Donald Trump Jr.

Donald John Trump Jr. (born December 31, 1977), often nicknamed Don Jr., is an American businessman and political activist. He is the eldest child of Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, and his first wife, Ivana Trump.

Trump is a trustee and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, running the company alongside his younger brother Eric. During their father's first presidency, the brothers continued to engage in deals and investments in foreign countries and collect payments at their U.S. properties from foreign governments, despite pledging not to do so. He was a boardroom judge on the reality TV show featuring his father, The Apprentice.

Trump was active in his father's 2016 presidential campaign. He cooperated with Russia in their interference in the 2016 United States elections and had a meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about the campaign of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Trump campaigned for several Republicans during the 2018 midterm elections.

Trump was also active in his father's 2020 presidential campaign, often on the campaign trail and featured in the news for making unfounded claims. During the election, he called for "total war" as the results were counted and promoted the stolen election conspiracy theory. Following his father's defeat, he engaged in attempts to overturn the results. He spoke at the rally that led to the storming of the Capitol, where he threatened Trump's opponents that "we're coming for you."

Donald John Trump Jr. was born on December 31, 1977, in Manhattan, New York City, to Ivana and Donald Trump. He has two younger siblings, Ivanka and Eric. He also has two half siblings, Tiffany, from his father's marriage to Marla Maples, and Barron, from his father's current marriage to Melania Trump. Through his father, Trump is a grandson of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod, and a great-grandson of Frederick Trump and Elizabeth Christ Trump, the latter of whom founded what became the Trump Organization. As a boy, Trump found a role model in his maternal grandfather, Miloš Zelníček, who had a home near Prague, where he spent summers camping, fishing, hunting and learning the Czech language.

His parents divorced when he was 12 years old due to his father having an extramarital affair. Trump Jr. was estranged from his father for one year after the divorce, furious at his actions which broke up the family.

Trump was educated at Buckley School and The Hill School, a college preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, followed by the University of Pennsylvania's (Penn) Wharton School, where he graduated in 2000 with a B.S. in Economics.

After graduating from Penn in 2000, Trump moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he hunted, fished, skied, lived in a truck, and worked as a bartender for a year, before returning to join the Trump Organization in New York. Trump has supervised building projects, which included 40 Wall Street, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Park Avenue, In 2006 he helped launch Trump Mortgage, which collapsed less than a year later. In 2010, he became a spokesperson and "executive director of global branding" for Cambridge Who's Who, a vanity publisher against whom hundreds of complaints had already been filed with the Better Business Bureau. He appeared as a guest adviser and judge on many episodes of his father's reality television show The Apprentice, from season 5 in 2006 to his father's last season in 2015.

On January 11, 2017, Trump's father announced that he and his brother Eric would oversee a trust that included the Trump Organization's assets while his father was president, to avert a conflict of interest.

Amid the Trump–Ukraine scandal – where Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden – Trump Jr. strongly criticized Hunter Biden, accusing him of nepotism and leveraging his father as a means to get financial benefits. Trump Jr. said, "When you're the father and your son's entire career is dependent on that, they own you." Trump Jr. was widely ridiculed for these remarks by Trevor Noah and others. Trump Jr. is a high-level executive in his father's business and continued to operate and promote the family's businesses across the world during Trump's presidency. The Associated Press wrote of Trump Jr.'s, remarks that he was "showing no self-awareness that he, too, has at least in part been successful because of a famous father". According to The Washington Post fact-checker, Trump Jr.'s assertion that he and his family members had gotten out of foreign business deals after Trump became president is false. The Washington Post reported that after Trump became president, "Trump's sons have been busy selling assets to foreign individuals, expanding or adding onto their existing deals and investments in foreign countries, and collecting payments in U.S. properties from foreign governments."

In February 2018, advertisements in Indian newspapers promoted a deal whereby anyone who purchased Trump Organization apartments in Gurgaon before February 20 would be invited to have a "conversation and dinner" with Trump Jr. The ads were criticized by corruption watchdogs as unethical.

A ruling which was handed down on February 16, 2024 barred Trump from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York, including the Trump Organization, for two years.

Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Trump Jr. was a central member of his father's campaign, characterized by The New York Times as a "close political adviser". He spoke at the Republican National Convention, along with his siblings Ivanka, Eric and Tiffany.

Trump Jr. influenced his father's choice of Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke during the presidential transition. Since his father's victory in the 2016 election, Trump Jr. has developed what The Washington Post calls a "public persona as a right-wing provocateur and ardent defender of Trumpism". The Atlantic reported in 2019 that Trump had described Trump Jr. in 2017 as "not the sharpest knife in the drawer". Trump Jr. earned the nickname "Fredo" among some Trump campaign staffers, a reference to a character in The Godfather.

On June 9, 2016, Trump Jr. attended a meeting arranged by publicist Rob Goldstone on behalf of Azerbaijani-Russian businessman Emin Agalarov. The meeting was held in Trump Tower in Manhattan, among three members of the presidential campaign: Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort – and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, her translator Anatoli Samochornov, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, and Ike Kaveladze, a Georgian-American, U.S.-based senior vice president at Crocus Group, the real estate development company run by Aras Agalarov.

Approximately a year later, Trump Jr. initially told the media that adoption of Russian children was the main subject of the meeting. On July 8, 2017, Trump Jr. tweeted his email exchange with Goldstone. It revealed that Trump Jr. had agreed to attend the meeting with the understanding he would receive information damaging to Hillary Clinton. Goldstone also wrote in one of Trump Jr.'s publicly disclosed emails that the Russian government was involved. Robert Mueller, the special counsel of the Department of Justice in charge of Russia-related investigations, investigated the emails and the meeting. Although the White House lauded Trump Jr. for his transparency, he released the e-mails only after The New York Times had informed him that they had them and were going to publish a story about them.

In June 2019, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral of Trump Jr. to federal prosecutors on suspicions that he misled the committee with his testimony.

During his father's presidential campaign, Trump Jr. caused controversy in 2016 when he posted an image that compared Syrian refugees to Skittles, saying "If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem." The makers of Skittles condemned the tweet, saying "Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy." The Cato Institute stated that year that the chances "an American would be killed in a terrorist attack committed by a refugee was one in 3.64 billion" per year.

On March 1, 2016, an interview with white supremacist James Edwards and Trump Jr. was aired. The campaign initially denied the interview had taken place; later Trump Jr. claimed it was unintentional. As a consequence of the interview, mainstream media outlets have accused Trump Jr. of being either a believer in the white genocide conspiracy theory, or pretending to be an advocate for political gain.

In September 2016, Trump Jr. cited Holocaust imagery to criticize what he perceived as the mainstream media's uncritical coverage of Hillary Clinton during her campaign, by "letting her slide on every discrepancy", while also accusing Democrats involved in the 2016 campaign of lying. Trump Jr. said if the Republicans were committing the same offences mainstream outlets would be "warming up the gas chamber right now". Also that month, Trump Jr. shared an image on Instagram depicting a cross between his father and Pepe the Frog. When asked on Good Morning America about Pepe the Frog and its associations with white supremacy, Trump Jr. said he had never heard of Pepe the Frog and thought it was just a "frog with a wig".

In April 2017, Trump Jr. lauded conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who has promoted the debunked white genocide and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, saying, "In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he'd win the Pulitzer".

In August 2020, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Trump Jr. appeared at a far-right "We Build the Wall" event with Jack Posobiec in July 2019.

Trump had a prominent role in his father's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, threatening Republican lawmakers who did not take part in it. In November 2020, he advocated "total war" instead of completion of vote counting in the 2020 United States elections.

CNN reported in April 2022 that two days after the election, Trump Jr. sent a text message to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows outlining paths to subvert the Electoral College process and ensure his father a second term. He wrote, "It's very simple. We have multiple paths. We control them all. We have operational control. Total leverage. Moral high ground. POTUS must start second term now." He continued, "Republicans control 28 states Democrats 22 states. Once again Trump wins," adding, "We either have a vote WE control and WE win OR it gets kicked to Congress 6 January 2021." Biden had not yet been declared the winner at the time of the text.

