Дональд Трамп - Triggered

But sound bites are not policy. Sound bites do not help the American worker. Sound bites don’t bring back jobs.

What will bring the American dream back to America will be someone with the balls to say, “Enough!” Someone who will say, “The days of us being a doormat are over.” Someone who knows the art of the deal.

On the campaign trail, my father promised American workers that one of the first things he would do as president would be to renegotiate trade deals that ignored their needs. That promise was the reason he won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, a feat not accomplished since Ronald Reagan in 1980. I’ve been Donald J. Trump’s son for forty-one years and counting, and I can tell you this with complete confidence: He will never stop fighting for the American worker. He will never give in to Democrats at the expense of the American worker. He will bring the American dream back to our shores.

5.

GAP YEAR

FROM THE MOMENT the nurses at New York Hospital inked the name “Donald John Trump Jr.” onto my birth certificate, you might say I’ve been following in the footsteps of my father. Even when I didn’t know it (and most of the time, I didn’t), I was picking up his mannerisms, learning his lessons, and trying to live up to his example.

Take the moment of my birth, for example: December 31, 1977, just a few hours before the stroke of midnight. By the time I was swaddled and sleeping in my crib, there were fireworks exploding outside the delivery room window, champagne corks popping in the streets, and music blaring from the rooftops—all while millions of people in Times Square screamed their heads off.

If that’s not an entrance fit for a Trump, I don’t know what is.

In the years since, I’ve started joking that the precise hour of my birth was no accident—that my father wanted to claim me as a dependent on his tax returns for 1977, so he told my mother she had to get me out by midnight or she could go back to the apartment in a cab. (I’m completely kidding about the second part, of course. On the tax return thing, who knows, it’s been a family joke for years.) I can also confirm that he wasn’t always so hot on letting someone else have his full name, even his own firstborn son. When my mother first approached him with the idea of naming me Don Jr., my father is rumored to have said, “We can’t do that! What if he’s a loser?” Again, no idea whether my father ever really said this, but it sure sounds like him.

When you’re Donald Trump’s son, you get used to that sense of humor. As you can probably tell, it’s one more of the things I picked up from him. But believe it or not, there was a time when most people didn’t believe that my father and I were very much alike. Even after I had gone to college at his alma mater, studied the same subjects, and prepared myself for a career in real estate, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go into the family business—at least not right away.

So after college graduation, I loaded up my Jeep and pointed it toward the Rocky Mountains.

I guess there is a conception of a certain privilege attached to taking a gap year. Not everyone can afford to take a year off to backpack through Europe before entering the work force or going on for an advanced degree.

My gap year, however, didn’t come attached with a whole lot of privilege. When I decided I was going to spend my first year out of college bartending and enjoying the great outdoors, I called my father to let him know. I would tell you exactly what he said during that call but… well, let’s just say it was less than awesome—after all, I was about to become perhaps the only Wharton grad to ever go off to work in a bar. By the end of the call, we had decided that I was free to do what I wanted, but as far as paying for it? Well, that was up to me. He was cutting me off. I rented a room in a small house in Aspen, Colorado with a few roommates. My budget might have gotten even tighter if my parents had remembered the Mobil card I had. I kept the gas tank in the Jeep full, and was able to buy a meal with it every now and then.

As a family, we’d gone to Aspen many times, usually spending Christmas and New Year’s there. I thought I might get a job as a ski instructor. My mom had been on the Czech national ski team, and all of the Trump children were on skis soon after we learned to walk. I didn’t end up teaching snowplows to eight-year-olds or parallel skiing to rich divorcées. Instead, I landed the perfect job for me at the time.

The Tippler had been a celebrity hangout in the 1980s and ’90s, attracting stars such as Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone. By the spring of 2000, when I began working there as a bartender, however, it had officially achieved dive status, just the way I liked my bars.

In fact, I started to like them a little too much.

Although I’d had fairly good grades in college, I had partied my ass off. Once I got going, it wasn’t easy to stop me—which, when you’re in college, isn’t a huge problem, as long as you’re getting your work done. But once I started thinking about a career and a life beyond school, it was. To be honest, I didn’t know how to drink in moderation. I have an all-or-nothing personality; just ask anyone who knows me. Being compulsive works for some things—give me a job to do, and I’m going to get it done—but it’s not so good for vices.

I guess I should have known that drinking wasn’t going to be good for me. There were warning signs in my family.

As you probably have heard, my dad has never had a glass of alcohol in his life. He watched his brother, Fred Trump Jr., die from alcoholism at the age of forty-three. My father had loved his older brother, and Uncle Freddy’s death affected him greatly.

So, in a couple of ways, my gap year was a kind of turning point for me. Though I continued to party throughout my time in Aspen, it was in the mountains surrounding the ski resort that I began to realize that with my personality, drinking alcohol was a recipe for disaster. One thing about us Trumps is that we have plenty of willpower. I would come to find that it was easier for me to ignore alcohol than it was to try to control it. Eventually, I would give up drinking for good.

The other awareness I experienced in Aspen was actually something I had known all along.

The mountains and rivers surrounding the Colorado ski resort provide some of the best fly fishing and elk hunting in the country. The Tippler was often slow during the week, and I’d spend three or four days in a row out on the mountain with a fly rod, or a rifle, or a bow. And it wasn’t just the western states. If I had a few days off, there was absolutely nowhere I wouldn’t drive. Once during that year, I went twenty-eight days straight hunting elk. Out in the woods, no one knew I was Donald Trump’s son, and I don’t think anyone would have cared if they did know. As it turned out, that was just what I needed.

For a moment or so during that year, the thought of staying in Aspen for an extended period of time might have crossed my mind: a bartender at night, ski bum and outdoorsman by day kind of life. I have friends from back then who are still out west and still doing exactly that. To this day, whenever I travel out to Iowa and Montana for campaign events or stump speeches, I sleep on one of their couches or in one of their guest rooms. It didn’t take me long to realize that as passionate as I am about the outdoors, I wasn’t going to make it my life’s work.

There was another path for me, and that path—the one that led toward business, capitalism, and self-reliance—was practically written into my DNA. I needed more—more of a fight, more of a challenge. Looking back, I think that’s why I took so readily to campaign politics.