What Does Donald Trump Really Want For His Son Eric?

Donald Trump has always boasted about his kids — well, most of them, anyway. In 2016, the real estate mogul-turned-president called in on "Fox and Friends" to brag about them on Election Day. "I'm very proud of my children. I mean, I'm just looking at them right now as an example... but I'm very proud 'cause Don and Eric and Ivanka and ... to a lesser extent 'cause she just got out of school, out of college, but, Tiffany, who's also been so terrific. I mean, they work so hard." Donald didn't mention his youngest son, Barron.

Eric Trump, who is an avid advocate for everything his father does, talked to People in December 2020 about how the former president raised him and his siblings, Donald Jr. and Ivanka. (The eldest siblings share a mom, Ivana Trump, while Tiffany's mom is Marla Maples and Barron's mother is Melania Trump.) "He's been protecting us from the public eye for a long time," Eric said. "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."

Now Donald and Eric are back in the news again, but this time it's because Donald envisions a life different from the one Eric is currently living. In fact, the former president revealed that Eric may want his situation to emulate his childhood more.

It's always hard as a parent to see your child going through some tough moments, which is why Donald Trump wants Eric Trump to try a new path in life outside of politics. "He gets treated terribly, just terribly," Trump told author David Drucker (via Yahoo! News), who just published the book "In Trump's Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future for the GOP." "I think he would like to have a normal life."

It's no secret that Eric gets a lot of flack from all sides in the media, especially when he defends his father so fiercely. Stephen Colbert once gave a backhanded apology to Eric on "The Late Show" for mocking his intelligence. "I'd like to apologize to Eric Trump," Colbert said, simultaneously slamming Eric's brother, Donald Trump, Jr. "We always thought you [Eric] were the dumb one. We were wrong." Eric also catches a lot of criticism from social media: whenever his name trends on Twitter, it's rarely ever for anything positive. (See: The Twitter user who recently called out Eric for allegedly funneling money from a children's cancer fund into his own company, as Forbes reported in 2017.)

From his interviews with Donald, Drucker concluded that out of his three oldest, it appears as if Eric will be the one to bow out of the political hemisphere. "Of all his kids, Trump sounded convinced that Eric was the least likely to subject himself to the rigors of political life beyond advocating for his father," Drucker said.