Together with his father and other speakers, on January 6, 2021, Trump Jr. spoke to an audience and, speaking about reluctant GOP lawmakers saying, "If you're gonna be the zero and not the hero, we're coming for you". President Trump further incited the crowd which then marched to the US Capitol building, where they forced entry, broke windows and vandalized the building. One woman was killed, and a police officer and three other people died during or shortly after the incursion.

Television host and former congressman Joe Scarborough called for the arrest of Trump Jr., along with his father and Rudolph Giuliani, for insurrection against the United States. Following his father's permanent ban from Twitter on January 8, 2021, Donald Trump Jr. claimed that free speech "no longer exists in America".

On March 5, 2021, Representative Eric Swalwell filed a civil lawsuit against Trump Jr. and three others (his father, Representative Mo Brooks, and Rudy Giuliani), seeking damages for their alleged role in inciting the riot.

In 2019, Trump Jr. released the book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. The book is critical of political correctness, and argues that the American left has a victimhood complex. The Washington Post commented: "yet, in his telling, the real victim is often him, his father or another Trump family member". In the book, Trump Jr. pushes conspiracy theories about how the intelligence community has attempted to harm President Trump, comparing President Trump's experiences with the FBI harassment campaign against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Trump Jr. wrote of a visit to Arlington National Cemetery (a military cemetery), commenting that he got emotional looking at the graves and that it reminded him of "all the sacrifices" the Trump family had made, including "voluntarily giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals to avoid the appearance that we were 'profiting off of the office'." Fact-checkers have reported that Trump still owns the family business, and that the Trump family have continued to engage in international business deals since Trump became president. In a review for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada said that it "fails as memoir and as polemic: its analysis is facile, its hypocrisy relentless, its self-awareness marginal (the writing is wretched, even by the standards of political vanity projects)".

The book was a New York Times best-seller. The book was purchased in bulk by at least nine Republican organizations, candidates or advocacy groups, including N.R.C.C. and the RNC which bought $75,000 and $100,000 worth of the books, respectively. Turning Point USA and the National Republican Senatorial Committee purchased approximately 2,000 and 2,500 books, respectively.

In 2020, Trump Jr. self-published the book Liberal Privilege: Joe Biden and the Democrats' Defense of the Indefensible. Trump Jr. reportedly hired three researchers to collect information about Joe Biden and spent three months writing the book. Trump Jr. explained to The New York Times his reasons: "While I had no plans for a book this year, I was stuck indoors like the rest of the nation during the pandemic", he said, adding that he "decided to highlight Biden's half century of being a swamp monster, since the media wouldn't do it". The same article stated that he decided to self-publish because he could count on the publicity of "his own platform – and the promise of bulk purchases from the RNC".

The book was indeed bought in bulk by the RNC. On October 28, 2020, the RNC paid over $300,000 of donor money to Pursuit Venture LLC, a company owned by Trump Jr., for "donor mementos". It was the most money the RNC had ever paid for this purpose. The hardcover retails for $29.99, which suggests roughly how many copies might have been purchased, and the RNC's intent was to give a copy to people who donated $50–$100.

In 2003, Trump Jr. began dating model Vanessa Kay Haydon at his father's suggestion. The couple married on November 12, 2005, at his father's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida; the service was officiated by Trump Jr.'s aunt, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. Haydon's grandfather was Danish jazz musician Kai Ewans. They have five children: daughter Kai Madison (b. May 2007), son Donald John III (b. February 2009), son Tristan Milos (b. October 2011), son Spencer Frederick (b. October 2012), and daughter Chloe Sophia (b. June 2014). The oldest daughter, Kai, is named after her maternal great-grandfather, Kai Ewans. Kai Trump was introduced by her father and spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention on July 17.

On March 15, 2018, media announced the couple had separated and Haydon had filed for an "uncontested" divorce in the Manhattan Supreme Court, despite later revelations that the divorce was, in fact, contested; court records only listed the title of the case, while details regarding the nature of the complaint were never made public. On February 22, 2019, Trump Jr. and Haydon announced they had settled their divorce at the end of 2018.