THIS IS DONALD JR., TRUMP'S FIRSTBORN: FIVE CHILDREN, PRESENTING BRIDE AND TACAÑO FAME
From getting lost in Soviet forests and living in a truck to using his last name to get the engagement ring free and taking care of his father's business. This is the president's firstborn.
In recent years, Donald Trump Jr., Don, has become the perfect heir to his father, the President of the United States. He keeps the chair for her in the family conglomerate; He brings together business, family and politics and, along with his brother Eric, forms Donald Trump's Praetorian Guard outside the White House (a role within him corresponds to his sister Ivanka). But he wasn't always the designated heir, so immersed in the Trump bubble that he even got married at Mar-A-Lago, Trump's favorite Florida property. Today, already divorced, he walks through the presidential campaign in the company of Kimberly Guilfoyle: former of the Democratic governor of California, a prominent member of the media alt-right and whose role in recent months is to raise funds - with great success - for the Donald Sr. campaign.
No, it took Don years to realize what it meant to be a Trump, a surname “like a smoking gun,” as he put it to journalist Larry King in 2004. A process that is not yet over. Don himself blurted out at one of his outlandish rallies (his participation in father's campaigns is aimed at the most exalted constituencies of his fathers' voters) that it had taken him more than 40 years to become the son of his father. Donald is now 42 years old, of which more than half were spent away from the media spotlight.
He also has to do with Donald's idea of fatherhood. Ivana Trump, the mother of Don, Eric and Ivanka, said in 2017, on the promotional tour of her memoirs, that Donald “was not the type of father who takes children to Central Park, nor does he play with them or anything . He started communicating with them when they were 18 years old, when he was able to start talking business with them. Before that, I really don't know what kind of talks he can have with young children. "
So Donald's childhood was that of an absent father who had put them in a golden cage: Trump Tower, the symbol of family power in Manhattan. The one where Don lived from ages 5 to 13. And to which he would return a decade later, already as an employee of his father.
A childhood lived in New York, except for the summers, when Ivana took him to Czechoslovakia to be with her maternal grandparents and learn the language. The grandfather, Milos Zelnicek, was quite a character: he taught Don to hunt and fish and survive in the wild, with quite expeditious methods: he gave him a rifle, pointed to a wild place saying "there you have a forest" and returned to pick him up at night. Among other activities, the grandfather was also engaged in spying on his father for the Soviets to unravel the mysteries of American politics in the Reagan years.
Zelnicek died in 1990, and Ivana divorced a year later, making it very clear to Don that it was her father's fault, that he had been unfaithful to her and her family. Something that shocked the 13-year-old boy a lot: he spent a year without speaking to his father, and embarked on an adolescence on the fringes of family ups and downs (his parents' divorce lasted for almost five years of headlines. it was a burden: on the one hand, he defined him as “just another rich kid,” as he has said on several occasions. On the other, Don did not have a definite pattern in life beyond his mother: Ivana was the one who decided where they would study the kids or what kinds of life they could chase without Donald criticizing him because, well, they weren't human to interact with yet.
Don studied economics in Pennsylvania, and decided to get away from it all: for a year, between 2000 and 2001, he dedicated himself to living on the other side of the wealthy Aspen. Between his ski slopes and mountains, Donald Jr. worked as a waiter, practicing grandfather's teachings and living in a truck. That year he did not speak to any of his parents, although he returned to New York thinking that life was something more than that. "Your brain is atrophied," he said years later.
This is how she entered the family business: Ivana took the grown children and said to Donald: "Here is the final product." Don returned to the Trump Tower and went into the family business, with the help of Eric and later Ivanka. A real estate developer's life with big parties and running from the headlines, although they used to find him: at 23, he was arrested in the middle of Mardi Gras, on the main street of the New Orleans festival, one Sunday, for carrying a giant tune-up. That he has the credit for it: in any given year, at Mardi Gras there are a million drunkards and the police only arrest about 30.
There it was already seen that Don was a bit excessive on the paternal side of him. When he decided to go media he did it in a big way: the day he proposed to the model Vanessa Haydon, he did it in public and on his knees. As a romantic gesture? Partly. The television cameras that he had brought to the request told another story: that the $ 100,000 ring was free when he turned the request into a jewelry promotional event. A master play of stinginess that in 2004 scared even his father away.
Haydon, later Vanessa Trump, used to other types of boyfriends (she was dating until 9/11 with a Saudi prince and diplomat, current ambassador of the Arab monarchy in the United Kingdom), would verify in her flesh that this stinginess was not a flower of a day . The divorce papers revealed in 2018, after 13 years of marriage and five children, that Don controlled his money to the point that Vanessa had to ask her mother for financial help to take care of the children or have dinner outside of her. The wedding, of course, was at Mar-A-Lago, the Trump complex in Florida that today is his second residence: it was free.
In The Apprentice, the reality show that covered the Trumps with money - it was the family's greatest source of profit, covering many of the holes in their disastrous real estate deals, several of them promoted by Don -, the first-born discovered that the media attention it had its good side. Not only because of the extramarital affair Don had with singer and contestant Aubrey O'Day while Vanessa was carrying her third child. Also because he discovered that television rewarded excesses. His participation led her to strengthen ties with his father and to embark with him in his political career.
Don, who has changed his image and now has a beard and a more aggressive and fit appearance, is the one who hangs out with the rank and file, participates in the events parallel to those of his father, and encourages the masses with statements to the limit. A trade in which he has also learned from his girlfriend Kimberly, who was a prosecutor for years before jumping into the Fox News pit, and from there to the Trump circle. He has written a book on "the left that feeds on hatred," calls Joe Biden a communist and insists on tightening the fence on Hunter, the Democrat's wayward son. His greatest contribution to the father's campaign? In 2016, before the election, he decided it was a good idea to sit down with Russian lawyers who promised him compromising information about Hillary Clinton.
The rest of the time, he maintains the Trumps' forte: his is temporary control of the nearly $ 3.6 billion in assets of the family conglomerate, which he exercises in consultation with his father - the president, of course, cannot do business on his own. name - and breaking his own electoral promises. Don Jr., in these four years of presidency, has signed several contracts with countries directly affected by the policies of his father, despite the fact that both agreed to avoid those scenarios.
FBI investigations of complicity with Russians eager to intervene in US elections; infidelities and a divorce; a girlfriend who is part of the other family business, politics; more or less failed businesses between appearances of success; and an increasingly altered presence in his public interventions. Perhaps Don was referring to all of that when he said that it took him more than 40 years to learn what it means to be a Trump.
