is going down? But what happened is his vote went down a little and the Democratic vote went down a lot. And so that is more about the failure of the turnout operation.

JW: Harris lost not because Democrats switched sides, but because too many Democrats did not vote at all. And why do you think that was?

SP: It’s remarkable to me how little consideration this gets in the post-election analysis by supposedly smart people: the reality of sexism in general, and of misogynoir in particular. Trump’s run three times. Twice against a woman. Once against a man. We’ve had 47 presidents in the United States. Every single one of them has been a man. I mean, how much longer of a data set do we need, to conclude that there’s something baked in around people’s conceptions of what leadership looks like and who the president should be?
And so there’s been very little ability or analysis of actually trying to get at that data set in reality. I will say that, while the voter decline was significant overall, much of that decline actually happened in the blue states, frankly. And it’s notable that in four of the seven battleground states the Democratic vote went up, and most particularly, in Georgia and North Carolina.
The Georgia situation, which I know a lot about because I’ve been on the Stacey Abrams bandwagon for over a decade and have seen this process, it feels very much like 2018, where Stacey almost doubled the Democratic vote from 2014 to 2018. But the Republican vote was even bigger than that. I really feel it’s a fundamental dynamic of people saying, ‘Hell no. We are not having this Black woman as our leader. We’re going to get off the couch. We’re going to come out of the woodwork to vote against her.’ And I feel that’s what happened for Kamala as well in Georgia and in North Carolina in particular.

JW: Yeah. I saw in Georgia that Kamala got 75,000 more votes than Biden had, which would’ve made her the winner four years ago. In that respect, it was a very successful campaign that she ran in Georgia. But as you say, more Republicans turned out than four years ago.

SP: Let me just say one thing on that as well, tnat I think also has to be in this picture of what happened in 2024.  I concluded that that’s not where people are at, that this was a very clear requiem for the theory of change that we can change this country through persuasion and not building power. And that the Democratic Super PAC most clearly is one of the culprits of this. They raised $900 million and spent almost all of it on television and digital ads, which were essentially redundant at what Kamala was doing. When they could have been putting over a hundred million dollars per state into hiring canvassers and doing voter turnout and getting out even more of our votes. But their theory of change was they could come up with clever TV ads that would change the minds of people drawn to Trump. And so obviously, that failed.  But you don’t hear much of that conclusion in the analysis in the postmortems.

JW: Leading the analysis in the postmortems is Nate Cohn, who writes the polling column for The New York Times. This week, he seems to have written a direct response to your Guardian piece. He says, “It is wrong to assume that the voters who stayed home would have backed Ms. Harris. Even if they had been dragged to the polls, it might not have meaningfully helped her.” What’s your response to Nate Cohn?

SP: Well, it’s not Nate Cohn. Frankly, it’s the entire New York Times. That they would take somebody who has very little experience in politics, even less experience engaging with people of color and communities of color, no graduate degree or expertise, and make that person the preeminent data analysis on the entire country because he works for The New York Times. And so I had a prior piece in The Guardian because Cohn’s polling was showing Kamala’s Black support in the 70% range, under 80%.
No Democrat who’s run for president since they started exit polling has ever gotten less than 83%. And yet Cohn, rather than look at his numbers and question what this is, just assumed that because his people ran the numbers, they must be right, so something was happening with Black people. So drawing on his minimal experience with Black people, he wrote a long piece in The New York Times trying to explain, why aren’t Black people backing Kamala? And then guess what? Her Black numbers were higher than the historical average.

JW: Among Black voters in Georgia, Kamala led 87 to 8.

SP: Exactly. Exactly. And so his polls had her at the high 70s in terms of where her numbers were going to be among Black people. And so, yeah, rather than having any kind of self-reflection, but he has this presupposition and this underlying assumption about there’s all these people of color are declining and abandoning the Democrats. And what is his data set to conclude that these non-voters wouldn’t have backed her? It’s his poll, which was not correct in the first place. So there’s no objective data that he’s pointing to in terms of that regard. And so if 87% of the Black voters supported Kamala, that rough percentage of the non-voters would’ve played itself out as well. So that’s the only meaningful data set that we have. But it’s The New York Times, so it must be true if it coincides or not.

JW: You’ve said the focus on persuasion to win Republican voters and indeed independent voters was a mistake and that they should have focused more on turning out of the Democratic base.  But the idea of winning some Republicans to vote for Harris didn’t seem that crazy at the time.  There was that week where Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney in the blue wall suburbs, where moderate white women in Republican primaries had voted for Nikki Haley. In Pennsylvania, Nikki Haley got, I looked it up, 157,000 votes in the Republican primary. And the idea was, well, if this is going to be a 1% election in Pennsylvania, the Democrats should try to recruit some of those presumably moderate white women who didn’t want to vote for Trump and get them to vote for Harris. That didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time.

