Born Trump_Inside America’s First Family

by Emily Jane Fox

  They also voted him biggest mooch on campus, because he was always asking for people to front him money to pay for little things that would come up, always skimming off their plates when they’d order food in to the dorms. According to a former classmate who interviewed Eric and several of his classmates in 2017 for an article in City & State New York, boys in the dorm ragged on him by doctoring photos of his sister and mom and hanging them around the dorm or setting them as the screen saver on his computer. As teenage boys at boarding school do, they wrestled it out. “Classmates remember a gangly, blonde-haired boy that most often wore an old baseball cap, a crew neck shirt under a black fleece, and well-worn khakis,” the former classmate, Frank Runyeon, wrote. He was fairly quiet, sometimes awkward, mostly uncommonly kind. He was always sort of goofy and good-humored—a trait he never quite grew out of. To this day, he will tell friends and close business associates that he plans on giving them “huge noogies” the next time he sees them. He did not seek the friendships of the most popular or attractive or wealthy people on campus, Runyeon explained. In fact, when he visited one classmate’s modest home nearby campus, he told his friend’s mother that he’d lived in lots of places, but their house felt “really homey.” As gentle as he was and as smooth of a talker as he could be, he sometimes let his not-so-stellar command of academia slip. Runyeon wrote that Eric once asked a classmate if Fidel Castro was the king of Spain.

  Despite the good-humored hard time his classmates gave him, Eric was very clearly grateful for the normal way they treated him. In his yearbook, he thanked his friends for the memories and great times they had over the years. “Like you, they will never be forgotten.” He praised his teachers for the wisdom and foundation they gave him. He also thanked his family, in initial form—DT (Donald), IT (Ivana), DT JR (Don Jr), IMT (Ivanka), MZ (Ivana’s mother), and DC (Dorothy, his nanny) for “supporting me throughout a great five years,” adding “I couldn’t have done it without you.” He finished it off, in true high school yearbook fashion, with a Led Zeppelin quote from “Stairway to Heaven”: “There’s two paths you can go by/but in the long run there’s still time to change the road your on.” (The high school grad on his way to Georgetown did, in fact, use the grammatically incorrect “your” in the quote.)

  The path Eric chose at Georgetown led him to study what his father would have wanted him to study. He partied hard—though not as hard as Don Jr. did at Penn—and he lived in the dorms his freshman year, with a roommate who played on the football team, and stayed on campus for sophomore year too. He joined a business fraternity and took part in long-range rifle contests, and traveled to New York and to visit family on weekends. When he graduated in 2006, Donald’s security reserved three rows, and he plunked down right in the middle of the blocked-off area. Ivana made it to that ceremony, as did Melania, Don Jr. and Vanessa, and Ivanka. Barron, a baby at the time, stayed back in New York, and once Eric had accepted his diploma, they flew off to Atlantic City, where Donald threw himself a party for his upcoming sixtieth birthday.

  The path led Eric to a few months off to travel and resettle back into New York, but ultimately back to working for his dad. He had little by way of actual work experience outside the Trump Organization when he took on his position within the company, though he contended that he’d been working for his dad for a decade, and under his tutelage from birth. He had obviously been exposed to the construction side of things, but he would tell people that his father taught him far more about the industry growing up. “Fortunately,” he told Construction Today in 2009, “he has done a great job exposing us to everything,” adding that as he and his siblings learned the ropes on worksites, he also “would bring in the business strategy and teach us the intricacies of finance, working with the banks, and other invaluable lessons that he had learned from his father and firsthand throughout his career.”

  Even as he first started, his attention to detail and how hard he worked to get things right jumped out at people, even those who were used to working with other real estate scions in the business. One former employee remembers that Eric was constantly checking in on people. “He would ask how I was, what’s going on, what did I need, was I on schedule, how I was feeling,” the employee said. “It was almost like a tic. He was just always, always asking.” One friend of the family said that Eric had both incredibly high standards and a good eye, like Ivana did, though his demeanor was far more mild-mannered and do-it-yourself (Ivana was known among her staff as ruling with an iron fist in Atlantic City, in a manner than engendered respect but also terror). His years going to clubs with his parents meant that he could see things the way members saw them, not just how owners thought they should be, which the friend said gave him a distinct advantage. “When he goes into his clubs and he sees things that aren’t right or things that need to be changed, he’s not above doing it himself,” the friend said. “I’m sure that if he walked into a dining room and it was short-staffed, Eric would jump right in and work alongside them. He’s able to just get things done where something is falling short.”

  That he hardly ever stopped looking for those areas stood out, too. “I would get a call from Eric at eight or nine or ten o’clock at night and he’d say, ‘Let’s talk about windows,’” one New York construction executive who worked with the Trump Organization on projects over the course of three years remembered. Eric would point out structural changes he wanted to make as they walked through sites, or finishes that weren’t quite right. It was never too early for Eric, and he stayed at work late, too. “They were some of the hardest-working clients that I’ve ever worked with. It’s not exactly what you’d expect from a billionaire’s kid.”

