Donald Trump Jr.

Background

Trump was born in Manhattan, New York City, to Ivana and Donald Trump. He has two younger siblings, Ivanka and Eric. He also has two half-siblings, Tiffany, from his father’s marriage to Marla Maples, and Barron, from his father’s current marriage to Melania Trump. He is the paternal grandson of Fred Trump and great-grandson of Elizabeth Trump, who founded what became the Trump Organization. As a boy, Trump found a role model in his maternal grandfather, Miloš Zelníček, who had a home near Prague, where he spent summers camping, fishing, hunting, and learning the Czech language. Trump was educated at Buckley School and The Hill School, a college preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He then studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he graduated in 2000 with a B.S. in Economics.

After graduating in 2000, Trump moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he hunted, fished, skied, lived in a truck, and worked as a bartender for a year, before returning to join the Trump Organization in New York. Trump has supervised building projects, which included 40 Wall Street, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Park Avenue. In 2006, he helped launch Trump Mortgage, which collapsed less than a year later. In 2010, he became a spokesperson and executive director of global branding for Cambridge Who’s Who, a vanity publisher against whom hundreds of complaints had already been filed with the Better Business Bureau. He appeared as a guest adviser and judge on many episodes of his father’s reality television show “The Apprentice,” from season five in 2006 to his father’s last season in 2015.

Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Trump Jr. was a central member of his father’s campaign, characterized by “The New York Times” as a close political adviser. He spoke at the Republican National Convention, along with his siblings Ivanka, Eric, and Tiffany. Trump Jr. influenced his father’s choice of Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, during the presidential transition.