SP: Yeah. At the time, it did not seem crazy. And I didn’t think that in terms of Harris’s campaign, her focus, her allocation of time, energy, and effort, that that was a bad strategy. My point about this being a requiem for the theory that persuasion is more effective than power is that if there were ever an election to have tested out this theory that persuasion would work and we could win over these people who are drawn to it, it would be this election–where a historic amount of money was spent, an incredible expenditure, particularly again on the independent expenditure side, which in the past has been about moving money to canvassing and get out the vote organizations, combined with a historically and epically disqualified, scandal-ridden, unqualified candidate on the Republican side.
And yet in the face of all of that, his numbers went up. So clearly, persuasion doesn’t work. But that’s not the conclusion that we have. And then there’s the larger – it’s so baked in on the progressive side. I mean, it goes way, way back. I’m talking about how much money goes to think tanks versus voter mobilization organizations — based on the theory that studies and reports can change people’s mind and behavior. And even at the beginning of the Biden administration, there was a big emphasis on getting bipartisan deals done, instead of voter protection and combating voter suppression to increase the progressive vote. They made that strategic calculation, and I think this election shows that that failed.

JW: But wasn’t there a big Democratic ground game in the swing states? I know America Votes, which is the coordinator for the Democratic registration and turnout organizations, said they did millions of door knocks.

SP: Yes. And so I think that’s partly responsible for why the Democratic numbers went up. But clearly, that wasn’t enough. And so that’s where we have to factor in – you were saying, my current book is called How We Win the Civil War – we’ve only picked up guns and started shooting and killing each other over one issue: And that’s whether this should be a white country or a multiracial democracy. And the ferocity and the intensity of stopping the ascension of people of color should not be underestimated. And we continue to do so. We needed to do even more, because that’s what happened.  So we needed more emphasis on voter turnout.
Although I will say, Georgia was not a priority state among the campaign or among the Super PACs. Prior to Kamala becoming the nominee, people were telling me, people in the very top positions of the party were telling me the swing states did not include Georgia. So it only late came into the game rather than having a deep embedded years-long effort to do voter turnout. Which the people in Arizona were telling me that that’s what the Republicans have been doing through the LIBRE initiative. That’s a Latino-focused endeavor. They’ve been there for years in really trying to build deep roots and ties in that state.

JW: Can we talk specifically about Arizona? Of all the swing states, Arizona was the only one where the Harris campaign really had a significant defeat. They were close in all the others, and they equaled or outdid the Biden vote in all the others. You’re our expert on Arizona politics. And the striking thing is Arizona voters did elect a Democrat as their new senator, Ruben Gallego. But they also voted for Trump. How come?

SP: A couple of things.  Quantitatively, Gallego got 90,000 more voters than votes than Harris did. So what was going on in that sector of the electorate? I think probably three things. For one, Kari Lake was an extraordinarily unqualified candidate — who he was running against.
On top of that is this issue of sexism –you see that in every demographic grouping to the extent that you want to say that there was some shifting among key constituencies, it was among the men, including among college-educated whites who are supposedly the most progressive sector of whites. College-educated white men by the exit polls voted for Trump. So you have to deal with that.
And the other factor, which is something that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, and it is controversial, but I was hearing this from people who are in Arizona, very involved there. What they were hearing on the doors as they were doing the canvassing is that young people and young people of color in particular felt very strongly about Gaza. And then when they looked at what was happening with Gaza, they saw white people dropping bombs on people of color, and the administration not doing enough to stop that. So we have to factor that in as a possible dimension of what went on as well.

JW: The Washington Post did a fascinating interview with Gallego where he talked about why he thought he won. He said he designed his campaign around reaching Latino men. “Latino men,” he said, this is a fascinating quote to me, “are not politically engaged. They do not watch TV. They don’t read the newspaper. They hardly listen to any politics. They don’t have cable TV. They are largely getting politics through vibes of what’s going on out there.” So his campaign did not focus on the government programs that the Democrats were promising would help–the tax credit for children. But instead, his campaign focused on his own story. They explained, “Hey, this is Ruben. He understands you. He’s like you. He’s from your background. And when he says he’s worried about costs, he actually gets it. He has held jobs as a janitor and a line cook. He’s worked at a meatpacking plant and on construction sites.” And as you say, he got 90,000 more votes than Harris. What do you think of Ruben Gallego’s explanation?

