This appetite—the eagerness with which he wanted to sit and eat—was indeed a Trump trait passed down from Donald to Eric, and all of his siblings, really. As a teenager at the Hill School, Eric would constantly pick food, particularly of the fried variety, off his friend’s plates. He was heavier as a kid and adolescent, which some of his classmates recall made him seem like a jolly type. During Thanksgiving break in his senior year of college, he boasted all about the family’s feast and genetic appetite to a New York Observer reporter. The family spent the holiday at Mar-a-Lago that year, not in Greenwich, as they had for years when he was a kid, when the turkeys, “sometimes . . . wouldn’t fit in the oven, they were so big.” And they doused everything with sauce, whatever sauce they could get their hands on—they were “big saucers,” Eric explained. So one reason for them to be thankful that year, even though it wasn’t quite tradition to be in Palm Beach, was that the staff had set up the meal as a buffet at Mar-a-Lago, where they all sat down to the table in formal attire. “We were grateful that it was a buffet-style, otherwise we’d constantly have to be ordering more gravy, which would be kind of embarrassing.” He was equally grateful that he didn’t have to share much of the yams, stuffing, cranberry sauce, peas and carrots that the Mar-a-Lago chef prepared for them that year. Don Jr. and Vanessa were on a holiday to Mexico, celebrating their anniversary, and Ivanka was off on a trip of her own, so as for Trump kids, it was only Eric and his little brother Barron, only eight months old at the time. He boasted about the baby’s ability to keep up. “He’s a typical Trump,” he said, with pride. “He was slamming down those mashed potatoes. We’re all big eaters in our family, and I can tell that Barron’s going to keep up that tradition.” That tradition, he added, cost his parents a hefty sum over the years. “My mom used to joke that it was more expensive to feed me than to pay for my education.”
When it came to education, Eric veered slightly from the rest of the Trumps. He chose not to go to Wharton like his father and Don Jr. and, eventually, Ivanka; instead, he opted for Georgetown, where Ivanka had started as an undergraduate before she transferred to Penn. (At the time, that Eric could get into Georgetown raised eyebrows among his classmates at the Hill School, who had a vague idea of the kind of student he was and the grades he received in class.) But he made up for it once he moved to New York after graduation. Like his siblings, he bought an apartment from his father—with his help, of course. He settled on a 1,353-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment on the fourteenth floor of a fourteen-story building at 100 Central Park South, known as Trump Park East. He shelled out $2 million for it—a price he said at the time he negotiated with his dad. “We went back and forth,” he recalled. “It wouldn’t be Trump if we didn’t. His father was the same way to him. By the way, if I were to go into his office and not haggle, he would have thrown me out and not sold me the space.” (A little more than a year after he picked up the first apartment, he snagged the one next door—a one-bedroom for $540,000, which had been listed earlier that year for $649,000. “It’s probably more than I need now at this stage in my life, being a younger, single guy. I like leather couches, I like comfy couches. I like a warm atmosphere, area rugs,” he said of his taste.)
Unlike Don Jr., who spent a year binge drinking in Aspen after Wharton, and Ivanka, who wanted to be able to say she did some grunt work and earned her stripes at a New York real estate company that did not bear her name before she went to work for her father, Eric skipped the whole prove-and-find-yourself gap year step. He is, after all, the baby, and in an already privileged lot, being the youngest is perhaps the most privileged spot of them all. Any hoops that the Trump children had to jump through, Don Jr. and Ivanka had already been through by the time Eric got there. Was it really all that necessary for another Trump kid to jump through them again, knowing that they didn’t much matter in the first place?
