Дональд Трамп - Triggered

I’d like to say I wasn’t impressed by social standing or celebrity, and certainly I would feel that way later on. But maybe the real reason was instinctual. I was much more at ease with the folks who worked for my dad. I became close with a number of the security guys at Trump Tower and other properties, most of whom were former New York City cops. I’m still friendly and go shooting with a few of them. For me, their stories from behind the scenes were always more interesting. Maybe the most productive relationships I had were with the chefs my parents hired. We always had world-class people who cooked for us. Having them cook for me was always way less comfortable. Within a few years, I was caramelizing onions and making soufflés right along with them, even taking over the kitchen and giving some of their dishes a shot on my own. All through my childhood, I cooked for myself alongside some of the best chefs in the world, and I learned a lifelong skill in the process. As a result, I can now cook some pretty impressive meals, and I’ve been teaching my kids to do the same thing. Even the fried eggs and bacon we cook over our campfires upstate have a few secret, chef-approved spices thrown in for flavor. I also try to help out with the more serious events when I’m not busy. When Prince Charles came to Mar-a-Lago, for instance, I made him a nice meringue cookie. (If you’re enjoying this book so far, keep an eye out for my self-help/cookbook, Cooking Through Collusion with Junior! , coming in 2024.)

I also spent as much time with my grandfather as I could. Half the year, my Czechoslovakian grandparents would stay with us in the United States. In Mar-a-Lago, I would find Dedo at the seawall, where he fished and smoked cigarettes. We would sit together for hours until our bucket was filled with pompano and jack. It was during those times that my grandfather impressed upon me that a man shouldn’t get used to being dependent on anything or anyone—not the government, not his company, and certainly not his father. When things got too rich for me, I could always count on Dedo to remind me of what really mattered in life and to keep me grounded.

In the early 1980s, my father bought a twelve-acre estate on the water in Greenwich, Connecticut. We would go there in the summer, when Florida was too hot. It was an amazing house with eight bedrooms, indoor and outdoor pools, and a bowling alley in the basement. With Dedo, I would ride Suzuki motorbikes and dirt bikes around the grounds. We’d shoot bows and air guns. My grandfather had a little dory, and we would fish for bluefish and striped bass in Long Island Sound. It had a motor, but if I went out with him I would usually row (good practice for when I rowed at the University of Pennsylvania). It was Dedo who taught me to use everything we caught or hunted. Together, we built a smokehouse where we would smoke our catch. When I was with my grandfather, there were also plenty of laughs. Some of them came at my expense.

When I was six or seven, I decided one night to camp outside on the grounds of the Connecticut home. In my own mind, I was already a pretty experienced outdoorsman, so I figured there wouldn’t be any problems. Dedo helped me put up a tent about three hundred yards from the main house. In Czechoslovakia, when I camped out, I had my friends with me. In Connecticut, however, I was all alone. I was in the tent only a few minutes when I heard howling. At seven, I didn’t know that the only wolves in Greenwich worked on Wall Street. It turned out that my grandfather was the hidden howler, and he laughed as he watched me break the land speed record back to the house. You never saw someone run three hundred yards that fast in your life!

That’s why it came as such a blow to me when in 1990 I got the call that Dedo had died of a sudden heart attack in the Czech Republic. I guess that medically, it wasn’t that big of a surprise. He’d been smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day for most of his life. Emotionally, however, it was as though Mike Tyson had punched me in the gut. The funeral was in the Czech Republic, and the whole family went over.

From the day Dedo died forward, I felt slightly adrift in the world. It was as though I had been living my life on a pair of stilts—one anchored to the woods of Czechoslovakia, the other to the gridded streets and swanky apartments of Manhattan—and his death had knocked one of them right out from under me. As if Dedo’s death weren’t bad enough, my parents were going through a divorce that was playing out on the front pages of the New York tabloids. Every day it seemed that there was a new story about them or a new rumor just beginning to spread. I can only imagine what it would have been like if Twitter had existed when I as a kid.

If any good at all came out of my parents’ divorce, it was the deeper bond that I developed with my sister and brother. Though we are very different people, we had always gotten along very well. We’ve always made a great team.

After the divorce, we sort of locked arms and got through it together. To this day, Ivanka, Eric, and I rib one another good-naturedly. When the news about this book leaked just after I signed the deal, liberal Twitter was pretty brutal to me. No surprise there. But even my sister had some fun at my expense.

@IvankaTrump:When #DonJrBookTitlesis trending on Twitter… @EricTrump @LaraLeaTrump @TiffanyATrump @kimguilfoyleand I are having some fun with this one!

I tweeted back that I was going to include some scandalous secrets about her. There’s a lot of material from Ivanka’s teen years. To be honest, however, there really isn’t much bad to say. My sister was always able to handle life as a child of Donald Trump, along with all the press, paparazzi, and gossip that came with it, with the kind of grace and calm I could never muster. Anyone in my father’s social circle during those years would have told you in a second that they wanted their daughters to grow up and be just like Ivanka. Later on in this book, when I tell you about fake news and its agenda against my father and his family, I’ll show you what Ivanka has to endure. The constant onslaught by the media is incredibly unfair and cruel. Yet she’s able to rise above the vindictiveness. So if you’re reading this, Ivanka, don’t worry. Your secrets are safe with me. I won’t even write about how I stuffed one of your boyfriends into a suitcase and flung—or, um… gently rolled—him down the stairs. I’ll keep my powder dry for the next Twitter attack.

The other good thing that came out of that horrible time was boarding school.

In 1990 or ’91, my parents gave me the opportunity to go away to school in rural Pennsylvania, and I jumped at the chance. I’ve learned that sometimes the best decisions come out of the worst circumstances. The Hill School would change my life in a couple of very important ways, although not at first.

A feeder school for the Naval Academy and West Point, “Hill,” as we called it, was an old-school type of place. There, it didn’t matter one bit that I was Donald Trump’s son. In fact, if anything, being a rich kid from New York got me my ass kicked more than usual. But guess what? I learned a lot from those beatings. I gave away eighty pounds to the seniors, so they weren’t fair, but they were deserved. (I’m sure you’re shocked to hear that.) My mouth developed faster than the rest of me. Stories about my parents’ divorce ran in supermarket checkout publications such as People and Page Six of the New York Post all the time. The day they dropped me off at school, we stopped at Kmart to pick up some things for my dorm room. Someone took a picture of the three of us in front of the store, which ran in the local paper. We also stopped at Taco Bell, where my mother ordered a glass of chardonnay which was really, really awesome for a guy just trying to fit in. Really awesome, Mom. Thanks. When people in school read about those moments, it didn’t make things any easier.