  Undoubtedly Eric got that from his father, who got that from his father. Fred Trump used to tell Donald that to retire is to expire. He didn’t get the concept of a vacation, and when he spent time with his grandchildren on the weekends, he had little understanding of how to relate or what to do with them. Work, he got. Work, he liked. So he would take his kids’ kids, including Donald’s, with him on the job. They would collect late rents from his tenants, driving around Queens in the back of his car, going with him to knock on doors and fight to collect checks. Donald was less hands-on, and he was able to unwind with trips to Palm Beach and Westchester and Bedminster. But he never stopped thinking of work, a habit his children picked up. “We love work,” Eric told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a live televised town hall during the presidential campaign, when he was asked by a member of the assembled audience what he bonds with his father over. “It’s something that really brings us together. We love building. The two of us just love machinery. We love building. We love concrete. We love jobs. We’ll sit on the phone at six o’clock in the morning, and we’ll talk about our favorite jobs.” They both liked to golf, too, he added.

  Like his dad, who polls his friends and colleagues on matters big and small, personal or business-related, and who, those close to him often remark, tends to soak up whatever the last person he spoke with said to him, Eric likes to listen. Eric, though, understands the subtle distinction between listening and hearing. When he asks someone for their opinion or their advice, particularly when it comes to a professional matter, he takes it to heart and mind. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that he is generally far quieter than his father. It may also have something to do with the reality that because he took such a senior position and its corresponding responsibilities at such a young age and with so little on-the-job experience, he actually needs answers from people much older, with more wisdom and real-world know-how, in order to do his job. One friend of the Trump family who works in the club industry remembers hitting balls with Eric at their Doral club on a Friday afternoon. He stopped dead in the middle of the swing when he thought of an issue at the club he needed advice on. “We spent ten minutes standing there as he asked my opinion on something,” the friend said. “We just stood there as he asked a ton of questions, trying to see what I thought. He listened very carefully to what I had
to say.”

  On the surface, Eric took after his father when it came to women, as well. Almost as soon as he graduated and started working at the Trump Organization, reporters started talking about Eric as the last standing Trump bachelor, ready to take on New York the way Donald and Don Jr. had before him. Donny had already settled down with Vanessa by that point, and Donald had been married to Melania for more than a year. That left only Eric, when it came to single Trump men on the prowl, of eligible age, and ascendant within the family business. “I can probably handle it,” he told the Daily News, referring to his status and the familial reputation he had to live up to. Eric did stumble a bit on the coolness factor, despite his name. He was turned away from Light at the Bellagio while in Las Vegas to celebrate his birthday in his early twenties because he broke the cardinal rule of nightclubs: he showed up to the door with a teeming group of fifteen buddies, all of them guys. Not even “Trump” scrawled across his credit card made that an easy feat with a bouncer after midnight.

  A few years later, at a nightclub in New York, he spotted a bottle blonde a head above the crowd—literally, at five feet ten inches, and in heels; the other women around her barely reached her chest. Lara Yunaska was the kind of woman Donald had dated when he was Eric’s age (and, frankly, up until the time he married Melania). She grew up in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, an oceanfront town on the Carolina coast, where she went to the high school from which Michael Jordan graduated and lived with her mother, Linda Ann Sykes, her father, Robert, who built heavy-displacement boats, and her little brother Kyle. She studied communications—broadcast journalism, in particular, struck her—while staying close to home at North Carolina State. She interned at local news stations and took up personal training on the side to make cash. Like her future stepmothers before her and like Don Jr.’s wife Vanessa, Lara did a bit of modeling. Her old modeling site, a page on One Model Place, lists her as a model specializing in fashion, editorial, runway, sport, casual, swimwear, hair, and makeup. Her eyes, she said, were green. Her shoe size, an eleven. Her additional skills included film and television acting, music, extreme sports, and singing. “I am a very versatile model,” she wrote on her profile. “I have an athletic look since I do so many sports.” The five photos in her portfolio show it off—one in low-slung ripped jeans and a white undershirt shrunken enough to show her silver belly-button piercing, and four other shots in two different bikinis—one red, one black—and a collection of shell necklaces in various colors. “I am responsible and serious,” she wrote. “You won’t have to worry about a ‘no show’ from me. My time is important, and so is yours.” She noted that she had won both the Hammerjax Bikini Contest in 2004 and the Aaron Chang Bikini Contest in 2005, appeared in the July 2005 issue of Stuff magazine and as a Maxim Hometown Hotties participant. She also noted that from 2000 through 2004, she had a job as a Hooters Girl.

  With all the modeling, the side jobs, and the college credits on her plate, she still wanted to make sure she was the one in control of everything—not some agent who would decide on gigs for her. “I reply to all e-mails and handle all bookings and offers,” she wrote. A Trump before her time.

