Agreed. The recent NYT piece on him was good. I’m trying to be selective about the quotes, but the whole thing is like catnip if you enjoy clowning on Jr.
When Trump ran for president in 2016, Trump Jr., who is now 42, was involved but hardly central to the effort. His sister Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, exercised sweeping influence over the campaign. Trump Jr., by contrast, was assigned small, discrete tasks, like putting his outdoorsmanship on display in a pheasant-hunting photo op with his brother, Eric, before the Iowa caucuses to counter attacks that his father was a liberal city slicker. (“Don, you can finally do something for me — you can go hunting,” his father told him, according to GQ magazine.) If he tried to go outside his narrow lane, disaster tended to follow. In the summer of 2016, he arranged for a Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, an encounter that later became a focus of Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The Trump team’s defense of Trump Jr. boiled down to the argument that he wasn’t a traitor, just an idiot — “by no means a sophisticated political actor,” Chris Christie said. Michael Cohen, at the time Trump’s personal attorney, later told a Senate panel that “Mr. Trump was very quick to tell everybody that he thinks Don Jr. has the worst judgment of anyone he’s ever met in the world.” Or, as the president himself put it, according to The Atlantic, “He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
So it is one of the many surprises of Trump’s presidency that Trump Jr. has grown into arguably his father’s most valuable political weapon. “Don Jr. represents the emotional center of the MAGA universe,” says Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s re-election campaign. Before the pandemic, he was crisscrossing the country as his father’s most-requested campaign surrogate. Since the coronavirus curtailed his travel plans, he has become one of the Republican Party’s top virtual fund-raisers. His Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts have a combined 11 million followers and are vital cogs in the Republican messaging machine.
The two men had for years had a difficult relationship. Trump’s ex-wife Ivana recounts in her 2017 book, “Raising Trump,” that when she suggested naming their newly born first child Donald Jr., Trump protested: “You can’t do that! What if he’s a loser?” After his parents divorced, a 12-year-old Trump Jr. refused to speak to his father for a year. >
Later, he seemed intent on escaping the celebrity businessman’s shadow and reputation. At the Fiji fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump Jr.’s nickname was Ron Rump, and his fraternity brothers called him Ron. “He loved it, perhaps because it gave him an extra level of anonymity,” one of them recalls. Rather than working for the Trump Organization immediately after college, Trump Jr. spent a year and half in Aspen, Colo., skiing, hunting, fishing and tending bar at night.In 2001, he moved back to New York City and took his place at the company. But his greatest contribution to the family business came on the set of “The Apprentice,” which he joined as an occasional boardroom judge in the show’s 2006 season. He was valued by the producers as a stabilizing presence, running interference between the cast and crew and the volatile star, his father. When Trump would berate crew members for a mistake, one “Apprentice” producer recalls, Trump Jr., speaking from a well of personal experience, would console them: “It’s not your fault; it’s your turn.”
People who worked on the show remember him often trying to lighten the mood. “He provided the comic relief, because his dad doesn’t have a sense of humor and Ivanka wasn’t someone who made jokes,” says Clay Aiken, the “American Idol” winner who appeared on “The Celebrity Apprentice” in 2012. “He was perfectly fine to take the piss out of himself, but sometimes he’d make a joke about his dad — and then you could tell he was really nervous his dad wouldn’t like it. His self-esteem was in the gutter.”
Much of the popular image of Trump Jr., especially among liberals, seems to stem from those years: “uselessly trying to impress a man who can only be impressed by himself” (GQ); “a recurring liability and a chronic headache” (The Daily Beast); the “Fredo” of the Trump family (Twitter). In the first days of Trump’s presidency, he seemed poised for more of the same. After the election, while Ivanka and Kushner headed to Washington, Trump Jr. stayed behind in New York, ostensibly to run the Trump Organization with Eric. But he had little to do. He was in charge of the company’s international portfolio, and while he could continue working on overseas projects that predated his father’s election, he couldn’t embark on new ones.
For a time, he tried to play a role in shaping the administration’s public-lands policy and other issues related to his outdoor activities, which had earned him the Secret Service code name Mountaineer.
The president can still be brutally dismissive of his son, grousing about his enthusiasm for firearms or questioning his political intelligence, according to multiple people present for such conversations. When Trump appeared on a special Father’s Day edition of “Triggered,” Trump Jr.’s biweekly online talk show for the Trump campaign, the awkwardness between the men was painful. Trump Jr. asked the president if he liked his beard. “Get rid of it,” Trump growled, to peals of nervous laughter from Trump Jr.
But the president is, at heart, a transactional person. As Trump Jr.’s political star has risen, Trump advisers say, so has Trump’s appreciation for him. Cliff Sims, a former White House communications aide, recalls watching television with the president in the private dining room off the Oval Office one afternoon when Trump Jr. appeared on the screen. “The president stopped what he was doing and turned up the volume,” Sims says. “He literally said to me, ‘He’s really good at this, isn’t he?’ He had this kind of feeling like, He’s a chip off the old block.”
In February, Trump Jr. posted to his Instagram account a picture of Mitt Romney, who had just voted to convict his father in the Senate impeachment trial, in some tragically high-waisted jeans with the caption, “MOM JEANS: Because you’re a pussy.”
