Presidential Kids Who Were Completely Estranged From Their Parents

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00:00Maintaining a work-life balance is difficult for anyone who has a job.

00:05Adding kids into the mix often makes this even tougher, particularly on those who end

00:09up in the White House and were not always the most doting of dads.

00:13These are the presidential kids who were estranged from their parents.

00:18Ever since President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his daughter Ivanka and her husband

00:24Jared Kushner have been two of POTUS's closest and most influential political advisors.

00:29Meanwhile, upon taking office, President Trump had to legally divest himself of his business

00:34interests and left most of the control of the Trump Organization in the hands of his sons,

00:39Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

00:42However, that level of closeness and trust is a relatively late-breaking development.

00:46Donald Jr. wasn't even in his teens when his father split from his mother, Ivana Trump,

00:52in the early 90s.

00:53The Trump kids were raised almost entirely by their mom, as well as her parents, who spent

00:58six months every year living with the family in the 50-room Trump Tower triplex Ivana got

01:03in the divorce.

01:04As Trump Jr. explained to New York Magazine in 2003,

01:08"'My father is a very hard-working guy, and that's his focus in life, so I got a lot

01:13of the paternal attention that a boy wants and needs from my grandfather.'"

01:17In the fallout of the drama, a 12-year-old Trump Jr. pinned the blame for the divorce on

01:21his father and reportedly accused Trump Sr. of not loving his family.

01:26Later, he and his younger siblings were sent off to boarding school, making the relationship

01:31between father and eldest son strained well into Trump Jr.'s early adulthood.

01:37When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, his four surviving children from two marriages

01:42were already adults, and nearly all had difficult relationships with their father.

01:47Reagan had distanced himself from his first set of kids, Maureen and his adopted son Michael,

01:53after divorcing Jane Wyman and marrying Nancy Davis.

01:57Maureen reportedly once read a biography about her father claiming he had just two kids, Patty

02:02Davis and Ron Reagan Jr., the children he fathered with Nancy.

02:06Meanwhile, Reagan's son Michael alleged the president opted to attend the wedding of Richard

02:11Nixon's daughter, Trisha, which was held on the same day as Michael's nuptials.

02:16While Republican National Committee co-chairwoman Maureen grew closer to her father during his presidency,

02:22Patty Davis continued to have a particularly fraught relationship with her parents.

02:27Patty and her siblings stopped talking after the publication of her semi-autobiographical

02:311986 novel, Homefront, about a withholding father who becomes president.

02:36She later wrote a tell-all memoir called The Way I See It, in which she alleged that her

02:41mother was an abusive pill user while her father looked the other way.

02:45Additionally, the politically progressive Patty was ideologically at odds with her conservative

02:50dad, so they didn't see each other very much during his presidency.

02:53Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

02:59Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency in 1963 upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

03:05For LBJ, it was the culmination of a political career that included the vice presidency, serving

03:10as the powerful Senate majority leader, and an election to the House of Representatives in

03:161937.

03:17Through his rise in politics, Johnson's constant companion and political second-in-command was

03:22his wife, Claudia, more famously known as Lady Bird Johnson.

03:27She funded his first congressional campaign and ran his office throughout the 1940s.

03:33When daughters Linda and Lucy were born in 1944 and 1947, respectively, that didn't change

03:39the Johnsons' work life much, as the couple reportedly relied on their household staff to take care

03:44of most of the parenting tasks.

03:46In the summer of 1955, then-Senator Johnson suffered a heart attack.

03:51While recovering at the family ranch in Texas, he finally spent a significant amount of time

03:56with his daughters.

03:58Long before he became the first president in American history to resign from office, Richard

04:03Nixon was a political hustler.

04:05He won his election to national office in 1946, earning a seat in the House of Representatives

04:10at age 33, after just barely getting back from serving in the Navy in World War II.

04:16From that moment on, Nixon worked tirelessly to advance his political career.

04:21According to Joshua Kendall's book First Dads, Parents and Politics from George Washington

04:26to Barack Obama, Nixon was known to put in 20-hour workdays during the 1948 congressional

04:32hearings regarding suspected spy Alger Hiss.

04:35During those early years of his career, Nixon's wife, Pat, gave birth to two daughters, Trisha,

04:40in 1946, and Julie in 1948.

04:44There certainly wasn't time to see either of them during his early political career, when

04:48then-Senator Nixon preferred to work late into the night at his office.

04:53Dwight D. Eisenhower's VP reportedly kept up the absent dad routine until his 1960 loss

04:59in the presidential election to John F. Kennedy.

05:01"'Just think how much you're gonna be missing.

05:04You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.'"

05:07After nabbing a less-taxing job at a Los Angeles law firm, Kendall writes,

05:12Nixon promised his wife that he would finally become a more involved father, but this never

05:17happened.

05:18Nixon hit the lecture circuit and wrote a book until successfully running for president in

05:221968.

05:23Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump's daughter with first wife Ivana, receives a lot of praise from her

05:29presidential father in the press.

05:31However, the family's patriarch rarely speaks about his other daughter, Tiffany Trump.

05:36Born in 1993 to Trump's second wife, Marla Maples, Tiffany grew up primarily in California

05:42and was raised by her single mom, seeing as her parents divorced in 1999.

05:48Long story short, Donald Trump remarried in 2005 to model Melania Knauss and welcomed a

05:54son, Barron, a year later.

05:56Along with his business interests and gig hosting the reality show The Apprentice, the future

06:01president's work-life balance in the Big Apple meant there was little time left over for him

06:06to see Tiffany.

06:07"'Well, a lot of people can't handle success.

06:09I've seen it.

06:10A lot of people can't win.

06:11They don't know how to win.'"

06:12While Tiffany Trump made some appearances toward the end of her famous dad's 2016 presidential

06:17campaign, that doesn't mean the two were close then or have gotten any closer since.

06:22An insider in the Trump family told People magazine in 2018,

06:27"'Since the inauguration, Tiffany and her father have sometimes gone for months without speaking,

06:32and she went a very long time without seeing him.

06:34The last time she was at a family function with him, it was awkward for her, and she didn't

06:39feel totally welcome.'"

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