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Trump's family circle has a different look as he returns to the White House
WASHINGTON (AP) — When Donald Trump returns to the White House on Monday, his family circle will look a little different than it did when he first arrived eight years ago.
His youngest son, Barron, was in fifth grade back then. He’s now a college freshman who towers over his 6-foot-plus (1.8-meter-plus) dad. Granddaughter Kai, who was 9 in 2017, is now an aspiring social media influencer and impressive golfer. Grandson Joseph, who posed in Trump’s lap with a Lego model of the White House last time, is 11 now.
The most prominent relatives in Trump’s political sphere, daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared, are in Florida this time around after working in his first administration.
Family members can provide presidents with a ready source of moral and sounding-board support, companionship and even relief from the world’s problems. Not to mention creating headaches for the president at times, too.
“Family can do things that other people can’t, and they can be trusted in a way that other people also can’t,” said Tevi Troy, a former George W. Bush administration official and author of several books about the presidency. “Everyone needs someone they can talk to late at night when you let your hair down, so to speak.”
The president-elect has five children — three of whom are married — from his marriages to Ivana Trump, Marla Maples and current wife Melania Trump. He has 10 grandkids, with an 11th on the way.
A look at Trump’s family circle, then and now:
Former first lady Melania Trump speaks at a campaign rally, Oct. 27, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
His wife:
THEN: She spent the opening months of Trump’s term at the family’s Manhattan penthouse so that 11-year-old Barron wouldn’t have to switch schools in the middle of the year. After moving to the White House, she traveled around the United States and to other countries, alone and with Trump, partly to promote her “Be Best” children’s initiative while fiercely guarding her privacy.
NOW: She avoided active campaigning during Trump’s 2024 run, limiting her public appearances to key moments, such as the campaign’s launch, the Republican National Convention and election night. She released a self-titled memoir late last year and will be the subject of a documentary distributed by Amazon Prime Video that is expected to be released later this year. While some doubt that Trump’s 54-year-old wife will spend much time at the White House, she said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” that she has already packed and picked out the furniture she wants to take to the executive mansion.
Donald Trump Jr. attends a rally for his father, Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump, at Madison Square Garden, Oct. 27, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
THEN: Trump’s eldest son, now 46, campaigned for his father in 2016 and 2020.
NOW: Trump Jr.’s influence has grown to the point that he lobbied his father to choose close friend JD Vance for vice president. He also pushed for former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president-elect’s picks for director of national intelligence and health and human services, respectively. Trump Jr. helps run the family real estate business and is an honorary chairman of Trump’s transition. He has a podcast and has said his role is to prevent “bad actors” from getting into the administration. He recently flew on his father’s airplane to Greenland; the president-elect has expressed a desire to take control of the mineral-rich Danish territory.
Trump Jr. has five children — or “smurfs,” as he sometimes refers to them — with his former wife, Vanessa Trump. They are Kai Madison, 17; Donald John III, 15; Tristan Milos, 13; Spencer Frederick, 12; and Chloe Sophia Trump, 10.
Ivanka Trump exits the courtroom for a lunch break during a civil fraud trial against her father, former President Donald Trump, at New York Supreme Court, Nov. 8, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
THEN: Ivanka, 43, campaigned for her father in 2016 and moved her family from New York City to Washington to work in his White House as a senior adviser. She was on the campaign trail in 2020, too, but she and her family moved to Florida and retreated from the spotlight after his loss.
NOW: As Trump geared up for the 2024 run, Ivanka announced that she loved and supported him but was getting out of politics to focus on her husband and their three kids. She did, however, join her father and other family members on election night and when he rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in early December after Time magazine named him Person of the Year. She told “The Skinny Confidential” podcast that this time around she just wanted to “show up for him as a daughter” and be there to watch a movie or a sports game.
Ivanka and her husband have three children: Arabella Rose, 13; Joseph Frederick, 11; and Theodore James Kushner, 8.
