“He’s been protecting us from the public eye for a long time,” says Eric. “We never made the tabloids when we were younger. He was the man that, his whole life, he’s always had thousands of cameras on him and yet we were raised as normal kids, or at least as normal as you could be raised under the circumstances.”
“When we were kids, we’d be sitting in a boardroom while he was negotiating a deal, and if we were playing with trucks, making noise, it didn’t matter,” recalls Donald. Jr., who is now married with five children of his own. Along with Ivanka and Eric, Donald Jr. works for his father’s company. (Though Donald Jr. oversees many of the Trump golf courses, the senior Trump jokes that he “can’t get him interested” in the sport.)
Following his father into the world of business “was a no brainer,” says Don. Jr., as he’s called. “It’s like, I’ve been doing this my whole life already!”
Ivanka says she’s developed a greater appreciation for her father as she has
become a parent herself.
“The 14-year-old Ivanka loved her father very much but didn’t realize just how great he was,” she says. “The parent Ivanka appreciates him all the more. Now that I’m a parent I realize how difficult it is. He was tough, firm, but always available to us.”
Already, her four-year-old daughter
Arabella has been learning of her grandfather’s high standards.
“My daughter saw a pothole and said, ‘Grandpa would not like that,’ ” Ivanka recalls with a laugh. “The fact that my daughter sees a crack and says that would be unacceptable to grandpa is a testament to the fact that she has observed him time and time again walking job sites, pushing the team to do the very best.”
And, after two difficult divorces, Trump’s kids credit him for maintaining great relationships with both ex wives – and
fostering closeness among the kids.
“We work together every single day. We travel together oftentimes for work and when we’re not working, the very little free time that we take for ourselves, we’re vacationing together,” says Eric. “It’s a special bond and I can count on them and they count on me.”