Triggered

  It wasn’t only the Rust Belt that suffered. American farmers did, too. Before NAFTA, farmers had been $200 million up in the balance of trade with Mexico and Canada. A few years after the deal was signed, they were minus $1.5 billion. Maybe even worse was the fact that the crops we were importing were displacing the crops we grow here. Avocados, berries, and tomatoes flooded our market and came without any tariffs, quotas, or quality food safety restrictions.

  Whatever way you looked at it, NAFTA was a disaster. Everyone knew it. During the campaign, my father said over and over that he was sick and tired of watching us export the American dream to our competitors while Americans—good, hardworking Americans—suffered. He was sick of watching countries live our American dream while our jobs went down the drain because of stupid, gutless Democrat decisions. The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) will bring much of those dreams back. It will increase US auto parts production. It will force Mexican companies to pay their autoworkers at least $16 an hour, which will help keep factories here in the United States. It will open up the Canadian market to US dairy farmers. Yet, at this writing, the Democrats continue to slow-walk ratifying the deal. Why? Because they hate my father more than they love the American worker—and don’t care if the American worker is collateral damage for their gains. For years, Democrats did a great job to build up the manufacturing base in other countries. In America? Not so much. They sat on their hands and watched the factories of iconic manufacturers such as Firestone and U.S. Steel empty and rust. As of right now, Nancy Pelosi won’t bring the trade deal up for a vote simply because she doesn’t want my father to have any credit. Can you imagine that? Because of her jealousy of DJT and his success, she will continue to strangle the American dream. The Democrats would much rather see America fail than for it to succeed with Trump at the helm. My father has done everything he can to keep Democrats from hurting the American worker. Later in this book, I talk about his being a blue-collar billionaire for just that reason: he understands workers, and would never think of them as pawns in trade deals that literally take away their jobs. The Democrats can give you all the talking points in the world, and their partners in crime, the liberal media, will run stories to support them. (Please don’t be swayed by the liberal media. Read @realDonaldTrump and @DonaldJTrumpJr’s tweets. They’re the unfiltered truth.)

  But sound bites are not policy. Sound bites do not help the American worker. Sound bites don’t bring back jobs.

  What will bring the American dream back to America will be someone with the balls to say, “Enough!” Someone who will say, “The days of us being a doormat are over.” Someone who knows the art of the deal.

  On the campaign trail, my father promised American workers that one of the first things he would do as president would be to renegotiate trade deals that ignored their needs. That promise was the reason he won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, a feat not accomplished since Ronald Reagan in 1980. I’ve been Donald J. Trump’s son for forty-one years and counting, and I can tell you this with complete confidence: He will never stop fighting for the American worker. He will never give in to Democrats at the expense of the American worker. He will bring the American dream back to our shores.

  5.

  GAP YEAR

  FROM THE MOMENT the nurses at New York Hospital inked the name “Donald John Trump Jr.” onto my birth certificate, you might say I’ve been following in the footsteps of my father. Even when I didn’t know it (and most of the time, I didn’t), I was picking up his mannerisms, learning his lessons, and trying to live up to his example.

  Take the moment of my birth, for example: December 31, 1977, just a few hours before the stroke of midnight. By the time I was swaddled and sleeping in my crib, there were fireworks exploding outside the delivery room window, champagne corks popping in the streets, and music blaring from the rooftops—all while millions of people in Times Square screamed their heads off.

  If that’s not an entrance fit for a Trump, I don’t know what is.

  In the years since, I’ve started joking that the precise hour of my birth was no accident—that my father wanted to claim me as a dependent on his tax returns for 1977, so he told my mother she had to get me out by midnight or she could go back to the apartment in a cab. (I’m completely kidding about the second part, of course. On the tax return thing, who knows, it’s been a family joke for years.) I can also confirm that he wasn’t always so hot on letting someone else have his full name, even his own firstborn son. When my mother first approached him with the idea of naming me Don Jr., my father is rumored to have said, “We can’t do that! What if he’s a loser?” Again, no idea whether my father ever really said this, but it sure sounds like him.

  When you’re Donald Trump’s son, you get used to that sense of humor. As you can probably tell, it’s one more of the things I picked up from him. But believe it or not, there was a time when most people didn’t believe that my father and I were very much alike. Even after I had gone to college at his alma mater, studied the same subjects, and prepared myself for a career in real estate, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go into the family business—at least not right away.

  So after college graduation, I loaded up my Jeep and pointed it toward the Rocky Mountains.

  I guess there is a conception of a certain privilege attached to taking a gap year. Not everyone can afford to take a year off to backpack through Europe before entering the work force or going on for an advanced degree.

  My gap year, however, didn’t come attached with a whole lot of privilege. When I decided I was going to spend my first year out of college bartending and enjoying the great outdoors, I called my father to let him know. I would tell you exactly what he said during that call but… well, let’s just say it was less than awesome—after all, I was about to become perhaps the only Wharton grad to ever go off to work in a bar. By the end of the call, we had decided that I was free to do what I wanted, but as far as paying for it? Well, that was up to me. He was cutting me off. I rented a room in a small house in Aspen, Colorado with a few roommates. My budget might have gotten even tighter if my parents had remembered the Mobil card I had. I kept the gas tank in the Jeep full, and was able to buy a meal with it every now and then.

