The Trump Family Turnover

Sunday, late afternoon, standing in a packed room in a DC hotel at a party in honor of incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, I found myself nose to nose with a charming man who told me was a banker.

A couple minutes more interrogation and then it emerged he wasn’t your average banker.

“My father was the dictator who ran …..[name of a well-known African country I won’t reveal to protect the source]. So, when he was kicked out I came here and became a banker…Now I might have to go back to XXX.”

Small talk at inauguration parties in DC is unlike small talk in New York – or London for that matter. Or Los Angeles.

I bring up LA, because inauguration weekend in DC reminded me eerily of the Oscars weekend, the only difference being the freezing temperature. There’s the same jostling for the best invites, the same energy, the same nightmarish traffic. (Actually the D.C. traffic gridlock was much worse.)

The only thing I found really baffling about the DC parties was the black tie dress code.

I get why you’d want to wear a long dress to the candlelight dinner on inauguration eve, for example. And there was a late night private dance party in a certain ambassador’s home that was by far the chicest event I’ve ever been to in DC and certainly merited getting dressed up for.

But most of the inaugural events, including the balls, don’t involve dancing by anyone other than the Trump family who are roped off, up on a stage. And there’s no sitting down.

So, why does one need to be in black tie to stand up, drink, eat and network? Most of the women put on their gowns at lunchtime so they don’t waste hours in horrible traffic changing. (But a wise piece of advice came from my host, who told me to wear my jeans or something comfortable to the weekend daytime events, because, he said, I’d stand out, which might be helpful, given my profession. I was skeptical but, of course, he was right.)

What I also hadn’t fully appreciated was just how difficult it is to get anywhere. The snow and the ice on Sunday night made it almost impossible. By the time I went to bed at 2 a.m. I felt like I deserved an Olympic gold medal for navigating the frigid streets of D.C. in three inch heels.

So when, on Monday, Trump mentioned that Melania’s feet were killing her, for once I was completely in sync with what the First Lady must be feeling.

My party experiences aside, two things stood out to me about the day itself:

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Hegseth Hearing

I’m typing this on the train for a quick trip to DC for the first of many Inauguration parties. (I’ll be returning there Saturday for the full immersion.)

Steve Bannon, Erik Prince, and Sean Ryan are all speaking at tonight’s party, and having tuned in to Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing this morning, there is likely to be plenty to talk about.

The one thing I found jarring about this morning’s back and forth was when Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia – whom I mistakenly remembered as a mild-mannered milk-toast politician when he was Hillary Clinton’s running-mate – lit into Hegseth like a Rottweiler.

He pressed Hegseth about the now infamous extra-marital affair he had in Monterey, California, while he was still married to his second wife – and had just had a baby daughter with the woman who would become wife number three.

It was a brutal exchange.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

How To Translate Trump

You can all relax! Despite what you’ve heard from the horse’s mouth, Donald Trump is not going to send US troops to invade the Panama Canal, or Greenland.

How do I know this?

Yesterday I sat through a fascinating, on-record discussion with Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster at the Council of Foreign Relations.

McMaster, a three star General about whom I heard a lot when I reported Kushner, Inc, gave a humdinger of a talk. Perhaps he was motivated because he was there to sell his most recent book: At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. Or perhaps he was motivated because, as was noted among members of the audience, he’s not going back in to another Trump administration. He did not appear to hold back.

(His honesty could also stem from the fact that, as I recall from my reporting for Kushner, Inc. McMaster was often on a losing wicket in the Trump White House that must have been frustrating for someone used to an orderly chain of command. He was viewed as too moderate and anti-isolationist by the hard core nationalist/populist Bannon wing – and, quite often, also by Trump, who said aloud he had wanted to hire a General with more stars.

McMaster argued, for example, to stay in the Paris Climate Agreement (a battle he lost). And he’d argued Trump should add troops in Afghanistan, not withdraw (another battle he lost). Plus, the end of his very brief tenure of just over one year, was marked ignominiously when Trump rushed in the more hawkish John Bolton as a replacement.)