So once Eric graduated from Georgetown, with a dual degree in finance and management, along with a minor in psychology, of all things, he went straight into the Trump Organization. Where Don Jr. used to squash his little brother, Eric was by then a more hulking presence. He had about three inches and a good two dozen pounds on his older brother when he first came to work with him. But Don Jr. still had more than a decade of experience working in the business by the time Eric took a glass office next to his and Ivanka’s, which, for at least a time, sort of made Donny his boss. “He is,” Eric responded to a New York Observer reporter who asked as much. “Temporarily,” he added, “as I learn the ropes. Um, I’m sure we’ll probably even out the work load eventually. But he is extremely intelligent, as is Ivanka, and I’m going to learn a lot from both of them.”
Eric caught on quickly, and like most of the Trumps before him, he relished working with his family. One of Donald’s longtime friends and business associates remembers stopping by Trump Tower to visit Donald a few years after Eric settled into his office. He was in his dad’s office when the friend arrived, and for fifteen minutes the father and son, in the process of putting together plans for a new tower somewhere, sat behind Donald’s paper-strewn desk, paging through a Yellow Pages–thick book of world-renowned architects together. Don Jr. walked in, which the friend thought might save him from more architect talk, but the eldest son just joined in, adding his thoughts about which architect would be most appropriate. When the phone’s ring interrupted them, Donald answered on speaker. It was Ivanka, who was working with a banker to finish up another deal, and she needed her dad’s sign-off on the terms. “I saw Donald’s eyes light up, as they were all seeking his advice, and I thought to myself, he’s got his three kids, brothers and sisters, who are working together, working for him,” the friend remembered. “I really believed at the time that Donald’s children had grown to a point where he had enough confidence in them, that these kids, and their unique demeanors and the same bloodline, were all three capable of running this business.”
Other friends of Donald point out that Donald was keenly aware of these “unique demeanors” each of his kids possessed, and that is perhaps why he did not have the same level of confidence in all three of their capabilities. When Donald plunked down a reported $63 million—about £37.5 million—to buy a 111-year-old golf estate in Scotland in the spring of 2014, experts saw it as something of a bargain. Leisurecorp, the Dubai-based company that had bought it less than a decade earlier, in 2008, paid a reported £52 million for the resort, which included several golf courses, a five-star hotel along with a lodge and cottage, and a golf academy, and that was before it put in another £40 million in renovations.
The club would be a crown jewel in the Trump’s collection of golf courses. The Trump Organization already owned twelve courses around the world, but Turnberry was prestigious. It was historic. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful. And it was seen as somewhat of a feat in the golf world. Built on a former World War I air force base overlooking the Irish Sea, the Isle of Arran, and a rock formation from which curling stones are made called the Ailsa Craig, the course had hosted the Open Championship four times when the Trumps agreed to buy it. “It was an opportunity as far as I was concerned,” Donald said in an interview with Golf.com at the time. “Turnberry is considered one of the greatest courses in the world. It’s a special place. It’s an important place.”
With a course this special, and a price tag that was both a bargain and still a big chunk of change for the Trumps, Donald looked to his sons to develop the property, mostly focusing on refurbishing the hotel, which had fallen into disrepair, making small tweaks to the existing course, and opening a second one on the property. Both sons, Eric and Don Jr., would be involved. The job was big enough for the both of them. But Donald knew it needed only one project leader, and he knew that only one of his sons could take that on.
On a different golf course in the midst of the Republican primaries in early spring of 2016, Donald confided in one of his friends about his two sons and sought some parental wisdom. He asked his friend what he would do if he had one
son who was so much more talented than the other. The friend told him that he would give the really talented son as many challenges as he could, and the other son as many challenges as he could handle. Donald admitted that the advice was good in theory, but much harder in practice, “because they figure out that that’s what you’re doing.”
He explained that when he put Eric in as the guy who would primarily take charge of Turnberry, Don Jr. got upset. “But how was I supposed to give the Turnberry project to Donny?” he asked his friend. “It’s such an important and historic project, and it just had to be done right.”