SP: Well, I think that that’s probably correct. And it also brings in the reality and the unanalyzed dimension of this, which is the gender lens and sexism. And so he’s going after Latino men as a Latino man.
And then how is it playing out when people are then, ‘Look at this woman. Are they going to get behind us?’ There’s some element of that. And then so what I had also heard from the people in Arizona is that the Republicans have been heavily investing in Arizona, in Latino organizations, the LIBRE Initiative. It was a Latino-focused, Republican-funded, Koch brother-funded effort, which is years old now, had deep roots in Arizona, was doing constituent service, helping people get driver’s licenses and building credibility. And then they would point to Trump and say, “Oh, he is not such a bad guy. We can get behind him.” We don’t fund the progressive community-based organizations and the civic engagement organizations at the same level with the same enthusiasm that the right does.

JW: There’s one other huge background factor that I just want to mention briefly. Of course, a lot of people said the big issue for them was the rising cost of food and housing, inflation, which made their lives harder. But inflation was a worldwide phenomenon following COVID, the pandemic, and the disruption of supply chains. And as Ben Wikler, the head of the Wisconsin Democratic party said, “Inflation was an incumbent killer everywhere in the world.” Everywhere in the world. There were democracies with elections in ’23 and ’24, the incumbents lost whether they were from the left or the right. And in fact, Kamala’s campaign did better than incumbent campaigns anywhere else in the world in the last two years with one exception, Belgium. So maybe Harris’s biggest mistake was running in 2024 when world inflation brought down all the incumbent parties.

SP: Yeah, I don’t buy that analysis. I mean, I think that there – so yes, there’s an inflation. But frankly, I think that, as I was saying before, we’ve never – and maybe some historians will try to make this point, but we didn’t go to war amongst one another over inflation and Harris. We went over whether this is a white country. What is this stuff that Trump – his ads, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a presidential ads in my lifetime as unapologetically divisive and homophobic as Trump’s ads, his anti-transgender ads, ‘Kamala is for they/them. He’s for you.’ That’s all code for who is this country for and who stands for you and who is with that grouping, which is the other.
Yeah: ‘Inflation is all,’ that’s what we talked about that at the top, but it wasn’t that for all of those voters, the same voters who voted in 2020, woke up in 2024 and said, “Well, gas prices are higher. I’m going to change my vote to Trump.” That’s not what happened. And that’s not what the numbers show. The number of Democratic voters dropped, and that wasn’t a function of the inflation numbers. That was a function of the lack of investment in turnout and the higher obstacles to voting that the Democratic base has because it’s lower income and faces all the other isms in society.

JW: Steve Phillips – his article, “The Democrats’ next campaign should appeal to their base, not swing voters” appeared at theguardian.com. Thank you, Steve. It’s always great to have you on the show.

SP: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time for another episode of “The Children’s Hour,” stories about Ivanka, Don Jr., Eric, and little Tiffany. Boy, have those kids been busy. Today, “Lives of the In-Laws.” For that, we turn, of course, to Amy Wilentz. She’s our chief Jared correspondent, but she’s best known for her work on Haiti, especially her award-winning book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo. She’s written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Nation. She’s also a 2020 Guggenheim fellow, and she teaches literary journalism at UC Irvine. Amy, welcome back.

Amy Wilentz: Thank you, Jon.

JW: Trump’s other daughter, Tiffany, married a guy named Michael Boulos in 2022, and now each daughter has a father-in-law who Trump appointed to a high position in his new administration. Let’s start with Ivanka’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner. He was named Trump’s ambassador to France. What are his qualifications for this much-sought-after diplomatic post?

AW: Well, one is not that he speaks French – because he doesn’t speak French. He’s a former convicted felon. He’s a jailbird who’s done time. Those are his qualifications. In 2004, he was fined $500,000 by the FEC for contributing to Democratic political campaigns in the names of partnerships when he lacked authorization to do so, and that was the least of the things that he did. He also hired a prostitute to have sex with his brother-in-law who was supporting an investigation into the campaigning behavior. Then, because he’s such a family guy, he gave that video that he took of the prostitute and his brother-in-law to his sister, the wife of his brother-in-law, so that she could get very, very, very angry.

JW: You can see how this whole story might appeal to Trump. I believe Trump pardoned Charles Kushner eventually.

AW: Unconditional pardon at the end of his first presidency.

JW: Who was it who sent Jared’s father to federal prison? Was it Obama?

AW: No, it was Chris Christie, the future Republican governor of New Jersey.

JW: Then there’s the second daughter, Tiffany. Her father-in-law is a Lebanese-American businessman named Massad Boulos. Trump named him his “senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs.” What are his qualifications there?