So here’s what McMaster had to say about Trump’s recent “let’s go acquire them” pronouncements on Greenland and the Panama Canal (which he acknowledged as “outlandish” or “what many would regard as outlandish”…but, he also said, there’s “something behind it”).

Whenever Trump speaks about anything, McMaster said, he’s basically asking four business questions…

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Where is the British Outrage about Elon?

It’s only the beginning of January and already it feels like we have descended into bewildering pre-inauguration insanity.

All I can think as I can scan the news is: Why?

Why is Elon Musk, a man who you’d think had enough to occupy him on these shores, disrupting British politics over something hideous – gangs of men, many of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan origin, who groomed under-age (mostly white) girls for sex – in the UK – over ten years ago? Yes, kudos to him for stirring up debate around the horrors of what happened and the lack of accountability for it, partly on account of lawmakers and enforcers worried about the ethnicity of the perpetrators; he has gotten me spending a few hours both online and on the phone to London, trying to educate myself about the history of Britain’s evil rape gangs.

But it seems as if there was a meaningful inquiry into the abuse and the cover-up. The problem was that the Conservative government, under whose watch this happened, didn’t implement the Inquiry’s list of recommendations, so it’s imperative that the current Labour government now does.

But after just a few hours of digging, I do not feel qualified to say whether there now needs to be a further national inquiry into what happened – or just a local one. And that’s the debate Musk has riled up, accusing the current Prime Minister Keir Starmer and a Labour MP Jess Phillips of blocking a national investigation for self-serving reasons. (Keir Starmer was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time all the horrific abuse came to light).

But I do feel qualified to ask: why is the normally fizzy British press so non-critical of Musk’s brazen intervention in their national domestic policy?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Happy New Year!

Dear Everyone,

This is the last post of 2024.

I was in the UK this past week with family and friends – and there’s plenty to report.

First, before flying to London, I wrote a deep-dive here about Syria’s former First Lady Asma al-Assad based on an interview with her cousin Abdu al-Dabbagh, whose arrest is also sought in Syria. No coincidence, surely, that various news stories then popped up in England’s Daily Telegraph, quoting anonymous sources saying that Mrs Assad’s leukemia has worsened and she wants to leave Moscow and return to her native country, the UK. Some reports in the Middle East even had her filing for divorce from her husband.

According to al-Dabbagh, whose mother, Saadat, talks to her sister, Sahar, Asma’s mother who is with her in Moscow, it’s all garbage. Propaganda most likely.

1. She isn’t at death’s door. She is in remission. There was a time when her health was so vulnerable that everyone, including her husband, wore Hazmat uniforms so as not to pass on any germs but, as I reported last week, she received a bone-marrow transplant from her son, Hafez in August, and so she is no longer in isolation. She hasn’t been in months. She’s getting better.

2. She isn’t getting divorced. She’s a conservative muslim.

3. She may want to return to England – but Tant Pis, as the French would say. On this, I’m with the British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (alongside whom I used to work at the Independent newspaper in the early 1990s). Yvette has rightly said there are other things to consider besides Mrs Bashad’s health. War crimes, for instance.

I got a small shock when I read that Indian-American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan had been appointed as Trump’s advisor on AI policies and that Steve Bannon and the MAGA wing of the Republican party had gone berserk because Sriram, supports H1-B visas (for exceptional immigrants).

In one of life’s weird coincidences, I know Sriram Khrishnan.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Inside The Fall of Asma al-Assad

I am completely fascinated by the story of Asma al-Assad, the British born wife of the Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and brutal dictator who fled into exile in Russia on December 8th.

I’ve kept wondering as we read about the horrors of Assad’s Syria: How did this beautiful, privileged woman who grew up in Acton, a London suburb, and who worked for JP Morgan come to be the Lady Macbeth of the Middle East, someone who is banned from her native Britain, sanctioned by the US and reviled by the West?

She’s only a few years younger than me and some of my closest British friends overlapped with her at JP Morgan.

It’s a conundrum that has sat with me.