Eric, the executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, took the challenge in stride. He flew to Scotland every month over the course of several years to oversee the renovation. He watched as workers took the hotel down to steel and concrete to restore it to its original splendor. He hired highly regarded golf course architects Mackenzie & Ebert to redesign the eighteen-hole course. That meant lengthening the first hole’s green to create a wider landing area, pushing the fourth hole closer to the coastline, and revealing coastal views, with a result that some of the most discerning critics called “extraordinary” and “sympathetic” to the course’s history. It also opened a second course named after Scottish icon Robert the Bruce.
Despite the renovation, or rather because of it, the world Eric oversaw might have been beautiful, but it bled the company nearly dry. In 2016, as his father ran his election campaign in the United States, the Trump Organization lost $23 million, or £17 million—more than double what it had lost a year earlier. The company said in a statement that this was due in part to the course closing so that renovations could be completed to its standards. “The directors believe that the resort will return to profitability in the short to medium term,” wrote Eric in a financial filing. By that point Donald had already taken office, and technically had given up his ability to take over any such business matters, let alone talk about them to his son—perhaps one of the many perks of being in this most unusual First Family arrangement they fashioned for themselves.
For Eric, and those who grew up around him, there was little question that he was built for this job. Like his siblings, he frequently mentions the elaborate Lego towers and cities he would build as a child, the frequent walk-throughs he’d made alongside his dad at any number of construction sites by the time he was in elementary school. That was in his blood, he said, the Trump gene, only made stronger from the continual exposure to building. “I think every kid wanted to fly F-14s and be a fighter pilot for a little while, but it was very soon thereafter, I was probably 10 or 11 or 12 years old, and I said, ‘I want to build,’” Eric told the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Since I was 11, I was running wire with our guys. I was cutting rebar with torches. I was cutting down trees. I was using backhoes, and laying marble and stone, and demoing walls. It kind of taught us the building blocks of actual building. I have actual scars on my hands to prove it.” Where Don Jr. grew into a love affair with the outdoors, Eric was born with a deep affection for anything that would help break things down or build things up. “I was always fascinated with tools,” he recalled. “For Christmas, I want gift cards for Home Depot.” He struggled to choose his favorite tool in his box when asked, veering toward something that had to do with woodworking. “I really like my chisels,” he settled, after quite some time going back and forth.
Just as Don Jr. found men to fill the void his father left through hunting, Eric sought them in construction. One of them was Vincent Stellio, who worked security in the Plaza Hotel when Donald still owned it in the early 1990s. When Tiffany was born in 1993, Donald and Marla put Stellio closer to the family, hiring him to be something of a bodyguard for the little girl. Donald valued his loyalty and how hard he worked. “I have a lot of confidence in you,” Donald told Stellio, calling him a “smart guy” who was “very dependable” and knew “how to get things done.” He eventually extended his responsibilities to overseeing construction at all the Trump-owned golf properties. Along with his other tasks in his greatly expanded role, Stellio oversaw an eager Eric Trump, who was dying to get in on the projects and make a little money on the side.
By the time Ivana unloaded their Greenwich home, Donald had bought the Westchester property known as Seven Springs, where he and Don Jr. moved into a caretaker house when he was twelve or thirteen. Stellio had them join the rest of his guys at seven o’clock in the morning and get to work. He got them on mowers and tractors. He handed them chain saws and leaf blowers and backhoes. If he needed a hole dug, they would dig it. If he needed a road grate put in, they’d put one in. “We would sit there and cut fields all day. We would cut down trees. We would help the masons do all the patios, do all the tile work in the house, do the demolition work,” he said. “We’d help them wire the entire house. . . . As a kid, you’re breaking down walls with a sledge hammer for these guys, you’re helping them put in marble, and you’re still working on those kinds of projects together . . . It was one of the kind of the greatest lessons of my life.”