  As a family, we’d gone to Aspen many times, usually spending Christmas and New Year’s there. I thought I might get a job as a ski instructor. My mom had been on the Czech national ski team, and all of the Trump children were on skis soon after we learned to walk. I didn’t end up teaching snowplows to eight-year-olds or parallel skiing to rich divorcées. Instead, I landed the perfect job for me at the time.

  The Tippler had been a celebrity hangout in the 1980s and ’90s, attracting stars such as Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone. By the spring of 2000, when I began working there as a bartender, however, it had officially achieved dive status, just the way I liked my bars.

  In fact, I started to like them a little too much.

  Although I’d had fairly good grades in college, I had partied my ass off. Once I got going, it wasn’t easy to stop me—which, when you’re in college, isn’t a huge problem, as long as you’re getting your work done. But once I started thinking about a career and a life beyond school, it was. To be honest, I didn’t know how to drink in moderation. I have an all-or-nothing personality; just ask anyone who knows me. Being compulsive works for some things—give me a job to do, and I’m going to get it done—but it’s not so good for vices.

  I guess I should have known that drinking wasn’t going to be good for me. There were warning signs in my family.

  As you probably have heard, my dad has never had a glass of alcohol in his life. He watched his brother, Fred Trump Jr., die from alcoholism at the age of forty-three. My father had loved his older brother, and Uncle Freddy’s death affected him greatly.

  So, in a couple of ways, my gap year was a kind of turning point for me. Though I continued to party throughout my time in Aspen, it was in the mountains surrounding the ski
resort that I began to realize that with my personality, drinking alcohol was a recipe for disaster. One thing about us Trumps is that we have plenty of willpower. I would come to find that it was easier for me to ignore alcohol than it was to try to control it. Eventually, I would give up drinking for good.

  The other awareness I experienced in Aspen was actually something I had known all along.

  The mountains and rivers surrounding the Colorado ski resort provide some of the best fly fishing and elk hunting in the country. The Tippler was often slow during the week, and I’d spend three or four days in a row out on the mountain with a fly rod, or a rifle, or a bow. And it wasn’t just the western states. If I had a few days off, there was absolutely nowhere I wouldn’t drive. Once during that year, I went twenty-eight days straight hunting elk. Out in the woods, no one knew I was Donald Trump’s son, and I don’t think anyone would have cared if they did know. As it turned out, that was just what I needed.

  For a moment or so during that year, the thought of staying in Aspen for an extended period of time might have crossed my mind: a bartender at night, ski bum and outdoorsman by day kind of life. I have friends from back then who are still out west and still doing exactly that. To this day, whenever I travel out to Iowa and Montana for campaign events or stump speeches, I sleep on one of their couches or in one of their guest rooms. It didn’t take me long to realize that as passionate as I am about the outdoors, I wasn’t going to make it my life’s work.

  There was another path for me, and that path—the one that led toward business, capitalism, and self-reliance—was practically written into my DNA. I needed more—more of a fight, more of a challenge. Looking back, I think that’s why I took so readily to campaign politics.

  My grandfather Fred Trump grew up in a working-class section of Queens called Woodhaven. When he was a little boy, he sold a local newspaper, making a half-cent a copy. Once he became strong enough to carry a golf bag, he caddied at the nearby Forest Park Golf Course. His building career began in his early teens. It was then that he took a job as a carpenter’s assistant. In the 1920s, Woodhaven was booming. New manufacturing offered plenty of jobs, and improved transportation made it attractive for commuters into the city. Houses went up by the hundreds. My grandfather learned the building trade on the job site and from the ground up. It was a good thing that work was steady. When he was just thirteen, his father passed away, making him the man of the house. He was responsible for putting food on the table for his mother, sister, and brother.

  When I was young, my parents would take us—my sister, brother, and me—to visit my grandparents in Jamaica Estates once a month. In the house my father had grown up in, my grandmother would make a big Sunday dinner. Sometimes during those visits, my grandfather would take me to visit job sites or collect rents at some of his properties. The job site stuff was fun; the rent stuff, not so much. My grandfather had strict Germanic ways, and because he had become the man of the house at thirteen, he had a different perspective on life. It was a perspective that not a lot of people have today. His motto was “To retire is to expire.” He really didn’t know how to have fun. Even late into life, in his 90s with Alzheimer’s disease, he went into the office because that’s what he knew and loved. My uncle kept him busy with older expired contracts because work was his life.

  I don’t know if I ever fully enjoyed most of the time I spent with him as a kid. As a child, it was tough to relate to him. But I would come to respect and truly appreciate the drive and work ethic I saw in him—the pure survival mode he had to take on when he was a small child changed him permanently. It was unlike anything I ever could have imagined.