So, these past two weeks, I’ve phoned around sources in the Middle East – and in a stroke of luck – I got to Asma’s cousin, Abdu al-Dabbagh, 59. As you might imagine, given Abdu is an Assad relative, he fled Syria in a hurry on Sunday December 8th, hours after Bashar left, and is now residing in a rental home in Beirut, Lebanon.

Abdu is a Syrian “businessman” who tells me he owns some jewelry stores in Dubai. He moved his businesses out of Syria in 2000 because he determined (correctly) very early on in Bashar Assad’s presidency that Assad would appropriate all the private businesses he could to line his own coffers. Bashar’s cousin and uncle were already running a monopoly even then.

Despite the family ties, (Abdu’s mother, Saadat Otri is Asma Assad’s mother’s sister) there is no love lost between him and Bashar Assad, who, he says, put him into solitary confinement in January, where guards peed into his drinking water and onto his blanket – all because he criticized the five “illiterates” running the Syrian economy. He was released he says because he went on a hunger-strike and his mother put pressure on Asma.

And yet fifty years ago Abdu and Bashar were childhood best friends. In the same class. In the same school. And Abdu’s father, Ahmed Adnan Dabbagh, was the Syrian Minister of Intelligence and then the Interior under Bashar’s father, President Hafez Assad, who was an even more tyrannical ruler than his son. Abdu says, that Hafez Bassad crammed the jails so full of people that they were so squashed that the myth spread they had to sleep standing up.

Abdu tells me that contrary to what Bashar al-Assad has said recently from Moscow – that he never planned to flee – that there were definitely clues that he was planning to leave Syria to go into exile the week before December 8th.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

What Luigi Mangione Got Wrong…

Like many people, I suspect, I’ve felt uncomfortable about the reaction to the arrest of Luigi Mangione for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Of course the act of cold-blooded, calculated murder is evil. And there are no “justifications” for taking a life.

And I think Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Rogan etcetera are plain wrong for giving wishy-washy caveats. “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” said Elizabeth Warren. Rogan has said health insurers are “fucking gross.”

But Luigi Mangione wasn’t pushed – at least not specifically by UnitedHealthcare. There is no evidence he was ever even a member of United.

Further, I’d argue young Mangione (and the tragedy here, is that he is per his manifesto, clearly young) was wrong in his assumption that single payer systems, like the one we have in my native Britain are better. Reportedly he talked to the British writer Gurwinder Bhogal months before the murder and “complained about how expensive healthcare in the US was, and expressed envy at the UK’s nationalized health system.”

I’m a dual citizen: British and American, so I have experience of both systems.

Neither, I have to tell you, is perfect. It’s a case of pick your poison.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Mothers and Sons

Apologies for my absence for a few days. We’ve been closing out the book, which heads to the printers shortly.

Meanwhile, there’s so much going on in the news that it’s hard to know where to focus.

But when I saw the video of Elon Musk striding into the capitol last week, child slung across his shoulders, reminiscent of the way in which wealthy New York women used to flaunt the must-have-impossible-to-get accessory, their Birkin bags, it occurred to me that the sagas of parents and sons are a thing right now.

There’s the emergence of Barron Trump – who has literally found his voice – as someone who has “brand value” in the Trump family.

And then there’s the resurfacing headache of the Biden family’s perennial problem child: Hunter who required a literal “get out of jail free’ card from his dad for Christmas.

(I couldn’t understand the surprised reaction in the media about this. Everything we’ve ever known about Joe Biden has indicated that one of his great weaknesses is his lack of a clear eyes and a firm hand around his troubled offspring).

And then there’s the other parent in the news, the one who struck a chord with me: Penelope Hegseth, the Minnesota mom of Trump’s controversial nominee for Defense secretary, Pete.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Dear France, Meet Your New US Ambassador, Charles Kushner…

Dear French Readers,

The good news is that your incoming US ambassador, Charles Kushner, will fit right in to life in the mansion in Rue St Honore in Paris.