AW: Well, he’s the CEO of a Nigerian conglomerate that distributes motor vehicles and equipment throughout West Africa, so that might be one thing. He has links to Christian politicians and parties in Lebanon, including allies of Hezbollah. He campaigned for Trump with the Arabs in Michigan. That might be his highest qualification. But he’s not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s Greek Orthodox.

JW: So what’s going on here?

AW: I think they say mom-and-pop is a Trump thing. He likes to run a mom-and-pop presidency, with his kids around, and like a car dealership or something where cousins get things, and wives, and children of course. It’s funny; Ivanka converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, and it’s kind of a Jewish thing. There’s a word in Hebrew that we don’t even have in English, and it’s a sad lack that we don’t have it. It’s called ‘machatonim’ and it means the parents of the people your children marry. The parents of your son-in-law or daughter-in-law, and in this case, the two son-in-law’s parents, the ‘machatonim’ of Trump, have been given these very important jobs — especially, I have to say from my own point of view, the ambassadorship to France. Really?

JW: And a couple of the spouses of the Trump kids have been in the news recently. Of course, Jared is the most prominent of the spouses. He did not campaign for Trump, and he said he wouldn’t return to the White House this time around. Last time, our listeners will recall, he got credit for negotiating what he called the Abraham Accords, which, we were told, brought peace to the Middle East. This was before the Gaza War of course. I think the best way to summarize the Abraham Accords is that they enlist the Arab states in ignoring the Palestinians as the basis of peace with Israel. Now Jared has some big ideas about Israel and Gaza. Tell us about that.

AW: He basically views the Gaza War as a way to clear land for development, and has suggested that the Israelis sort of bulldoze part of the Negev Desert and put whatever remaining Palestinians there may be, after it finishes the clearing, sweeping, ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, into the Negev Desert so that this area can be developed. At his Harvard interview, he said, “If I were Israel, I would do my best to move people out and clean it up.” He called the Gaza Strip “waterfront property” – said it could be “very valuable.”

JW: He announced this plan, or he talked about these proposals, at Harvard. He, of course, is an alumnus of Harvard College. Remind us how he got into college. I believe his high school regarded him as unqualified.

AW: I think he was unqualified, but his father promised 2.5 million dollars to Harvard University, and suddenly Jared was admitted to Harvard–where he spent most of his time developing real estate projects.

JW: In Somerville. He did one other thing when he was at Harvard. This was the period where his father was in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and on weekends he would leave Harvard, fly to Atlanta, and meet with his father in prison to learn how to run the family businesses. This had to have been a very rough period for a Harvard kid–to be visiting his father in the pen for a year.

AW: A strange tutorial, one might say.

JW: But I understand Jared also has proposed building a luxury resort–in Albania.

AW: Two luxury resorts. Okay. Albania was a highly idiosyncratic dictatorship for a long time and now has come out of that phase, and now it has the kind of average corruption that you find in every country.  And Jared has developed a relationship with the – I think it’s the president of Albania. But beyond that, he has fought off several other plausible developers of this incredible pristine land in Albania to get it for himself and his company in order to develop it as a luxury resort.

JW: I believe there’s waterfront property involved here.

AW: There’s some waterfront property. There’s a small island called Sazan where the Soviet Union used to send its military supplies during the Cold War, and it’s got bunkers and safe houses and all sorts of stuff on it, but that’s one of the places he wants to develop. And the other is this beautiful Mediterranean area of Albania where he wants to build an opulent hotel and beach villa complex. There are two contenders for this property who are not the Kushners, the Kushner-Trumps, because Ivanka is very much a part of this. One is the farmers who used to own this land and who – oh, they thought they did own this land, and apparently they do have title to the land, so they’ve been making a small stink in Albania to try and control their land, which of course they will fail to do.
And then there was an Albanian-American developer, a woman who was trying to get title to this land when the Kushners were trying to do it and she had to try to fight them off. She became an avid supporter of Donald Trump’s campaign for president. She did all the sucking up you could possibly do, but she lost.

JW: Our theme today is “Lives of the In-Laws.” This has been a review of the son-in-law of the president-elect.  The daughter-in-law of the president-elect, Eric Trump’s wife, Lara, has been in the news a lot lately. Last year, Trump got her named co-chair of the Republican National Committee to preside over his reelection campaign. What’s this week’s news about Lara Trump?

AW: Well, she’s considering her possibilities. She has a lot of potential now, and she is, like much of Donald Trump’s family today, a Floridian, she lives in Florida, and so one of the things she’s considering is becoming a senator–because Marco Rubio, Florida’s Senator, Trump has tapped him to be the next Secretary of State of the United States. If he’s confirmed, his replacement would be chosen by Ron DeSantis, and that replacement would serve for two years, so wouldn’t even have to be elected, it’s a named position. And so that would be maybe Lara Trump. She says it’s something she would “seriously consider,” thank you.