  By high school, Fred Trump had started his own construction business. He built a garage for a guy and did it better, cheaper, faster than any of his competitors. Then he built another one. And another one, putting them up so fast it was as if he were trying to keep up with the production of Henry Ford’s Model T, which was then coming off the assembly line. He called his company E. Trump & Son. His mother’s name was Elizabeth, and she took care of the books until Fred was legally old enough to do it himself. By then he was already well on his way to putting up twenty buildings. His properties weren’t fancy, but they were “spic and span,” functional, and solidly built. “Mint condition” was the phrase he would use to describe them. He paid the same attention to small details that my father would, only Fred Trump’s focus was on non-luxury products. Because of that, he would go on to become one of the biggest developers in Brooklyn. His was the quintessential Horatio Alger story, one of hard work, determination, and opportunity.

  As a young boy, my dad would go to job sites with his father, just as I did with both of them. I guess you could say my future was cemented during that time.

  Now, it’s not as though I was destined to become Donald J. Trump 2.0. There’s only one of that man. The idea, however, that I wouldn’t work for The Trump Organization now seems preposterous, although it took me a year out in the woods to realize that. It was never a question of whether I would go back to New York City, just when.

  The “when” came on a Tuesday in the second week of September 2001. I was coming out of the woods in Colorado, fresh off a morning elk hunt during archery season, when I heard the news on the radio driving over Independence Pass back into town. Like many people, when I first heard that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I thought it was a small single-engine. I figured it was small and hard to control, like one of the planes I used to fly. When I found out it was a terrorist attack, and the towers had collapsed, killing nearly three thousand people, there was only one place I wanted to be.

  A day or two later, I packed up the Jeep and headed back home.

  My first job in the real estate business after college was on a project called Trump Place that now sits on a seventy-six-acre plot of land on the banks of the Hudson River. I was working on the building with some of my father’s partners, Hudson Waterfront Associates. Once the New York Central Railroad yards, it was the last undeveloped tract in Manhattan. I learned about “ground-up” construction. The project included a combination of very-high-end condominiums and rental apartments.

  Along with construction, I learned marketing and leasing. My next assignment came two years later and was a completely different kind of construction from the first job. We bought an existing seventy-five-year-old building on Park Avenue and turned it into high-end condominiums. The old adage “They don’t build them like they used to” doesn’t necessarily mean what you might think. The building had been the Hotel Delmonico, and there was a surprise behind every wall. There were rent-controlled apartments that we had to retrofit around, floors and walls that didn’t match the building drawings that we had. We also had a couple of partners, including General Electric Pension Trust. There were lots of balls in the air. Because I was young enough and dumb enough, I did all the jobs no one else wanted to do. I knew that everyone on the project had about 10 percent of his or her job they hated doing. During those first years, I made it my business to take that 10 percent off their hands. An executive was too busy to handle some aspect of the construction or marketing? I’d gladly take it off his or her plate. Because of my willingness to work and learn, I went from a project manager to basically having ownership of all aspects of the job.

  Another old adage is “Responsibility is taken, not given.” I took that one to heart.

  The next job I worked on was the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Here again, the project was a totally different animal than the other jobs. The plans called for a ninety-eight-story tower with a hotel, condominiums, and retail space including restaurants and a spa, built on the banks of the Chicago River. With the world-renowned architect Adrian Smith we came up with a fabulous design built on the site of the former Chicago Sun-Times building. Long considered an eyesore on a beautiful riverside plot of land, it was the only project I ever worked on where no one was upset that we were demolishing a building.

  W
ith a growing family and commuting two or three times a week to Chicago, I wasn’t watching intently what was going on in Washington, DC. My interest in politics, such as it was, was mostly local, fiscally conservative, and seen through a business lens. I’d show up at certain events and support certain politicians who could give us support when we needed it during every project. I didn’t necessarily have to believe in the person’s politics (I’m in New York City, after all, so most times I didn’t) or particularly love the politicians with whom I dealt. But as Michael Corleone said to his brother Sonny in The Godfather, “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” At least most of the time, that is. Every now and then you ran into a politician who took things very personally.

  In the mid-eighties, when my father first began planning the development of the West Side Yard, a local state assemblyman from the district fought the project as though he had a personal vendetta. Even more curious was that his opposition to the plan made no sense. The land was desolate, crime-ridden, and an eyesore. DJT was going to turn it into a beautiful, thriving business and residential community. My father even scaled his plans down to appease the assemblyman and others, to no avail. Then, in 1993, the assemblyman ran for Congress and was elected to represent the Tenth District on the west side of Manhattan. He took his hostility toward my father with him to Washington. One of the aspects of the planned construction involved moving the West Side Highway. In order to do so, DJT needed federal approval and funds. The congressman from the west side went out of his way to make sure the federal government would not give my dad a dime.

  Why a politician, whose job is to serve the people he represents, would spend so much of his time and energy fighting a developer who wanted to improve that politician’s district is a mystery. Except, that is, when you learn that the politician’s name is Jerrold Nadler.