Eric Trump appears in the spin room after a presidential debate, Sept. 10, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)
THEN: The 40-year-old helped run the family business and participated in his father’s campaigns.
NOW: Eric is also an honorary chair of the transition and a close adviser to his father. But he continues to focus more on running the family business. In September, he and his brother started a crypto platform called World Liberty Financial, and their father helped launch it in an interview on the X social media platform.”
Eric and his wife, Lara, have two children: Eric Luke, 7, and Carolina Dorothy Trump, 5.
Tiffany Trump and her husband, Michael Boulos, listen as Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Williams Arena at Mignes Coliseum, Oct. 21, 2024, in Greenville, N.C. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
THEN: Trump’s daughter with second wife Marla Maples was 23 and a recent University of Pennsylvania graduate who kept a low profile when Trump was first elected.
NOW: She was more present in the 2024 campaign but still largely avoids the spotlight. Tiffany, 31, and her husband, Michael Boulos, are expecting their first child this year. Boulos is a businessman who traveled with Trump in the final stretch of the campaign. His father is Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman who helped Trump with the influential Arab American community in the swing state of Michigan. Trump has named Massad Boulos to be a senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
Barron Trump stands on the South Lawn of the White House on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention in Washington, Aug. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
THEN: At the start of Trump’s first term, Barron and his mother stayed at the family’s Trump Tower penthouse in Manhattan so he could finish his school year. When they got to Washington, his soccer net appeared in what’s known as the first lady’s garden.
NOW: Barron, 18, is a freshman New York University business student. His parents and Trump campaign officials credit him for recommending podcasts popular with young men that the president-elect appeared on during the campaign. Barron will have a bedroom in the White House, Melania Trump said on “Fox & Friends.”
“I’m very proud of him, about his knowledge, even about politics and giving an advice to his father,” his mother said on the program. “He brought in so many young people. He knows his generation.”
Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump walks onstage at a campaign event for Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, in Monroe, N.C., Oct. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Nell Redmond, File)
Other family members in the spotlight:Lara Trump
THEN: Trump’s daughter-in-law, 42, campaigned for him during all his runs. After Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, she considered running for a U.S. Senate seat from her home state of North Carolina but ultimately decided against it. She became a Fox News commentator.
NOW: As Trump revved up his 2024 campaign, he installed his daughter-in-law as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, where she was a TV-ready advocate overseeing fundraising, voter outreach and the party’s “election integrity” initiative. She stepped down from the RNC after the election and removed her name from consideration as a possible successor to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Trump’s choice for secretary of state.
Lara Trump is passionate about fitness and has her own line of activewear. She also has explored a side venture as a singer and has released some songs. Daughter Carolina is named after her home state.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are seen during the final day of the Republican National Convention, July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)
THEN: Kushner, 44, was also a key figure in Trump’s 2016 campaign. He joined his wife in the White House as a senior adviser, a role that included working on U.S. policy toward Israel and the broader Middle East.
NOW: Kushner has stepped out of the political spotlight — but his father could soon step in. Trump announced after the election that he intends to nominate Charles Kushner, a real estate developer, to be U.S. ambassador to France. The elder Kushner was pardoned by Trump in December 2020 after he pleaded guilty years earlier to tax evasion and making illegal campaign contributions.
Kai Trump, granddaughter of former President Donald Trump, walks on the 18th green during the ProAm of the LIV Golf Team Championship at Trump National Doral Golf Club, Oct. 27, 2022, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File)
Kai Trump
THEN: Kai was in elementary school when her grandfather became president.
NOW: Donald Trump Jr.’s 17-year-old granddaughter is an aspiring social media influencer. Her behind-the-scenes video from election night garnered 3.7 million views on YouTube. Other posts related to her grandfather have been watched millions more times on TikTok. Kai delivered her first public speech at the Republican convention and is an avid golfer who sometimes plays with her grandfather.
“If I’m not on his team, he’ll try to get inside of my head, and he’s always surprised that I don’t let him get to me,” she said at the convention. “But I have to remind him, I’m a Trump, too.”