JW: I read that Lara Trump is supported for senator by Elon Musk’s mother.

AW: That is someone to have backing you. Lara said also, about being a senator, “. “If I’m being completely transparent, I don’t know exactly what that would look like. I certainly want to get all of the information possible if that’s something that’s real for me, but yeah, I would 100% consider it.”

JW: If Lara Trump became a senator from Florida, wouldn’t that make her the most politically powerful Trump family member?  More important than Don Jr. who is not going to work in the White House?  Or am I wrong about that?

AW: She would be quite a figure in the Senate, yeah, and she would win reelection I believe, because she would have Trump in the White House and that would be very powerful in Florida. So yeah, she would be a senator for a long time.

JW: This is the wife of Eric Trump. What about Don Jr.’s fiancée? We call her “the woman in the red dress”: Kimberly Guilfoyle. We haven’t seen much of her lately.

AW: We suspect that she’s no longer his fiancée. We haven’t seen her for a while. She’s been busy writing for The Washington Times about the greatness of Kash Patel. Meanwhile, Don has been seen swanning around a Palm Beach socialite named Bettina Anderson, who’s considerably younger than Kim Guilfoyle, if I can add that sexist note. And who is like a wealthy socialite and philanthropist. She too has a way with words, like Lara Trump. She says, “My biggest dream is to live a significant life, a life of meaning and purpose. I want to engage this life with passion, and with an attitude of gratitude.”

JW: Good plan. We haven’t really talked about Ivanka. What has she been doing?

AW: She seems to be like, aside from investing in Albania, she seems to be living a life of amusement for herself as sort of a mom and then also a social person. She’s been partying in Palm Beach. She went to a party to open the Palm Tree Club for Art Basel, that kind of fun thing that we all do when we’re having fun. She went on a family vacation and posted shots of herself surfing–not in the surf, but in a surf simulator, wearing a wonderful black bathing suit. She posed in front of the Eiffel Tower. She went to a Formula One party in Miami in a race-car red dress. She posted this all on Instagram. She took a dip with her children in a hot tub and hung out with Kim Kardashian. What more could you ask?

JW: I noticed none of this involves politicking for her father.

AW: And my analysis is she did her time in the White House. She was nice enough to her dad, and now his name is working for her.

JW: I would push your theory one step farther. I think Ivanka stayed out of the campaign and is not returning to her old job in the White House mostly because of what happened to her on January 6th. We know she was in the White House that day, when Trump’s staff was trying to get him to call off the mob that had attacked the capitol, but no one could get him to do it. So the top people, especially Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, were begging her to intercede with her father, telling her that she was the only one who could get him to stop them. So she did intercede, and eventually she convinced him. I imagine that was the worst day of her life–having to be the one to stop her father from doing something terrible. That’s my theory of why she’s staying away from politics, away from the White House. and frankly, away from him these days.

AW: Yes, she seems not to be around very much, not to be very close, and they were so close, and he was always taking her by the hand and wrapping his arm around her in public settings to have his picture taken with his beautiful daughter.  And now you don’t see that. She’s up on the stage when he’s at his campaign victory party, but she’s not really even doing a physical presence with him.

JW: As for the other boys: We know Eric runs the family business. What about Don Jr.? He’s not going to work in the White House. What is he going to do?

AW: Well, they call him ‘the Enforcer.’ I guess he will make everybody stay in line and not allow any deviant ideas or behaviors to infect the family, the business, or the people around the president.

JW: And of course, Trump has one more kid: Barron, the youngest of all Trump’s children, the quiet one, the tall one.  He’s been given credit for helping Trump win this election. What’s the story there?

AW: It’s very unclear, but what is generally said about Barron, who is very tall but very young, is that he supposedly advised the campaign on how to reach young voters through social media and the podcasts that young men listen to and he could point to those for the campaign to use.

JW: My question: Is it Donald Trump himself who gives Barron credit for these contributions to his campaign?

AW: Mostly it’s not Donald Trump himself but Barron’s mother, Melania Trump.  She likes to do the public relations for Barron.

JW: It’s sort of like Melania saying, “My kid is important too.”

AW: “My kid’s just as good as the rest of those kids.”

JW: This has been “The Children’s Hour,” stories about Ivanka, Don Jr., Eric, and little Tiffany. Today’s episode, “Lives of the In-Laws,” featured Amy Wilentz as our reporter and analyst. Amy, thanks for talking with us today.

AW: Thank you, Jon.