Triggered

  My father bought the massive mansion in the late 1980s. It might have been the greatest deal ever recorded in Palm Beach: twenty acres on the Atlantic that stretched to the Intracoastal Waterway in one of the richest zip codes in the country. The main house had fifty-eight bedrooms, thirty-three bathrooms, and an 1,800-square-foot living room with a forty-two-foot-high ceiling. Dad bought it from the federal government for about $7 million, or about the price the original owner, cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, had paid to have it built in 1923. The asking price was sweet enough, but the deal became even better when the untapped value of the house was calculated. Ms. Post had collected antique furniture from all over the world, including from European castles. Though beautiful and very expensive, the furniture wasn’t practical. Dad sold most of it and almost paid for Mar-a-Lago with the proceeds.

  Though my father’s entrepreneurial spirit would eventually kick in and he would turn the mansion into a club, when we first moved to Mar-a-Lago, it was our winter home. I was seven at the time, Ivanka was four, and Eric was two. For us, it was like the movie Night at the Museum. We explored every inch of the mansion. Hide-and-seek games were epic. You could put a full-grown palm tree in the living room, so for us it was like having our own private indoor stadium. When my parents had parties, I would climb up onto the rafters over the entranceway of the living room with a handful of raisins. As the guests passed by underneath, I would fire the raisins at them, trying to land them in their drinks. More than once, guests looked at their cocktail and thought there were spiders falling from the ceiling.

  To be honest, I was much more comfortable in the rafters than down with the people in the living room. I didn’t take to the opulent lifestyle the way some children of billionaires do. It’s not that I despised my father’s money, because I really didn’t. Even as a kid, I sensed that wealth and opulence were DJT’s brand. I saw it as part of his job. Later, I would realize that it was the reason he had become so successful in the first place. Without his solid-gold image, I doubt there would be Trump properties all over the globe today, all of them rated among the highest quality in the world. That’s not a plug, that’s the truth.

  Still, there was something that made me feel uncomfortable around the people who populated the rich circles my father lived and worked in. Even when Dad would bring home a celebrity, which he did often, I would usually run in the other direction. Although I did become friends with a few of them, including Herschel Walker, the Heisman Trophy winner who played for my dad’s team in the USFL, the New Jersey Generals. When I was six, I took a trip to Disney World with Herschel and his family. He used to come to our house in Greenwich. His wife at the time once took a ride on my motocross bike and crashed it, seriously injuring herself. We remain friends to this day. There was also Michael Jackson, who lived in Trump Tower and with whom I played video games. One day in Eric’s room, my father saw how much Michael enjoyed playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with us on Nintendo and told him he could take the game home. My game! To this day, Eric says it was his game because it was in his room, but I know whose game it was. I’d worked a summer job to pay for it! And here was Michael Jackson, probably a billionaire at this point, and he took it! The recent revelations about Jackson came as a shock to me. My experience with Michael does not include any of what he’s been accused of. Oh, and by the way, given all the things my father has been called, particularly a “racist,” it sure sounds odd that he’d let his son vacation with a black man or hang out with Michael Jackson, doesn’t it? If he’s a racist, he’s sure not very good at it.

  I’d like to say I wasn’t impressed by social standing or celebrity, and certainly I would feel that way later on. But maybe the real reason was instinctual. I was much more at ease with the folks who worked for my dad. I became close with a number of the security guys at Trump Tower and other properties, most of whom were former New York City cops. I’m still friendly and go shooting with a few of them. For me, their stories from behind the scenes were always more interesting. Maybe the most productive relationships I had were with the chefs my parents hired. We always had world-class people who cooked for us. Having them cook for me was always way less comfortable. Within a few years, I was caramelizing onions and making soufflés right along with them, even taking over the kitchen and giving some of their dishes a shot on my own. All through my childhood, I cooked for myself alongside some of the best chefs in the world, and I learned a lifelong skill in the process. As a result, I can now cook some pretty impressive meals, and I’ve been teaching my kids to do the same thing. Even the fried eggs and bacon we cook over our campfires upstate have a few secret, chef-approved spices thrown in for flavor. I also try to help out with the more serious events when I’m not busy. When Prince Charles came to Mar-a-Lago, for instance, I made him a nice meringue cookie. (If you’re enjoying this book so far, keep an eye out for my self-help/cookbook, Cooking Through Collusion with Junior!, coming in 2024.)