Arabella Kushner
THEN: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s daughter was 6 when her grandfather showed China’s Xi Jinping a video of her, in a traditional Chinese dress, belting out Chinese-language songs.
“It’s very good, right? She’s very smart,” Trump said. Xi responded that Arabella was her grandfather’s “little angel” and a “messenger of China-U.S. relations.”
NOW: Arabella is 13 and enjoys singing, playing the piano, horseback riding and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, according to a social media post from her mother.
___
Gomez Licon reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.
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As the U.S. ramps up attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats, blowing up vessels and killing their crews, American allies across the Atlantic are waging their own at-sea fights with suspected narcotics smugglers.
“Europe is literally being flooded with cocaine,” Artur Vaz, Portugal’s narcotics police chief, told Fox News.
“Criminal organizations… acquire the drugs in Latin America, and then the price at which they place it in the markets… there’s a big profit margin here,” said Vaz, director of the National Unit for Combating Drug Trafficking at Portugal’s Judiciary Police.
The drugs come over in cargo ships, high-speed boats and, increasingly, low-budget, semi-submersible vessels known colloquially as “narco-subs.” These boats sail largely undetected with only the top of the craft visible — often painted, researchers say, in steely blues and grays to blend in with the stormy Atlantic waves and evade surveillance efforts.
AS TRUMP’S STANDOFF WITH MADURO DEEPENS, EXPERTS WARN THE NEXT MOVE MAY FORCE A SHOWDOWN
Spanish police chase a high-speed boat carrying suspected drug smugglers in footage released by the Guardia Civil. (Guardia Civil via Storyful)
Portuguese authorities scored a notable capture this fall, intercepting a narco-sub in the mid-Atlantic with 1.7 metric tons of cocaine on board. But European authorities acknowledge that many others are making it past their defenses.
“The interdiction rates for these subs is between 10%, roughly, and maybe as low as 5%,” said Sam Woolston, a Honduras-based investigative journalist specializing in organized crime.
“Even if one or two get nabbed by the authorities, it’s not enough to dissuade them.”
European authorities mostly choose to intercept narco boats, stopping far short of the Trump administration’s policy of destroying them. Instead, the often low-rung crews are detained for interrogation, in the hope of shedding light on shady drug kingpins, gang operations and distribution networks.
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Officials tell Fox News, though, that they would like to do more.
“We must be more muscular — that is, with greater means and a greater capacity for intervention,” said Vaz. “But, of course, within the rule of law.”
As for the narco-subs, those vessels aren’t new, but they never used to cross oceans.
“It’s mind-boggling, the level of sophistication,” Derek Maltz, a former acting chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told Fox News.
Portuguese police inspect the scene after capturing a narco-sub in March 2025, authorities said. (Policia Judiciaria.)
“But it’s all about the money, and it’s all about the risk, and right now I don’t think these networks perceive Europe as a huge risk for them.”
Journalist Woolston says the transatlantic voyage is typically crewed by “desperate people,” given its perilous nature.
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“You’ll be locked up in a very small compartment for days, usually inhaling things like diesel fumes. There have been cases of narco submarines found with a crew of dead bodies.
“The kingpins would not get on these boats.”
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Trying to understand tech billionaire Elon Musk is like trying to assemble IKEA furniture in the dark.
Except we have no instructions, and the pieces keep changing shape.
Some Europeans dismiss him as a “barbaric cowboy”. We pride ourselves on being the educated adults in the room.
Well, if we are so clever, let us prove it and use Carl Jung to talk about Elon. This Swiss psychologist defined archetypes — the universal roles.
But there is a catch. For every positive one, there is a shadowy downside.
First, there is the Creator. As one, Musk is the visionary building rockets to take him to Mars one day. But his shadow is the Anarchist. He treats SpaceX explosions as “data” and he is willing to burn billions — and occasionally break laws — to see if his toys work.
Second, the Ruler. If money is the measure of success, he is the most profitable CEO in the world who just secured $1 trillion deal at Tesla to keep him.
