The rise of Eric Trump

For years, Eric Trump perfected the art of strategic invisibility. In the grand theater of Trump family politics, he played the understudy: the dutiful son who minded vineyards and managed golf courses while his older brother courted Twitter controversies and his older sister pursued power.

It was a calculated public persona. Eric appeared refreshingly uncontroversial and unbothered – and relatively non-political – compared to the rest of his family. But here’s what everyone missed: while his siblings were soaking in the limelight, Eric was quietly orchestrating moves of far greater consequence. His dutiful pose, it turns out, was the perfect cover for building an empire.

The son who once complained that politics had made the life of his family “exponentially worse” now globetrots as the de facto ambassador of Trump Inc., turning diplomatic relationships into commercial opportunities with a brazenness that would make even his father proud.

Within months of Trump Sr.’s second inauguration, Eric secured approval for a $1.5 billion golf resort in communist Vietnam. Permits that typically take years were granted in days.

There, he shared the stage with the Prime Minister, who gushed that Eric’s visit had “motivated us to expedite this project.” Eric also joined the boards of AI and data-center companies, earning him millions in stock alone just weeks after his father announced massive government investments in those exact sectors. The timing, one might say, is impeccable. Could it be that Eric has only just clocked that closeness to presidential power opens doors internationally in ways that pure business acumen never could?

Eric is not the shrinking wallflower he’s often portrayed as – the shy brother, “the forgotten Trump,” as one journalist snarked to me a few weeks ago. “Why would anybody want to write about him?”

Eric’s life alternated between Manhattan’s elite social circles and extended stays in the Czech Republic

According to friends and staffers he is firm, charming, funny. He sweats the details in ways none of the other Trumps do. When he is out scouting buildings to buy for the Trump Organization, Eric is often seen getting down and dirty in the crawlspace, conducting the inspections himself. When he bought his home in Florida, he rewired most of the house just because he enjoyed doing it. “He’s borderline OCD,” says Jason Vincent, friend of Eric and co-host of the Field Ethos podcast with Don Jr. “He understands things at a granular level.” This is what makes him, according to Vincent, a “world-class long-range shooter. Not many people realize this but Eric is top of the heap. I shoot with just about every kind of person from that world: law enforcement, military. Eric can hang with them.”

In his spare time, Eric does his own gunsmithing, with a fully fleshed-out workshop in his basement. It’s a curious pastime for a rich kid whose Broadway-loving dad honestly looks like he’s never held a gun in his life. But Eric’s love of hunting and the outdoors springs from his childhood, which was half Gilded Age fantasy and half post-communist eastern Europe thanks to his mother, Ivana. “They got both sides of the coin,” observes Vincent. Eric’s life alternated between Manhattan’s elite social circles and extended stays in the Czech Republic where his maternal grandfather – who only had an air gun, being insufficiently communist for a proper one – taught him to shoot. “Running around in the woods with an air gun, playing army and stuff like that as kids is really what did it,” Vincent recalls. “He took that training and is using it in every aspect of his life.”

Upon their return to the US each year, Eric would be put to work chopping trees and helping on the construction sites of Trump properties for $4 an hour. Both parents were workaholics, and their kids absorbed that. “That was their normal –watching two adults work really hard and work long hours and obviously be very successful. They didn’t have the traditional upbringing, where the father goes out to grind and the mom stays at home. She was an incredible athlete and really driven at business,” Vincent explains. “You do what you know, and that’s what they knew.”

In Eric, the result is a man as at ease field-dressing deer in Virginia as he is charming Emirati sovereigns in Dubai – someone who inherited his father’s ruthless ambition tempered by his mother’s eastern European hustle.

Eric’s obsessive attention to detail can also be seen 1,000 miles away from his Florida home – in the rolling hills of Charlottesville, Virginia. It is here that the Trump Winery – Eric’s baby – lies. He runs the business independently from his siblings and the rest of the Trump clan. His father famously disapproves of drinking. But nothing stands between a Trump and money.

One would think that Eric might have neglected the 1,300-acre property now that his business interests extend to Dubai, which he described as a “developer’s playground,” and Vietnam, where he said his resort would become “the envy of all of Asia and of the entire world.”

