Donald Trump’s biographer, Tim O’Brien, predicted on Monday that prosecutors will paint Ivanka Trump into a corner when she testifies at her father’s civil fraud trial in New York next week.
Ivanka Trump had attempted to get out of taking the stand, arguing that she’d already been dismissed from the case. But Judge Arthur Engoron prevailed and she’ll now follow her father and brothers, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, in giving evidence.
O’Brien said that Ivanka Trump is her father’s “Aryan trope” that he parades around. He said that Trump has been “embarrassed by his boys to a certain extent” with them acting as “fenceposts,” while Ivanka Trump “made sure to stay in his good graces, while not going completely off the reservation in any way.”
However, O’Brien said that Ivanka Trump has “never been as robustly in his corner and as completely MAGA as the boys are.
He said that with her testimony, “it won’t really matter what her allegiances are or how she wants to play her father’s graces.”
She’s going to have to figure out whether or not she wants to perjure herself in a courtroom and whether or not the fact pattern is just completely damning in her own role that Donald Trump and his sons and she have all played,” O’Brien added.
Which is to routinely and artificially inflate the value of Trump’s holding or to deflate them in order to cheat the tax man or goad banks into lending him money, depending on what their preferences are,” he said.
O’Brien’s prediction that Ivanka Trump’s testimony could destabilize her father is sure to add to the suspense of the trial. It will be interesting to see how Ivanka Trump handles the pressure of the witness stand and whether she is able to avoid perjuring herself.