Could one of President Donald Trump’s two eldest sons be considering how to turn their father’s Make America Great Again machine into a new American political dynasty?
One of them isn’t dismissing the idea out of hand.
The president’s second-eldest son, Eric Trump, told Nikkei Asia in an interview published Sunday that he was neither closing the door nor giving the nod to launching his own bid for the presidency, more than a decade after his father first entered the political stage as a candidate in the 2016 Republican primary.
Asked whether he was harboring political ambitions of his own, he replied: “I’m not saying no, but I’m also not saying yes.”
The 41-year-old real estate executive, who works for his father’s eponymous real estate and hotel company as an executive vice president, has been promoting his family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, and spoke at the Bitcoin Asia conference over the weekend.
The recent venture is estimated to have added to his family’s net worth to the tune of billions of dollars in hard-to-trace cash, including from foreign investors looking for influence with his father’s administration.
Neither Eric Trump nor his elder brother, Donald Trump Jr, have ever appeared on a ballot or run for office. But Eric’s wife Lara Trump has twice turned down opportunities to run for or be appointed to the U.S. Senate.
But Eric Trump has previously hinted that he’s thought about what it would take to make the Trump family the fourth political dynasty to count two presidents among them — a feat that would see them join the Harrison family (of William Henry Harrison and grandson Benjamin Harrison), the Roosevelts (cousins Theodore and Franklin), and the Bushes (George HW and son George W) in sending two family members to the White House.
In an interview with the Financial Times in July, he claimed a political career would be “easy” for family members to pursue after the end of the president’s second term in 2029.
“The real question is: ‘Do you want to drag other members of your family into it?’”
“Would I want my kids to live the same experience over the last decade that I’ve lived?” he asked.
“If the answer was yes, I think the political path would be an easy one, meaning, I think I could do it,” he added. “And by the way, I think other members of our family could do it too.”
Eric Trump told the paper that he’s “wholly unimpressed by half the politicians I see.”
“I could do it very effectively,” he claimed.
When he was asked if a member of the family would launch a campaign for office in the future, he said, “I don’t know… Time will tell. But there’s more people than just me.”
“The question is, do you want to do it?” said Eric Trump. “And do you want to subject the people that you love to the brutality of this system? And I’m not sure if I can answer that question yet.”
He rejected allegations of conflict of interest, saying, “If there’s one family that hasn’t profited off politics, it’s the Trump family.”
“In fact, I would sit there and say that we [would have] had many more zeros behind our name had my father not run in the first place. The opportunity cost, the legal cost, the toll it’s taken on our family has been astronomical,” he claimed.
Gustaf Killander contributed reporting
