Donald Trump had a decision to make. He was on the cusp of securing the GOP presidential nomination and asserting his control over the party. Now he was gearing to take over its main political organization, the Republican National Committee. Traditionally, Trump installs family members at the top of his organizational pyramids, but the obvious choices were unavailable. Eric was running his real estate conglomerate, the Trump Organization. Ivanka and Jared had bowed out of politics and moved to Miami. Don Jr. was consumed with being a podcast host and traveling MAGA evangelist.
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But Trump had someone else in mind.
In late January, his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was inside her personal recording studio in Palm Beach where she records TV hits when she got a text message from Trump campaign manager Susie Wiles. The former President wanted to schedule a phone call with Lara and senior campaign leadership. When she got home a few hours later, she took the call from her backyard to escape the cacophony of two young children and three dogs. Trump said he wanted her to be the new RNC co-chair. “I don’t want to pressure you,” he told her, “but I need someone I can trust.”
It wasn’t exactly a natural fit for a former television producer with no experience managing a political operation. But so far, Trump’s openly nepotistic move is working out surprisingly well. Considered a fundraising draw, Lara Trump has helped the party rake in more than $280 million since March, a haul that was boosted by MAGA outrage over Trump’s conviction of 34 felony counts. She’s held training sessions across the country recruiting the Trump faithful to be poll watchers; her goal is to enlist more than 100,000 in battleground states. According to multiple sources, she played a key role in persuading Trump to end his longstanding war against vote by mail. Next week, she will deliver a primetime speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
The upshot is that Lara Trump is potentially going places in MAGA World. As an articulate Trump defender and one of his most prominent surrogates, she would have a long list of options should her father-in-law reclaim the White House, ranging from a senior role in a second Trump term to elected office. “If we win,” says Charlie Kirk, the right-wing firebrand, “she’ll definitely be one of the most sought after and respected people in the conservative movement.”
To be sure, Lara Trump’s rise in Republican politics has been due to some fateful interventions. Her detractors doubt whether a lightly-tested Trump relative is the best person to co-chair the party. “I think it’s incredibly disserving that the Trump campaign is remaking the RNC into a family office,” says Rob Stutzman, a former chief of staff to Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It’s not normal. It’s not healthy.”
Lara Trump, 41, acknowledges that her ascension has been owed to her familial ties. Wearing a flamboyant pink suit in the posh clubhouse of Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., she recognizes this as a moment to prove herself. “I’m not numb to the fact that this is because my last name is Trump,” she tells me, “but I do think merit is important in everything we do.”
There is a wide range of possible futures for Lara Trump in today’s unconventional world of politics and power. In one scenario, she could disappear from the scene after the election. In another, she could become the heir of the MAGA movement. Much of that trajectory will be determined by her performance over the next few months. But before the votes are cast, there is one man in particular who has ideas for where she can go from here. As one of Donald Trump’s top aides tells me: “The boss has said on numerous occasions she should run.”
One of the strongest impressions Lara made on her father-in-law was when she was walking down the aisle, about to marry his son. Three weeks before her 2014 wedding to Eric, Lara fell off her horse, broke both her wrists, and had emergency surgery. Undaunted, she refused to wear casts for the lavish ceremony at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. That show of defiance struck the future President who respects above all else the importance of optics. “She’s a tough cookie,” Trump would later say.
By all accounts, Lara enjoyed an idyllic upbringing with little hardship. Born and raised in Wilmington, N.C., a beach town near the southern edge of the state, her family was socially conservative but not especially political. She began riding horses at a young age and attended public schools. Her most traumatic childhood memory, she says, was not making the JV cheerleading team.
After graduating from North Carolina State University, she spent three years working odd jobs—personal trainer, bartender, waitress—before moving to New York City to attend culinary school. In March 2008, she met Eric Trump at a nightclub. At five-foot-eleven with no heels, Lara viewed the six-foot-five Eric as an acceptable suitor, and the two were smitten. At the time, Donald Trump was starring in the hit reality show The Apprentice, with his three eldest children appearing as close advisers and company executives. After Lara and Eric became a couple, she took a job adjacent to the Trump family’s marquee project, becoming a producer for the television program Inside Edition.
Lara Trump might have stayed in that job forever, she says, if her father-in-law hadn’t run for President. She describes experiencing an “awakening” in 2016 when the family traveled to Iowa ahead of the caucuses. Thrust into the spotlight, she saw how Trump’s early supporters viewed him as a messianic figure who could save America from irreparable decline. Like the rest of Trump’s children and their spouses, he recruited her into the fold. “I think it was probably a surprise for all of us,” Trump’s eldest son Don. Jr. tells me. “None of us were particularly outwardly political.”
Lara Trump displayed natural talents as a surrogate. Tall and blonde, she spoke in crisp, fluid sentences and possessed a stately charisma. At a rally in Raleigh, Trump turned to Lara and said: “Can you help me win your home state?” She soon teamed up with the campaign’s state director and became a ubiquitous presence in North Carolina: on television and radio, speaking at rallies, holding her own events. She launched a “Women for Trump” bus tour.
When Trump entered the White House, Lara became a fundraiser and later resumed her role as a surrogate and senior adviser on the 2020 campaign. After Trump lost, she was a prominent voice propagating Trump’s fiction that the election was stolen; she was a speaker at his infamous Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse.
Lara Trump also toyed with her own political prospects. When Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina stepped down in 2022, MAGA media personalities like Kirk and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and Trump himself urged Lara to run for the seat. With her father-in-law’s backing a foregone conclusion, she would have been a lock for the GOP nomination. But Lara opted not to run, citing her two young children, who were one and three.
