The relationship between President Donald Trump and his eldest son, Don Jr. hasn’t always been loving, with the president even at one point fighting the idea of naming his son after himself, in case he turned out to be “a loser” as a young man.
Nice, huh?
And while Business Insider [1] and GQ Magazine [2] reported on this in 2018, it’s becoming relevant once again after Steve Schmidt, co-founder of The Lincoln Project [3] took to Twitter to zing Trump as “America’s greatest loser.”
Because if there’s one thing Schmidt knows how to do, it’s kicking Trump where it hurts. Remember, Schmidt is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, along with George Conway and Rick Wilson, and the PAC has on many occasions gotten under Trump’s skin to the point the president screams about them on Twitter.
when you didn’t want to name @DonaldJTrumpJr [4] Donald because you were worried about him being a loser named Donald. You were right about that. He is. But it is you @realDonaldTrump [5] who will be remembered as America’s greatest loser. You will be crushed in the election. Shhhhhhhh
— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) October 7, 2020 [6]
The stress between the younger Trump, born during his father’s first marriage, to Ivana Trump, and his father was so great at times, that when his parents divorced when he was 12, he didn’t speak to his father for a year. Trump had used his son as a negotiating tool during the split and that fueled the young man’s anger.
Fortunately, he was able to find refuge during summer visits to his grandfather (Ivana Trump’s father) in the former Czechoslovakia, where he discovered he loved hunting and fishing. That even spurred him to spend an entire year in the woods in Aspen, Colorado after he graduated from college and before his work at the Trump Organization.
“Poor Don,” Ivana wrote in her book Raising Trump. “He really got the brunt of everything. No wonder Don likes to go in the woods and escape from everything.”
As the oldest child, Donald Trump Jr. faced challenges that his younger siblings haven’t had to face, growing up in the shadow of a man who was larger than life and trying to win that man’s approval. A man who worried about his oldest child becoming a loser.
“According to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody,” Julia Ioffe [7] wrote for GQ. “It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald Jr. ‘You can’t do that!’ Ivana wrote in her book. What if he’s a loser?”
So now Donald Trump Jr., sometimes accompanied by his brother Eric, travels around the globe spending time in the wilderness by killing rare and endangered animals. Last year, flying all the way to Mongolia, he killed a rare Argali sheep, an endeavor that according to two Freedom of Information Act requests submitted to the Secret Service reportedly cost at least $76,000 the BBC News [8] reports.
It’s anyone’s guess why Donald Trump Jr. likes to kill wild creatures but that makes him a loser in my book.