It’s true that the staff and the parties and the bodyguards will be no culture shock because he’s very wealthy. (But I suspect he may not want to drive the armored Mercedes you offer: It’s German and he, historically, hasn’t liked to drive German cars on account of history – see my book Kushner, Inc. for details).

But I am certain he will make the annual July 4th party for 1000 even more spectacular than his predecessors. You always want an American real estate developer to give grand parties…Why? Because they suffer from something the Germans call “profil-neurose” (fear of invisibility), so everything they do from collecting art, wives – and throwing parties – is therefore completely over the top.

When it comes to communication: Will Charlie’s French be anywhere near the level of that of his predecessors like Felix Rohatyn or Pamela Harriman who spoke the language “couramment”? That’s a rhetorical question because we know the answer is “non, non, non pas de tout.’” But it doesn’t matter because you all speak perfect English, anyway.

But I believe Monsieur L’ambassadeur Kushner will get you culturally – and vice versa – in a way that possibly none of his predecessors did.

That’s because La France, for which I have much respect is, the land of sexual sophistication and relaxed moraes.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Jessica Reed Kraus (House InHabit) Unplugged

My second guest for the new vodcast series, Failing Up! (Sari, my former producer at Audible tells me that’s what this is called, rather than a podcast) is a woman who is no stranger to her hundreds of thousands of subscribers on Substack.

Jessica Reed Kraus, whose handle is

House Inhabit

, is the epitome of success in the new media landscape. She makes seven figures off her Substack and Instagram. Wired listed her as one of the key influencers in the 2024 election along with Tucker Carolson and Elon Musk. She has been profiled in publications like the Wall Street Journal, Elle and Mother Jones. Yet only a few years ago Jess was a mommy blogger in Orange County, California (where she lives with husband, Mike, and their four children).

 

For those who don’t know, during the pandemic, Jessica, 44, decided she wanted to cover things she thought weren’t getting enough attention – or the right sort of attention in the media. I met her in the winter of 2021 – on the steps of the Thurgood Marshall courthouse in downtown Manhattan, where each morning, before dawn, we lined up to gain admission to the tiny courtroom (made even more diminutive thanks to Covid restrictions) in which Ghislaine Maxwell was on trial for abusing and trafficking minors. Every lunchtime we ate the crappy food in the cafeteria together with a couple of other friends. We gossiped about what we’d seen and how we thought the trial was going (initially not well for the government) and then we went home and wrote it all up. Only to get up at 4am and repeat it all over again, day after day, week after week.

It was an endurance test. I know that by the end I was so exhausted I could barely see straight. Sheer adrenaline and uncertainty got us through. I remember right until closing arguments we wondered about the strength of the government’s case. But the closing argument for the prosecution, delivered by James Comey’s daughter, Maurene, was one of the most unforgettable and powerful performances in a courtroom I’ve ever seen. Apparently, the jury agreed. They convicted Maxwell on all counts of sexual abuse and trafficking. Adding to the stress was that it took place in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Neither of us saw much, if anything, of our families.

But the thing about covering trials is that once you start, you feel locked in – or you do if the proceedings are not being televised, and the responsibility on the shoulders of the conduits to the public hangs heavy. It’s like becoming an actor in a play, not simply a spectator. I started grading the lawyers for each of their performances in my Substack and suddenly I found that various of their parents were writing in my comments box.

Jess was unafraid to say exactly what she saw. Which was that the woman in front of us had a distinct magnetism when she turned to look at us, even when wearing her mask and standing silent. “I didn’t think the trial told the whole story,” she says in our interview below. Jess found Maxwell intriguing, possibly even sympathetic. That was not and is not the “narrative” around Maxwell. But Jess points out she “had nothing to lose.”

From there she covered the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial. Her husband Mike told her that “no one is interested”. Thankfully, he was wrong. Again, she took a contrarian position, but it was the one that felt authentic to her sitting in the courtroom. As the proceedings unfolded, she began to feel sympathetic towards Depp – who then phoned her out of the blue. She put the details of that phone call behind a paywall. Her earnings took off.

Read on and watch at Vicky Ward Investigates