Two years later, Trump tapped her again. As early as January, when it became clear he would steamroll the 2024 GOP primary, Trump met with campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles to discuss the outlines of a reconstituted RNC that would merge with the campaign and eliminate dozens of duplicative positions. The plan was to appoint the loyal pro-Trump operative Michael Whatley as chair and LaCivita as chief for staff to shepherd the transformation. They all agreed on Lara Trump for co-chair, making her the face of the organization.
The move wasn’t without historical precedence. Presidents have often placed trusted aides inside the Republican National Committee: George H.W. Bush made Lee Atwater chair and George W. Bush selected Ken Mehlman for the same role. In 1987, Ronald Reagan picked his daughter Maureen Reagan to be RNC co-chair. For Trump and his team, Lara offered more than a familiar presence for the former President. They saw in her a communicator who could speak to both the base and independent voters. “You’re only as good as your ability to articulate your strategy,” LaCivita says.
Lara was more receptive to the RNC job than the Senate run, she says, because it has an ostensible expiration date. “This one felt like it was feasible to me, because I know that the craziness will come to an end on November 5.” She was also filling a need for the former President, who has long relied on relatives, whether it be at the Trump Organization, his campaigns, or the White House. “Trump wanted a family member to be his eyes and ears at the RNC,” a committee member tells me. “He trusts his family.” Many of Trump’s aides have been unceremoniously fired, but his relatives have enjoyed rarefied status. “What he’s learned over the years,” says Lara, “is really sometimes the only people you can truly count on are people in your family.”
She had other reasons too. The elevation gives her an opportunity to make her mark as a GOP official operating from a position of power. When taking the job, Lara had one stipulation. “I don’t want to be a name or a face,” she told Trump’s top campaign brass. “I want to do shit.”
Only a few weeks into the gig, Lara Trump met with her father-in-law to discuss a touchy subject: mail voting. Trump had spent the last four years trashing vote by mail as “rife with fraud.” After the 2020 election, he baselessly blamed the voting method for corrupting the outcome. Lara, like many of Trump’s devotees, helped to spread that falsehood. But to more and more Republicans, the strategy backfired. Now many of Trump’s closest aides were encouraging him to reverse course. Lara’s goal was to get him to cross the rubicon. Meeting with him for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, she told him: “It’s just not smart to wait until Election Day to get all of our people out to vote.”
It was the beginning of what would become an ongoing conversation to convince Trump that he could gain a tactical advantage by turning out his base well before Election Day. That way, she said, Republicans could target low-propensity voters in the election’s final weeks and mitigate the risk of Election Day problems that depress turnout, citing recent examples of an ice storm in Nevada and tabulator machines malfunctioning in Arizona.
Others, including the previous RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, had made similar pitches to the former President. But the advice of Trump’s own kin weighed heavily on his mind, according to LaCivita. In a matter of weeks, Trump came around. On April 19, he posted on Truth Social that voting by mail or in person were “ALL GOOD OPTIONS.”
To Lara, the reversal was not only a sign of their relationship. It revealed how Trump and the new RNC were willing to learn from past mistakes. “We probably did miss a big opportunity in 2020,” Lara says. “We are not in the business of missing opportunities in 2024. Not while I’m the co-chair of the RNC.”
To that end, Lara is overseeing the organization’s early voting drive, dubbed “Swamp the Vote,” a nationwide initiative to encourage Republicans to vote by mail. She’s the RNC point person on donor outreach, participating in multiple calls and events each week; her staff says she has hosted six major fundraisers in the last four months. Most important to her father-in-law, she is co-running the RNC’s “Election Integrity Task Force.” Through the initiative, the committee has already filed more than 90 election-related lawsuits, including attempts to purge voter rolls, and is recruiting an army of poll watchers.
Lara Trump says the program, particularly the installation of RNC-trained poll monitors, is designed to improve Republican faith in elections. “Once you see how the sausage is made, I think it demystifies it a little bit,” Lara says. “It’s safe. We can trust it. I think it’s imperative that everybody trusts this process.” To critics, it’s two things at once: a hypocritical attempt to reverse the damage of Trump’s lies about election fraud and a preemptive maneuver to challenge the next election if Trump loses. “It’s all part of the effort to reassure Republicans that elections aren’t stolen,” says Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP consultant, “despite the fact that there’s zero evidence that they have been.”
In the coming days, Lara Trump’s biggest job will be to help orchestrate a successful convention, with the goal of making Trump’s GOP look like a model of competency and strength in contrast to the dysfunction and doubt besetting Democrats. Much of the line-up, including Trump’s running mate, remains unknown. Lara Trump is one of the few speakers that organizers have confirmed. “Obviously you’re going to hear from a lot of the Trump family,” she says.
Many who watch will likely wonder if they are witnessing the makings of an American political dynasty. In one of our conversations, Lara Trump is coy about that prospect. She tells me her brother-in-law Don Jr. is the one poised to have a political future. “If there were another Trump in the family to run for higher office,” she says, “keep your eye on Don.” Yet she holds out plenty of options for herself. Like most political hopefuls, Lara Trump says she’s focused only on her current job, but suggests she could one day run for Senate or governor, either in North Carolina or Florida. Notwithstanding the “horror stories” she’s heard from Jared and Ivanka, she might take a job in a Trump Administration.
Of course, that would be contingent on a Trump victory. But regardless of the November outcome, someone will inevitably try to carry the MAGA torch once Trump exits the scene. When I ask Lara whether that might be her, she takes a second to think through her answer. “Never say never with a Trump,” she says. “I would never say never to anything.”