  Lara moved to New York City in 2007, despite her parent’s urging her to stay closer to home. She kept doing personal training, and took classes for pastry arts at the Culinary Institute. Eventually, she got her résumé in front of folks at Inside Edition, CBS’s syndicated newsmagazine show, where they hired her as a field producer and story coordinator. All of the jobs she bounced from and toggled between did not add up to a clear picture of someone with a cohesive identity or path forward. She was a personal training pastry chef Hooters girl broadcast producer Maxim model who handled all inquiries herself. The technical description for someone like that is a hustler. And so, when she spotted a tall guy with gelled, spikey blond hair from across the club one night in New York, a city boy who only ever had one job and one path to go down, she found her exact opposite. That his path happened to be lined with gold, well, that is a hustler’s dream come true. It was a comparison Eric would undoubtedly cringe at, but the résumé and the meet-cute suggested a striking resemblance to Marla Maples.

  The way Lara tells it, they struck up a conversation because Eric was one of the few, or perhaps only, guys in the room who was taller than she was. “I wish it was some silly, lovely scenario, but we just happened to be out in the same place at the same time in New York,” she remembered. She claims she didn’t know his last name until after she left with her friends that evening. They broke it to her who he was. With Eric traveling as often as he did, it took three months for them to schedule a date, a date she, frankly, was not terribly optimistic about. “I was sort of expecting it to be a bad date,” she said, anticipating that he would be “sort of what you would expect from a rich guy’s son.” The way she saw it, she would “just go out with him to say she did it.” But when they went to dinner, they talked for two hours before they got around to opening their menus and ordering something to eat. “It ended up being the best date I’ve ever been on.”

  Things moved quickly from there. By late summer of 2008, about three months after they started dating, Eric invited Lara to join him at the US Open (where Marla had made something of a splash with Donald a decade and a half earlier). He’d left out the fact that his dad and Melania would be there, too, meaning that the first time Lara would be introduced to her newish boyfriend’s famous family would be a total surprise to her. She nearly melted in the August heat, under the weight of that unexpected pressure. Donald, however, made no deal of it whatsoever. He gave her a quick greeting and offered her some ice cream, which she gamely accepted. “This was normal,” she breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t some fancy showing, nor was it a series of tests. “This is what people do. There was no grilling, not a ton of questions. Just nice hellos and ice cream.”

  The truth was, Donald never really got to know Lara much. To his friends, he’d made snide comments about her. He thought she was in it for the wrong reasons—a lesson he had learned in his own life and through his own relationships, and become quite paranoid about, as time went on. “He’d say such nasty things about her,” one very close friend of Donald’s recalled. “Mostly, the sentiment was that she dropped the Trump name more than he did, and it was his name.” The rest of the family warmed up to her with greater ease. As she continued her cake-baking business—Lara Lea Confections—she created elaborate constructions for Don Jr. and Vanessa’s children on their birthdays—a tiered blue fondant cake with an edible Elmo figure on top, alongside a number 1, and “DTJIII” cut out in red lettering, and a Dora the Explorer version for Kai’s birthday. Vanessa, too, got the Lara Lea treatment, with a Tiffany box cake of her own. (Her website also showcases photos of impressive cakes shaped after Christian Louboutin pumps and Chanel purses, BlackBerry phones for a fiftieth birthday, and a tool box cake for a fortieth. There is also a woman’s figure dressed up in an L.A. Lakers jersey, labeled “boob jersey cake.”) Donald eventually came around to Lara, years after their wedding, once she took on a public-facing role within his presidential campaign, and particularly as she did more and more interviews on Fox News. Friends say that Donald would say he hadn’t thought much of her until he watched her on cable. “He’d say, ‘Have you watched her? She is great,’” one friend recalled. Suddenly, he started paying attention to his daughter-in-law.

  Whatever hesitancy his father expressed initially, either Eric did not know about it or he decidedly ignored it. On July 4, 2013, he and Lara and her rescue dog—a beagle named Charlie—went up to Seven Springs in Westchester for the holiday. He convinced her to go on a walk across a field on the property. All she could see at first was a blanket laid out with a bottle of champagne. “Oh my gosh,” she thought. “What is this?” As she got closer, she saw a little white box. Inside, there was an emerald-cut diamond ring—from Ivanka Trump’s fine jewelry collection, no less. “It was a thoughtful proposal,” she said. It was a yes.

 
The couple decided to follow in the footsteps of Eric’s dad and his third wife, and his older brother and his first. They would wed in the fall of 2014 in Palm Beach, at Mar-a-Lago. They set up a wedding website to fill in the 450 people they invited to their blessed event on all the details. The wedding would take place in November at his father’s estate, with a tasting of Trump Winery’s finest (Eric had taken on the Virginia vineyard as one of his chief responsibilities and pet projects within the Trump Organization), a formal black-tie affair with dinner and dancing in the 118-room private club. The website winked in its description of the groom, for those guests who might not know him. Eric, it read, was “born into a relatively unknown New York Family,” and early on, he “embraced his family’s passion for Erector sets, Monopoly and Jenga, which ultimately led to a very successful career in construction and real estate.” For those unfamiliar with the bride, Lara, the website read, is a “Southern girl” by birth, who grew into a “breaking news guru and baker extraordinaire.” Despite Eric’s “successful career,” something was missing. “Bored with world domination, however, Eric soon realized that success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be without someone to love by your side.”