Donald Trump Jr.

• 1. Introduction

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  Donald John Trump Jr. was born on the 31st of December 1977 in Manhattan. He is the eldest child of Ivana and Donald Trump, who would later serve as the 45th and 47th president of the United States. When he was twelve, his parents divorced after his father's extramarital affair. Furious that his father had broken up the family, he stayed estranged from him for a full year. Decades later, he is one of his father's most visible allies. He is a businessman and political activist who helps run the family company and appears on the campaign trail. How did a boy who once shut his father out become one of his loudest defenders? What did he actually do inside the family business, and what did the public learn about its dealings? And why have his meetings, messages and posts drawn so much scrutiny?

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• 2. Prague Summers to Aspen

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  Elizabeth Christ Trump, a great-grandmother of Don Jr., founded the business that grew into the Trump Organization. His grandparents on his father's side were Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod. The family history he inherited was one of property and ambition.

  A different influence came from his mother's side. His maternal grandfather, Miloš Zelníček, had a home near Prague, and the boy spent his summers there. He camped, fished, hunted and learned the Czech language. He came to see his grandfather as a role model.

  He grew up with two younger siblings, Ivanka and Eric. Two half siblings came through his father's later marriages. Tiffany is the daughter of Marla Maples, and Barron is the son of Melania Trump.

  His schooling began at the Buckley School. He then went to The Hill School, a college preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. From there he moved to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2000 with a B.S. in Economics.

  A corner office in Manhattan did not come next. After Penn, he moved to Aspen, Colorado, for a year. He hunted, fished and skied, lived in a truck and worked as a bartender. Only then did he return to New York and join the Trump Organization.

  At the company he supervised building projects, including 40 Wall Street, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Park Avenue. Not every venture lasted. In 2006 he helped launch Trump Mortgage, and it collapsed in less than a year.

  Television gave him a second stage. From season 5 in 2006 until his father's last season in 2015, he appeared on many episodes of The Apprentice as a guest adviser and boardroom judge.

  In 2010 he became spokesperson and "executive director of global branding" for Cambridge Who's Who. It was a vanity publisher, and hundreds of complaints against it had already reached the Better Business Bureau.

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• 3. The Family Firm

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  On the 11th of January 2017, Donald Trump announced a plan to avoid conflicts of interest during his presidency. His assets in the Trump Organization would go into a trust overseen by two of his sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Don Jr. is now a trustee and executive vice president, running the company alongside his brother.

  The brothers had pledged not to pursue new foreign business while their father was in office. The Washington Post reported a different picture. According to the paper, the sons sold assets to foreign individuals, expanded existing deals and investments abroad, and collected payments from foreign governments at properties in the United States. The paper's fact-checker rated as false Don Jr.'s claim that family members had gotten out of foreign business deals.

  In February 2018, newspaper advertisements in India offered a perk to anyone who bought Trump Organization apartments in Gurgaon before the 20th of February. Buyers would be invited to a "conversation and dinner" with Don Jr. Corruption watchdogs criticized the ads as unethical.

  During the Trump-Ukraine scandal, his father asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden and Biden's son Hunter. Don Jr. attacked Hunter Biden for nepotism. His line was, "When you're the father and your son's entire career is dependent on that, they own you." Trevor Noah and others ridiculed the remark. The Associated Press observed that he showed no awareness of how a famous father had helped his own success.

  A court ruling on the 16th of February 2024 changed his role in New York. It barred him for two years from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or legal entity, the Trump Organization included.

  His business activity outside the family firm kept growing. In November 2024 he became a partner at the venture capital firm 1789 Capital, and he joined the advisory board of the drone company Unusual Machines. In December 2024 he joined the board of PublicSquare. The source also lists a 2024 seat on the board of Credova. In 2025 he announced that 1789 Capital would invest in the Enhanced Games, a proposed sports event that would allow performance-enhancing drugs.

  In April 2025 a private membership club called the Executive Branch opened in Washington, D.C. Don Jr. co-founded it with David O. Sacks and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Opening-night guests reportedly included members of the Trump administration, wealthy CEOs, tech founders and policy experts.

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• 4. Meetings and Messages

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  On the 9th of June 2016, a meeting took place at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Publicist Rob Goldstone had arranged it on behalf of Azerbaijani-Russian businessman Emin Agalarov. Three members of the presidential campaign attended: Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. They met Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, her translator Anatoli Samochornov, lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze. Kaveladze was a senior vice president at Crocus Group, the real estate company run by Aras Agalarov.

  About a year later, Don Jr. first told the media that the adoption of Russian children was the main subject. On the 8th of July 2017 he tweeted his email exchange with Goldstone, and it told another story. He had agreed to attend expecting information damaging to Hillary Clinton. One of Goldstone's emails also said the Russian government was involved.

