Of Course Donald Trump Jr.'s Ex-Wife Traded Him In for a Secret Service Agent

By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair

17 May 21

Tiffany Trump was reportedly also a fan.

ove. It works, as they say, in mysterious ways. And yet, in many cases, it actually works in entirely predictable, obvious, and reasonable ways. For example, if you found yourself married to Donald Trump Jr., the mortifying, simpleminded, sheep-killing son of the 45th president, whose own father seems to despise him, you’d almost certainly replace him with a Secret Service agent, as Vanessa Trump, who found herself in that very situation, understandably decided to do.

In Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Carol Leonnig reports that Vanessa, the ex-wife of Donald Trump’s eldest son, started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to the family “shortly” after her 2018 divorce from Junior, according to The Guardian, which obtained a copy of the book. While agents are prohibited from forming personal relationships with the people they are assigned to protect, as such feelings could affect their judgment, the individual Vanessa was seeing was apparently not subject to disciplinary action because “neither he nor the agency were official guardians of Vanessa Trump at that point.”

According to Leonnig, Vanessa wasn’t the only Trump gal with an eye for the men assigned to the family:

Leonnig also writes that Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail.” Secret Service leaders, the book says, “became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent.”

Both Tiffany Trump and the agent said nothing untoward was happening, Leonnig writes, and pointed out the nature of the agent’s job meant spending time alone with his charge. The agent was subsequently reassigned.

Tiffany is now engaged to Michael Boulos, the son of a Lebanese billionaire, who apparently popped the question in the waning days of the Trump administration. Leonnig, whose 2015 Pulitzer was awarded for her reporting on security failures at the Secret Service, notes that it’s not clear if Donald Trump was aware of what Secret Service personnel were discussing in regard to his daughter and daughter-in-law. Instead, he was focused on “repeatedly” trying to remove agents he believed were too short or overweight from his detail. “I want these fat guys off my detail,” Trump reportedly said, possibly not knowing the difference between office-based personnel and active agents. (Height and weight are famously important to the ex-president, who reportedly decided that Janet Yellen couldn‘t serve as Fed chair because she wasn’t tall enough.) Other Trumps, of course, had different issues with the Secret Service, like Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who made the people assigned to protect them go to extreme lengths to “find a bathroom,” reportedly having banned them from using any of the six and a half facilities in their Kalorama mansion.

Vanessa and Don Jr. were married for 12 years before calling it quits, and as my colleague Kenzie Bryant memorialized at the time their divorce was finalized, this was the romantic story of how the two met, as told to The New York Times:

“I’m at this fashion show,” Ms. Trump said, recalling their meeting in 2003. “Donald Trump comes up to me with his son: ‘Hi, I’m Donald Trump. I wanted to introduce you to my son Donald Trump Jr.’”

The three engaged in a brief, awkward conversation.

At intermission, the elder Mr. Trump again noticed a gorgeous girl nearby.

“Donald comes back up to me again, ‘I don’t think you’ve met my son Donald Trump Jr.,’” Vanessa Trump recalled. She remembers responding, “Yeah, we just met, five minutes ago.”

Vanessa looked at the younger Mr. Trump “like we’re taking crazy pills,” he recalled. “You know, I’m 25 at the time, I did perfectly well with girls. It wasn’t really my M.O. to have my father try to pick up girls for me.”

Six weeks later, at a birthday party at the downtown restaurant Butter, they were introduced a third time, this time by a mutual friend. Neither remembered the other. “We talked for an hour,” she recalled.

Then suddenly, something clicked: Wait, you were at that fashion show. Wait, you’re...

“...the one with the retarded dad!” Ms. Trump blurted out.

Junior later got Vanessa’s engagement ring for free in exchange for a public engagement announcement at a New Jersey jeweler, which Donald Trump—yes, that Donald Trump— reportedly thought was a little déclassé.