YOU’RE SIRED!
LI’L DONNIE TURNS INTO BIG PROBLEM FOR POPS
HE WAS the heir apparent — and now he has erred bigly.
Before blowing up the Trump-Russia scandal this week with an email trail and a series of self-contradicting statements, Donald Trump Jr. seemed like the child most likely to follow in his father’s footsteps.
The President’s eldest child, who is 39, stood out as a leader of the family business, a reliable political adviser and a rabid Twitter attack dog against his father’s foes.
After the 2016 race, he was the first Trump child to talk about running for office when he floated the idea of seeking the New York governorship. (Polls showed little support for that idea and he scrapped it, saying, “Maybe someday.”)
But he and his father have at times had public conflicts — and the younger Donald has tried unsuccessfully to step out from under his father’s shadow.
Their tangled relationship will now come under new scrutiny after Trump Jr.’s secret meeting last year with a Russian lawyer has turned into one of the biggest scandals of President Trump’s chaotic administration.
The President defended his son Tuesday, issuing a secondhand statement through the White House that called him “a high-quality person.”
But that came after Trump stayed silent about the controversy as it escalated for four days in a row. With Trump Jr. already saying he’d be willing to testify about his Russia encounter, there’s no telling how long this could drag on — or how it could test the father-son relationship.
Trump Jr. has insisted he never informed his father about the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016. That claim is, at the very least, questionable, considering how much the father and son mix their family, business and politics.
Trump Jr. runs the Trump Organization with his brother Eric, even though President Trump still has financial control of the global empire. He steadily campaigned for his father during the 2016 race and advised him on matters as crucial as cabinet nominations. This year, he has been meeting with the Republican National Committee and GOP congressional candidates to discuss strategies on his father’s behalf.
Besides his sister Ivanka, no other Trump child has played such a major part in the President’s professional and political lives.
But none of the other children has had as many public clashes with their father, either.
When Trump Jr. was 12, he stopped speaking with his father for a year after his dad trashed his mother, Ivana, in the press during their ugly divorce.
That rift was eventually settled, and the first son followed a familiar path for the family. He spent his childhood in Trump Tower and graduated from the Wharton School — the alma mater of Donald, Ivanka and Tiffany Trump.
He drifted away for about a year after graduating, tending bar in Colorado and getting arrested in New Orleans for public intoxication in 2001. But he would soon step right into the family mold — working his way up through the Trump Organization, appearing on “The Apprentice” and even marrying a model introduced to him by his father.
He’s spoken warmly, but vaguely, about his upbringing, but made it clear that his father was strictly business as a parent.
“When I spent time with my father, it wasn’t playing ball in the backyard. I came to his office and listened to him do business or sat in on meetings,” he told The New York Times in 2010.
“My father’s not the type of person that teaches you by saying, ‘Come here, son. I’m going to tell you about real estate.’ You learn by watching it. If you don’t pick it up, it’s your problem.”
As his father’s political career surged, Trump Jr. jumped behind
it more fiercely than the other children. He helped orchestrate the firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and, later, supported the choice of cabinet members including Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. He delivered a passionate speech at the Republican National Convention that kicked off chatter about his own potential political future.
As his father sits in the Oval Office, Trump Jr. has outdone him in the Twitter wars. He rarely shies away from picking tweet fights with Trump critics, and he tweeted more than 80 times as former FBI Director James Comey delivered damning testimony about his father’s conduct. Most of the tweets struck a proud, defensive tone on his dad’s behalf.
“Knowing my father for 39 years, when he ‘orders or tells’ you to do something there is no ambiguity, you will know exactly what he means,” he wrote in one tweet, referring to Comey’s accusations that Trump seemed to pressure him to drop his Russia investigation.
Along the way, Trump Jr. has cultivated a public persona somewhat at odds with the glitz and glamour of his heritage. He likes portraying himself as a rustic outdoorsman who is implicitly more in touch with the average Joe than the rest of his family might seem to be.
“For some people — you see that in New York a lot — they go hunting once every other year and they talk about it at a cocktail party for the next two years until they do it again,” he told The New York Times this year in a profile that dubbed the son “his own kind of Trump.”
“For me, it is the way I choose to live my life,” he said.
Long before his father put him in charge of the Trump Organization, he was clearly steeped in the company’s inner workings and allowed to talk openly about it.
Eight years before taking the covert meeting in Trump Tower, Trump Jr. made an offhand remark that could now come back to haunt him.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” he said in a 2008 real estate conference.
“We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”