  The White House praised his transparency. Yet he published the emails only after The New York Times told him it had them and planned a story. Special counsel Robert Mueller, who led the Justice Department's Russia-related investigations, examined the emails and the meeting. In June 2019, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee sent prosecutors a criminal referral. They suspected he had misled the committee in his testimony.

  Another meeting came in August 2016. An emissary for the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia offered help to the campaign. The meeting included Joel Zamel, an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation, and George Nader, an envoy for the crown princes of those two countries. Businessman Erik Prince was also there.

  In November 2017, news broke that Julian Assange had used the WikiLeaks Twitter account to correspond with Don Jr. during the 2016 election. He had already handed the exchange to congressional investigators. The messages showed WikiLeaks courting his cooperation. At a moment when the campaign seemed headed for defeat, it urged the Trump side to reject the election results.

  WikiLeaks also asked him to share a made-up claim from True Pundit. The claim held that Hillary Clinton had wanted to attack Assange with drones. It sent a link to a site for searching the hacked emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, which WikiLeaks had recently made public. Don Jr. shared both.

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• 5. Campaign Trail

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  At the Republican National Convention in 2016, Don Jr. spoke alongside his siblings Ivanka, Eric and Tiffany. The New York Times called him a "close political adviser" to his father's campaign. During the transition he influenced his father's choice of Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior.

  The Washington Post later described a "public persona as a right-wing provocateur and ardent defender of Trumpism." Inside the orbit, his standing was less glowing. The Atlantic reported in 2019 that his father had called him "not the sharpest knife in the drawer." Some campaign staffers nicknamed him "Fredo," after a character in The Godfather.

  In the 2018 midterms he campaigned for Matt Rosendale, Patrick Morrisey, Mike Braun, Ron DeSantis, Lee Zeldin and Matt Gaetz, among others. He raised millions of dollars. Only his father drew bigger crowds, and he is credited with helping Republican candidates win.

  His political record includes some surprises. In 2007 he gave $4,000 to Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In 2011 he answered Representative Frederica Wilson's criticism of the Tea Party by confusing her with Maxine Waters, and he said her colorful hats made her look like a stripper.

  In September 2017 he asked to have his Secret Service detail removed, telling friends he wanted more privacy. He was the second presidential child to do so. Former Secret Service agents criticized the request, and his protection returned later that month.

  In October 2020, Pennsylvania Republicans floated him as a candidate for the Senate seat that Pat Toomey was leaving. That month he held a crowded indoor rally where attendees wore no masks, against public health guidelines. He also posted a photo of a "Don Jr. 2024" flag on Instagram. At the 2024 Republican National Convention, he led the introductions of JD Vance, his father's running mate.

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• 6. Posts and Pushback

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  In 2016 a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles set off a public rebuke. The makers of Skittles replied that candy is candy and refugees are people. That year the Cato Institute put the yearly chance of an American dying in a terrorist attack by a refugee at one in 3.64 billion.

  On the 1st of March 2016, an interview with white supremacist James Edwards and Don Jr. aired. The campaign first denied it had happened, and he later called it unintentional. Mainstream outlets accused him of either believing in the white genocide conspiracy theory or posing as a believer for political gain.

  In September 2016 he said that if Republicans had committed the same offenses as Democrats, the media would be "warming up the gas chamber right now." That month he also shared an image mixing his father with Pepe the Frog. On Good Morning America he said he had never heard of Pepe and saw only a "frog with a wig."

  His sharing of conspiracy theories ran through the years that followed. On the campaign trail he promoted Alex Jones's claim that Hillary Clinton wore an earpiece at a presidential forum. In May 2017 he promoted the long-debunked theory linking Bill Clinton to Vince Foster's death. In February 2018 he liked tweets claiming survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting were coached.

  In May 2018 he retweeted a false, antisemitic claim about George Soros that came from Roseanne Barr. A Soros spokesperson answered that Soros had survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary as a thirteen-year-old in hiding under a false identity. His father had helped save the family.

  In September 2018, during Hurricane Florence, he tweeted a photo of CNN's Anderson Cooper standing in floodwaters. The picture was about ten years old, from 2008's Hurricane Ike, and Cooper had been videoed explaining that the water was receding.

  The pandemic brought sharper consequences. In July 2020 Twitter restricted his account for 12 hours after he retweeted a video of Houston doctor Stella Immanuel promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure. On the 29th of October 2020, he told Fox News that the death rate had dropped to "almost nothing." The United States registered 1,063 coronavirus deaths that day.