  I also spent as much time with my grandfather as I could. Half the year, my Czechoslovakian grandparents would stay with us in the United States. In Mar-a-Lago, I would find Dedo at the seawall, where he fished and smoked cigarettes. We would sit together for hours until our bucket was filled with pompano and jack. It was during those times that my grandfather impressed upon me that a man shouldn’t get used to being dependent on anything or anyone—not the government, not his company, and certainly not his father. When things got too rich for me, I could always count on Dedo to remind me of what really mattered in life and to keep me grounded.

  In the early 1980s, my father bought a twelve-acre estate on the water in Greenwich, Connecticut. We would go there in the summer, when Florida was too hot. It was an amazing house with eight bedrooms, indoor and outdoor pools, and a bowling alley in the basement. With Dedo, I would ride Suzuki motorbikes and dirt bikes around the grounds. We’d shoot bows and air guns. My grandfather had a little dory, and we would fish for bluefish and striped bass in Long Island Sound. It had a motor, but if I went out with him I would usually row (good practice for when I rowed at the University of Pennsylvania). It was Dedo who taught me to use everything we caught or hunted. Together, we built a smokehouse where we would smoke our catch. When I was with my grandfather, there were also plenty of laughs. Some of them came at my expense.

  When I was six or seven, I decided one night to camp outside on the grounds of the Connecticut home. In my own mind, I was already a pretty experienced outdoorsman, so I figured there wouldn’t be any problems. Dedo helped me put up a tent about three hundred yards from the main house. In Czechoslovakia, when I camped out, I had my friends with me. In Connecticut, however, I was all alone. I was in the tent only a few minutes when I heard howling. At seven, I didn’t know that the only wolves in Greenwich worked on Wall Street. It turned out that my grandfather was the hidden howler, and he laughed as he watched me break the land speed record back to the house. You never saw someone run three hundred yards that fast in your life!

  That’s why it came as such a blow to me when in 1990 I got the call that Dedo had died of a sudden heart attack in the Czech Republic. I guess that medically, it wasn’t that big of a surprise. He’d been smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day for most of his life. Emotionally, however, it was as though Mike Tyson had punched me in the gut. The funeral was in the Czech Republic, and the whole family went over.

  From the day Dedo died forward, I felt slightly adrift in the world. It was as though I had been living my life on a pair of stilts—one anchored to the woods of Czechoslovakia, the other to the gridded streets and swanky apartments of Manhattan—and his death had knocked one of them right out from under me. As if Dedo’s death weren’t bad enough, my parents were going through a divorce that was playing out on the front pages of the New York tabloids. Every day it seemed that there was a new story about them or a new rumor just beginning to spread. I can only imagine what it would have been like if Twitter had existed when I as a kid.

  If
any good at all came out of my parents’ divorce, it was the deeper bond that I developed with my sister and brother. Though we are very different people, we had always gotten along very well. We’ve always made a great team.

  After the divorce, we sort of locked arms and got through it together. To this day, Ivanka, Eric, and I rib one another good-naturedly. When the news about this book leaked just after I signed the deal, liberal Twitter was pretty brutal to me. No surprise there. But even my sister had some fun at my expense.

  @IvankaTrump: When #DonJrBookTitles is trending on Twitter… @EricTrump @LaraLeaTrump @TiffanyATrump @kimguilfoyle and I are having some fun with this one!

