Politics - News Analysis

Watch Trump Completely Ignore Son Don Jr. As He Leaves Rally Stage in Pennsylvania

Donald Trump, Jr. once again proved to be a loyal son and spoke for almost an hour at his father’s MAGA rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night.

However, when the president left the stage to greet his son, he didn’t seem that thrilled.

Trump Sr. gave Jr. and quick handshake then darted away. It was markedly different that how Trump responds when he sees daughter Ivanka.

Senior and Junior have often had a difficult relationship in the past.

As a preteen, Trump Jr.’s relationship with his father was fraught following Trump’s separation from his first wife, Ivana Trump, the mother of eldest children Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.

Trump Jr. was 12 at the time and didn’t speak to his father for a year after the highly publicized split, New York magazine reported in a 2004 article about the Trump children.

Trump Jr. told the magazine that at the time he blamed the divorce on his father, who had been having an affair with model Marla Maples. But he added that in retrospect he may have been “manipulated” into that belief by his mother.

“Listen, it’s tough to be a 12-year-old. You’re not quite a man, but you think you are. You think you know everything. Being driven into school every day and you see the front page and it’s divorce! THE BEST SEX I EVER HAD! And you don’t even know what that means,” he said, referencing the heavy gossip-column coverage of his parents’ split, some of which was encouraged by his father.

After his parents’ divorce, Trump Jr. and his brother Eric were shipped off to boarding school, the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, to remove them from the New York society scene, according to Vanity Fair.

At school, Trump Jr. practiced skeet shooting, and — unlike his father — seemed to enjoy life outside the spotlight.

“When I went to boarding school, it all kind of went away — all those inconveniences that I found intrusive,” he told New York in 2004.

Trump Jr. went on to attend father’s alma mater, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was by all accounts (including his own) a big partier who “had a reputation” for getting into “drunken, ‘do-you-have-any-idea-who-I-am?’ fights,” according to New York.

Vanity Fair reported that Scott Melker, a Penn classmate, wrote on Facebook, “Donald Jr. was a drunk in college. Every memory I have of him is of him stumbling around on campus falling over or passing out in public, with his arm in a sling from injuring himself while drinking. He absolutely despised his father, and hated the attention that his last name afforded him.”

Melker also described an alleged incident in which Trump showed up to his son’s dorm room to take him to a Yankees game. Trump Jr. was dressed in a Yankees jersey and when he opened the door to his father, “without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor in front of all of his classmates. He simply said, ‘Put on a suit and meet me outside,’ and closed the door.” A spokesperson for the Trump family told Vanity Fair this story is “completely false.”

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