  In August 2020 he shared a Breitbart article about more than 800 dead people voting in Michigan. The voters had died after sending in their ballots, and Michigan authorities rejected those ballots. In November 2020, after Pfizer announced a vaccine with 90% effectiveness, he suggested it had been held back to hurt his father's chances. Pfizer's CEO, Albert Bourla, replied that the company had always relied on the "speed of science."

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• 7. After Election Day

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  Two days after the 2020 election, Don Jr. sent White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows a text about keeping his father in office. CNN reported it in April 2022. He wrote, "It's very simple. We have multiple paths. We control them all." He added that the result might be settled by a vote his side controlled, or pushed to Congress on the 6th of January 2021. Joe Biden had not yet been declared the winner. In public he urged "total war" rather than finishing the count.

  On the 6th of January 2021, he spoke at the rally before the Capitol attack. Aiming at reluctant Republican lawmakers, he said, "If you're gonna be the zero and not the hero, we're coming for you." The crowd marched to the Capitol, forced entry, broke windows and vandalized the building. One woman was killed. A police officer and three other people died during or shortly after the attack.

  In December 2021, text messages released by Meadows showed that Don Jr. had begged him to persuade his father to stop the attack.

  Television host Joe Scarborough called for the arrest of Don Jr., his father and Rudolph Giuliani for insurrection. After his father's permanent ban from Twitter on the 8th of January 2021, Don Jr. claimed free speech "no longer exists in America." On the 5th of March 2021, Representative Eric Swalwell filed a civil lawsuit against him and three others, seeking damages for their alleged part in inciting the riot.

  Legal scrutiny came quickly. On the 11th of January 2021, D.C. attorney general Karl Racine called Don Jr. a person of interest in the criminal investigation of the attack. Three days later it emerged that he was also a person of interest in a probe of his father's inaugural funds. Prosecutors wanted to ask about the Trump Hotel in Washington, where the inaugural committee had grossly overpaid for event space in 2017. In May 2022, Racine settled with the committee for $750,000, without requiring an admission of wrongdoing.

  On the 28th of May 2024, defense closing arguments in his father's New York criminal trial showed an email involving reimbursements to Michael Cohen. Cohen had paid hush money to Stormy Daniels. Trump Organization comptroller Jeffrey McConney had sought approval from both Don Jr. and Eric. Don Jr. also signed some of the reimbursement checks.

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• 8. Books, Hunts and Home

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  In 2019 Don Jr. published Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. It attacks political correctness and argues that the American left has a victimhood complex. The Washington Post noted that in his telling, the real victim is often a Trump. Reviewer Carlos Lozada wrote that it fails as memoir and as polemic.

  The book still became a New York Times best-seller, helped by bulk orders from at least nine Republican organizations, candidates or advocacy groups. The N.R.C.C. bought $75,000 worth, and the RNC bought $100,000 worth. Turning Point USA took about 2,000 copies, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee about 2,500.

  In 2020 he self-published Liberal Privilege: Joe Biden and the Democrats' Defense of the Indefensible. He reportedly hired three researchers and spent three months writing it. On the 28th of October 2020, the RNC paid over $300,000 of donor money to Pursuit Venture LLC, a company he owns, for "donor mementos." It was the most the RNC had ever paid for that purpose. In 2023 he launched a podcast, Triggered with Don Jr., on the platform Rumble.

  Hunting runs through his life as a passion and a recurring controversy. In 2012, photos from a 2010 trip surfaced. In one he embraces a dead leopard, and in another he holds a knife and a bloody elephant tail. The hunt was legal, but at least one sponsor dropped his father's show The Celebrity Apprentice.

  ProPublica revealed on the 11th of December 2019 that Mongolia had retroactively granted him a permit to hunt an endangered Argali mountain sheep. The trip, including a private meeting with President Khaltmaagiin Battulga, cost taxpayers $76,859.36 in Secret Service protection. In February 2025, an Italian newspaper published a video of him with the body of a rare ruddy shelduck, a protected species, from the Venice lagoon.

  His private life has changed shape several times. He married model Vanessa Kay Haydon on the 12th of November 2005 at Mar-a-Lago, in a service led by his aunt, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. They have five children: Kai Madison, Donald John III, Tristan Milos, Spencer Frederick and Chloe Sophia. Kai spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention on the 17th of July. The couple settled their divorce at the end of 2018.

  He later dated Kimberly Guilfoyle, and they ended their engagement in 2024. In December 2021 he changed his official residency from New York to Florida. In December 2025 his engagement to socialite Bettina Anderson was announced, and they legally married in West Palm Beach on the 21st of May 2026. A private celebration followed in the Bahamas two days later.

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