  I tweeted back that I was going to include some scandalous secrets about her. There’s a lot of material from Ivanka’s teen years. To be honest, however, there really isn’t much bad to say. My sister was always able to handle life as a child of Donald Trump, along with all the press, paparazzi, and gossip that came with it, with the kind of grace and calm I could never muster. Anyone in my father’s social circle during those years would have told you in a second that they wanted their daughters to grow up and be just like Ivanka. Later on in this book, when I tell you about fake news and its agenda against my father and his family, I’ll show you what Ivanka has to endure. The constant onslaught by the media is incredibly unfair and cruel. Yet she’s able to rise above the vindictiveness. So if you’re reading this, Ivanka, don’t worry. Your secrets are safe with me. I won’t even write about how I stuffed one of your boyfriends into a suitcase and flung—or, um… gently rolled—him down the stairs. I’ll keep my powder dry for the next Twitter attack.

  The other good thing that came out of that horrible time was boarding school.

  In 1990 or ’91, my parents gave me the opportunity to go away to school in rural Pennsylvania, and I jumped at the chance. I’ve learned that sometimes the best decisions come out of the worst circumstances. The Hill School would change my life in a couple of very important ways, although not at first.

  A feeder school for the Naval Academy and West Point, “Hill,” as we called it, was an old-school type of place. There, it didn’t matter one bit that I was Donald Trump’s son. In fact, if anything, being a rich kid from New York got me my ass kicked more than usual. But guess what? I learned a lot from those beatings. I gave away eighty pounds to the seniors, so they weren’t fair, but they were deserved. (I’m sure you’re shocked to hear that.) My mouth developed faster than the rest of me. Stories about my parents’ divorce ran in supermarket checkout publications such as People and Page Six of the New York Post all the time. The day they dropped me off at school, we stopped at Kmart to pick up some things for my dorm room. Someone took a picture of the three of us in front of the store, which ran in the local paper. We also stopped at Taco Bell, where my mother ordered a glass of chardonnay which was really, really awesome for a guy just trying to fit in. Really awesome, Mom. Thanks. When people in school read about those moments, it didn’t make things any easier.

  Luckily, the dean of students at Hill, a man named Gordon McAlpin, took me under his wing. The school had a small rifle range for small-bore shooting and another one just off campus for skeet and trap shooting. I had shot an air gun with my grandfather but had never done any shooting with a real firearm. Mr. McAlpin took me to the range my first time. Most of the students went there once or twice as a novelty. From the first time I went, however, I was hooked and went back as much as I could. You couldn’t find a better outdoors mentor than Mr. McAlpin. He was the consummate outdoorsman, the kind of guy who could shoot a perfect skeet score with a .410 pump-action Winchester Model 42. Soon I started showing my own talent for shooting.

  One Saturday in school, Mr. McAlpin told me to meet him in the parking lot the next morning at 6:00 a.m. and to dress warmly. That might not fly in today’s world of helicopter parenting, but I thought it was awesome. Along with another student a couple of grades higher, I climbed into his car and we drove about an hour outside the campus to shoot birds. In the woods, I remember thinking that this was the coolest thing in the world. Afterward, I read every book I could about hunting and took every opportunity to shoot and hunt. Mr. McAlpin arranged for me to take my hunter’s safety course so I could get licensed. We went hunting on opening day of Pennsylvania deer season. It was the quintessential American hunting experience: I carried an old-school 30-30 lever-action rifle and it was on public land, which forms the basis of so much American outdoor life. It’s the reason I fight so hard to this day to preserve public land, and the lifestyle that comes with it.

  There was also a teacher at Hill who taught me the basic fly-casting motion. I got an L.L. Bean starter kit and went from there. I knew so little about it that for the first couple of years, I was reeling in the fly line instead of stripping it in because I didn’t know what I was doing. In time, however, I taught myself and became pretty good at it.

