Eric Trump

There’s been a change of mood across the country – and not one that is favorable to the GOP. Last November, the prediction markets gave Republicans a 70 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate. Now their odds have deteriorated. It looks likely that the Democrats will win both the chambers – so what’s happened? The latest polls all tell the same story. The economy is no longer Trump’s superpower. Of those polled by Fox News, three- quarters rate the economy negatively, with 70 percent feeling it’s getting worse. Voters now trust Democrats on the economy more than Republicans for the first time since May 2010. Trump’s weakness on the economy brings with it another growing danger for him.

For years, Eric Trump perfected the art of strategic invisibility. In the grand theater of Trump family politics, he played the understudy: the dutiful son who minded vineyards and managed golf courses while his older brother courted Twitter controversies and his older sister pursued power. It was a calculated public persona. Eric appeared refreshingly uncontroversial and unbothered – and relatively non-political – compared to the rest of his family. But here’s what everyone missed: while his siblings were soaking in the limelight, Eric was quietly orchestrating moves of far greater consequence. His dutiful pose, it turns out, was the perfect cover for building an empire.

On the ground floor of Georgetown Park, Donald Trump Jr. is putting the finishing touches on his invitation-only club, the Executive Branch. When the doors open, reportedly in the next few weeks, it will become Washington’s new power hangout. Cabinet secretaries will mingle with tech billionaires and foreign investors, each having parted with $500,000 for the privilege. The launch party last month included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson. David Sacks, the President's crypto and AI czar, proudly announced himself as member number one. This tableau – celebrity, politics, profit – perfectly captures the Trump dynasty’s particular brand.

"Sorry, super busy,” replies someone from Lara Trump’s media team, after I texted to ask for an interview. "I’m working on her music stuff.” The Trumps love to multitask and, in the President’s first 100 days, King Donald’s favorite (that is, only) daughter-in-law has been showing off how hard she can work. Since the inauguration, and now free from the burdens of campaign politics, Lara has released a song called “No Days Off” with the rapper French Montana; a Saturday night show on Fox News; and an activewear collection in the color “MAGA red,” alongside her already established podcast, The Right View. Unfortunately, she has a different press person to dodge questions over each venture.

While Donald Trump’s excessive rhetoric often evokes eye rolls, in the case of Friday’s record-setting $350 million judgment against the Trump Organization, he is spot on. “Disgraceful.” “Lawfare.” “Banana republic.” All three apply.  It’s hard to imagine a more perverse and vindictive misuse of the justice system than that which New York attorney general Letitia James has committed. While campaigning in 2018, James promised to vigorously investigate Trump and his business. True to her word, once in the office James spent three years seizing and scouring through Trump’s tax and financial records for anything she could use as the basis for legal action.

Just when you think it’s all Brett Kavanaugh, all the time, up pops Stormy Daniels as a reminder that Donald Trump faces multiple perils that he can’t simply wave away with a magic wand. Today, it’s a story in the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that is sometimes supposed by Trump’s detractors to be in the hip pocket of the president, but that is actually proving quite nettlesome to him. It reveals that Donald Trump has — surprise! — been much more enmeshed in trying to squash the Daniels story than he has acknowledged. Recall that when quizzed about whether he knew the payment to Daniels on April 5 on Air Force One, Trump responded with a flat ‘no.’ That turned out to not be true.