Around that time, Eric went off to the Hill School, where he immediately gravitated toward the woodshop on campus. He spent hours in that room, hunched over wooden work tables between the great big rectangular windows lining the white-painted brick walls, letting light in. He’d stand on the cool concrete floor, cutting and carving into slabs of wood, sanding it, soldering it, staining it to make a bench—a picture of which he put on his senior yearbook page—and a rowing scull and a triangular structure that the school displayed on campus after Eric finished it. What he lacked in academic rigor, he made up for in that woodshop, and the school recognized that that was where his strength lay, awarding him honors for what he made several times throughout his years at Hill. Eric would often turn in his homework assignments early, which one of his former teachers noted was extremely unusual for his young male students, most of whom had to be bugged to turn assignments in at all, let alone on time. The teacher wrote Donald about this unexpected, delightful habit, and Donald asked Eric why he did his work ahead of time when he did not have to. He said he got things done early so that he’d have more time to read about things he cared about. Undoubtedly, friends at the time said, all he wanted to learn more about was craftsmanship.
That is not to say that Eric made no time to be a regular teenager at school. He had normal friends, which, for boarding school, is unusual. But Hill was not Choate, where Ivanka went. It was not St. Paul’s or Phillips Exeter or Deerfield or Groton or Hotchkiss or Taft, where young heirs and barons and titans-in-waiting idle until they eventually make their way to the Ivy League and then back to their family fortunes or analyst jobs on Wall Street or whatever cushy life their parents have arranged for them. Trump was one of the most well-known names when Eric got to campus, though Don Jr. had worn down the notion that they were typical spoiled rich kids years earlier when he arrived on campus. Sometimes the school would get an Eric Trump, but far more often, the students were locals or legacy kids. Most didn’t come from wealthy families or even from New York City, though of course there were some. Some came on scholarship, and some came because it was close to home and better than the public schools nearby. Their families were born and raised in Pottstown, in the shadow of steel and iron country, with its foundries and rolling mills and factories, and dairy and Christmas tree farms in between.
Donald and Ivana dropped Eric off on campus on his first day, as they had with Don Jr. years earlier, at the start of the school year in 1997. This time, they didn’t forget sheets and didn’t make a stop at the local Kmart, where paparazzi had met them wheeling a full cart outside. Eric heaped all his stuff into two suitcases, which he could barely zip, shoving whatever didn’t fit into a hamper he carried into his room. They didn’t come back to visit until he graduated in 2002, and even then, Ivana did not show up. For the ceremony, at which the school awarded Eric an award for his character and academic improvement and resolve to succeed, Ivana was on a whir
lwind trip aboard her yacht, the Ivana, in Cannes during the fifty-fifth annual film festival there. She threw herself a belated birthday party in the VIP section of the nightclub, blowing out three candles alongside her guests, including Naomi Campbell, Sean Penn, and Harvey Weinstein. At the time, she arranged for her staff not to tell reporters her age; she did not arrange a flight home in time to see her youngest son receive his high school diploma.
That the flashiest members of his family mostly stayed away from Pottstown perhaps made it easier for Eric just to be Eric, not Eric Trump—yes, that Trump (in college, friends remember that he would often say no when strangers would ask if there was any relation, after they happened to see his name on a credit card or hear it called by a professor rolling through attendance). Outside the woodshop, he did some community service. He worked as an archives editor of the Hill newspaper. He fell into a rhythm with his golf swing—a skill that would come in handy later, as he tried to find common ground with his dad and, eventually, take over his father’s clubs once he took office as president. He put to the test the skating skills he’d honed at the ice rink in Central Park his dad also owned, though they went only so far. He made the hockey team, albeit the JV squad. But he did earn his nickname, which immediately stuck like glue. During one game, Eric shouted out that a player on an opposing team was “a choad,” a derogatory slang term for a specific shape of a certain male body part. His teammates were stunned, and flipped the name back on him. They didn’t need to call him Eric Trump. To them, for the rest of his time at Hill, he was Choad. In fact, on Eric’s senior year book page—which is littered with photos of his family and him posing with classmates in boxy formalwear on their way to prom and putting the finishing touches on a white bench he’d painstakingly made in woodshop—“Choad” is printed at the tippy top.
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