  I guess I was seventeen when I got my first car, a Jeep (I had the Jeep and then two Dodge Durangos in a row, and that was pretty much the extent of my car history for the first twenty years I drove). The last two years at Hill School, I took solo hunting and fishing trips. I’d work for my father for the first two months of the summer and then jump into the Jeep and drive to parts of Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and New England.

  The summer after I graduated, I headed west to the Rockies. That time of the year isn’t hunting season, so I hiked and fished. I didn’t want to be around tourists, so I would find what looked like a good high-mountain lake maybe fourteen miles away from my location on a map or atlas. (For you younger folks, those were things we used to find our way around when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.) I had learned orienteering from my grandfather, so a map and a compass were usually enough for me.

  I would throw my pack on and go spend a few days up there. Sometimes I’d lose my bearings, come out somewhere completely different, and have to hitchhike my way back to the Jeep. Then, I’d drive somewhere else and fish a different river or lake. I’d live out of the back of my truck for a couple of weeks at a time and go for days without seeing anyone. Sometimes I would come upon someone and share a camp for a day or two.

  I continued my trips out west throughout college. I’ve driven across country four or five times by myself. I have fully covered Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. I hiked much of the western Rockies, wherever there was good fishing.

  While attending the Hill School, I also learned a lesson courtesy of Donald J. Trump.

  I was a very average student until the end of my freshman year. When my father read my report card, he sat me down.

  As disciplinarians, my parents were completely different. My mother had old-school Eastern European ideas about raising a child. If she thought you’d done something wrong, she’d whack you before she said a word. My father used a more psychological technique: he’d have one of “those” talks with you, and you’d walk away thinking that whatever you’d done wrong was the stupidest thing in the world. He was good at guilt trips.

  “These grades are fine,” he said, “if you want to be average.”

  He knew exactly how to motivate me. When I went back to school, it was as though he’d put a rocket in my butt. Whereas I had crammed for maybe an hour for a test, I’d now spend eight hours studying. I’d put in thirty hours for an exam. I went from being an average student to getting nearly straight As. I became the editor of the school’s literary journal and yearbook. By my senior year, I was mentoring other students. I rose to the top of the GPA rankings in my class. In fake news hit pieces about me, you’ll read that the only reason I got into the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania was that my father went there and has donated to the school. Maybe that had something to do with it, although all of them say the donation came after I had already gotten in. But in my heart, I know that even if I wasn’t my father’s son, I had the grades to get into Wharton.

  The last big lesson I learned at Hill had nothing to do with the
school at all.

  The campus of the school sat on the very eastern edge of the Rust Belt. There was a closed Firestone Tire plant in nearby Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and Bethlehem Steel, which would close just after I graduated, was about an hour’s drive away. The juxtaposition was not lost on me. Here you had a wealthy boarding school up on a hill surrounded by the modest homes of blue-collar workers, many of whom were out of work. I didn’t know it then, but the men and women who had once worked in the now-shuttered factories, who staked their family’s future on those same factories, were the same people I would later meet at Trump rallies all around the country. They’re the ones who would tell me stories about their lives and families as they waited for my father to arrive and deliver the message that they had been waiting to hear. I lived with those people. I had local friends, dated local girls. After a while, I started feeling as though I was more from Pennsylvania than from New York City, and I was proud of it.

  Even in 1990, when I began boarding school, we had already begun the process of exporting the American dream all over the world, sending the jobs that used to belong to hardworking Americans of all colors, creeds, and genders to countries that couldn’t have cared less about our values. They were our biggest export. In some cases, we sent those jobs to countries that hated our guts, and then we paid the price for it later. At Hill, I could already see some of that anxiety and desperation building around me.

  In my junior year, Bill Clinton signed one of the most disastrous trade agreements in the history of our country. Democrats promised that the North American Free Trade Agreement would usher in a golden age for US business and send our economy skyrocketing. Instead, NAFTA did the exact opposite: it caused a huge trade deficit, hollowed out Detroit, and sent US companies scrambling over the border to exploit cheap labor.