But his shadow is the Tyrant. When he took over Twitter — now X — he did not just restructure the social media network, he decapitated it. He fired 80% of the staff in weeks, demanding “hardcore” loyalty just to prove he holds the crown.
And third, the Jester. The internet troll posts memes that make people laugh. But here, his shadow is the Nihilist, the cruel trickster who retweets posts comparing the European Union to the “Fourth Reich.”
He burns institutions not for a plan, but for the “lols” — because he believes nothing matters anyway.
Musk is a spectacle we cannot look away from. So, Mr Musk, which Elon are you today?
Watch the Euronews video in the player above for the full story.
Rod Paige, an educator, coach and administrator who rolled out the nation’s landmark No Child Left Behind law as the first African American to serve as U.S. education secretary, died Tuesday.
Former President George W. Bush, who tapped Paige for the nation’s top federal education post, announced the death in a statement but did not provide further details. Paige was 92.
Under Paige’s leadership, the Department of Education implemented No Child Left Behind policy that in 2002 became Bush’s signature education law and was modeled on Paige’s previous work as a schools superintendent in Houston. The law established universal testing standards and sanctioned schools that failed to meet certain benchmarks.
“Rod was a leader and a friend,” Bush said in his statement. “Unsatisfied with the status quo, he challenged what we called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’ Rod worked hard to make sure that where a child was born didn’t determine whether they could succeed in school and beyond.”
Roderick R. Paige was born to two teachers in the small Mississippi town of Monticello of roughly 1,400 inhabitants. The oldest of five siblings, Paige served a two-year stint the U.S. Navy before becoming a football coach at the high school, and then junior college levels. Within years, Paige rose to head coach of Jackson State University, his alma mater and a historically black college in the Mississippi capital city.
There, his team became the first — with a 1967 football game — to integrate Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, once an all-white venue.
After moving to Houston in the mid-1970s to become head coach of Texas Southern University, Paige pivoted from the playing field to the classroom and education — first as a teacher, and then as administrator and eventually the dean of its college of education from 1984 to 1994.
Amid growing public recognition of his pursuit of educational excellence, Paige rose to become superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, then one of the largest school districts in the country.
He quickly drew the attention of Texas’ most powerful politicians for his sweeping educational reforms in the diverse Texas city. Most notably, he moved to implement stricter metrics for student outcomes, something that became a central point for Bush’s 2000s bid for president. Bush — who later would dub himself the “Education President” — frequently praised Paige on the campaign trail for the Houston reforms he called the “Texas Miracle.”
And once Bush won election, he tapped Paige to be the nation’s top education official.
As education secretary from 2001 to 2005, Paige emphasized his belief that high expectations were essential for childhood development.
“The easiest thing to do is assign them a nice little menial task and pat them on the head,” he told the Washington Post at the time. “And that is precisely what we don’t need. We need to assign high expectations to those people, too. In fact, that may be our greatest gift: expecting them to achieve, and then supporting them in their efforts to achieve.”
While some educators applauded the law for standardizing expectations regardless of student race or income, others complained for years about what they consider a maze of redundant and unnecessary tests and too much “teaching to the test” by educators.
In 2015, House and Senate lawmakers agreed to pull back many provisions from “No Child Left Behind,” shrinking the Education Department’s role in setting testing standards and preventing the federal agency from sanctioning schools that fail to improve. That year, then-President Barack Obama signed the sweeping education law overhaul, ushering in a new approach to accountability, teacher evaluations and the way the most poorly performing schools are pushed to improve.
After serving as education secretary, Paige returned to Jackson State University a half century after he was a student there, serving as the interim president in 2016 at the age of 83.
Into his 90s, Paige still publicly expressed deep concern, and optimism, about the future of U.S. education. In an opinion piece appearing in the Houston Chronicle in 2024, Paige lifted up the city that helped propel him to national prominence, urging readers to “look to Houston not just for inspiration, but for hard-won lessons about what works, what doesn’t and what it takes to shake up a stagnant system.”
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