But Charlottesville will “always be a special place for Eric,” according to Kerry Woolard, the general manager of Trump Winery. “It’s like his second home. He checks in with us here multiple times a week, coming up with new ideas for the business and opinions about the wine,” she adds. One of these ideas, according to reports, is a Trump-branded vodka, which is yet to be officially announced. (When I ask Woolard and others in the know, they reply, “How did you know about that?” I don’t inform her that it’s all over the internet.)

Last Memorial Day, Eric had a pang of inspiration and decided he wanted the perimeter of the property to be adorned with American flags on every post in the fence around the huge estate. “He texted me a video of a parade of flags, and said ‘can we do something like this?’” Woolard says. “Immediately I started searching for where I could buy hundreds of American flags, but it’s not as easy a task as you would think.” Woolard took it upon herself to ensure that each of the flags were American-made and good quality. “It ended up taking a few months to get 680 flags, which I now buy in bulk each month to make sure I can replace any damaged ones.”

“You won’t believe this,” she added, “but after all of the effort I went through to get those flags, and after they were each attached to the fence, Buck, the maintenance supervisor goes, ‘Eh, we probably could have gotten away with just doing every other post.’” The flags now serve as a patriotic – if over-the-top – beacon for Trump supporters making pilgrimages from all over the country. A couple I met there were completing a “Trump tour,” and had booked a flight to Scotland next to see the most famous Trump golf course.

Aside from the Trump-lovers desperate to get a taste of the wines and ciders the place offers, with flavors such as “Donny Appleseed” and “Passionate Patriot IPA,” concocted by Eric and master winemaker Jonathan Wheeler, surrounding wineries in the area also benefit from the establishment. “The Trump Bump,” Woolard tells me, happens around 5 p.m. every day when the winery closes and patrons flock to the nearest place they can get another glass.

For Eric’s friends and staffers, the newfound reach of his portfolio in the Trump Organization is hardly surprising. “This is Eric’s world, we’re all just living in it,” a friend of his tells me, on condition of anonymity. “He’s always been one of the driving forces behind the Trump Organization’s growth internationally. He’s always pushing for the next big thing, so nobody should be shocked by this. I know that there’s plenty more that he wants to achieve globally.”

‘This is Eric’s world, we’re all just living in it,’ a friend of his says

Vincent believes this a natural progression for Eric. “He’s a good people person. He can build relationships. He’s got the drive, the business acumen, the personality. It makes total sense. One thing you’ll see with those guys when you’re behind the curtain is the way the Trump family treats employees and staff, not only at their own business, but wherever they go. When the world thinks of this successful family with this giant business, which is really just a large mom and pop business, they don’t realize the level of personal interest they take in their employees, all the way from the top to the bottom.”

Vincent tells me that the first day he met Eric – during a camping trip at Don Jr.’s property in upstate New York – Eric had brought the father of his executive assistant, Kimberly Benza, along for the ride. “Eric and I, we set up a cannon in the backyard set a bunch of coolers full of beer and we cooked out on the fire and stuffed gunpowder down the cannon just to scare the hell out of people,” he recalls.

Vincent also dismisses the idea of Eric as the silent one. “Most people don’t realize this, but I think Don is definitely more of an introvert than Eric is,” says Vincent. “Eric’s got a big personality, but he’s more forward-facing. You don’t see it as much because he’s running the company day-to-day. But you put those two at a dinner table together, and you will overhear some of the funniest things you’ve ever heard. Just two brothers picking on each other, being loud, competitive in a friendly and brotherly way. But they give each other a lot of shit. And Eric, if he knows you and he’s comfortable around you, he’s certainly not quiet.”

As I write, Eric is on stage at the Las Vegas Bitcoin 2025 conference surrounded by crypto-evangelists and die-hard libertarians. “America is going to win the crypto revolution,” he booms. “They don’t like you because you’re wearing a red hat that says Make America Great Again,” he says of the “scumbag and corrupt” traditional banks, in an uncharacteristically agitated and Trumpian tone. It is on stages such as this that Eric completes his transformation. The quiet son is becoming the face of a new Trump empire – one built not on Atlantic City casinos or Manhattan towers, but on blockchain protocols and international partnerships.

His path from Charlottesville vintner to crypto kingpin reveals something profound about power in this country: that the most consequential moves often happen not in front of cameras, but in the shadows, orchestrated by those smart enough to let others chase the spotlight.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.