Eric Trump

Eric Frederick Trump (born January 6, 1984) is an American businessman, activist, and former reality television presenter.

His parents divorced in 1990, when he was six years old.

As a boy, Trump spent his summers in the Czech countryside near Zlín with his maternal grandparents.

His grandfather, Miloš Zelníček, who died in 1990, was an engineer; his grandmother, Maria, worked in a shoe factory.

His grandfather taught Trump to hunt and fish.

In 2002, Trump graduated from the Hill School.

He graduated with a degree in finance and management from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Trump started accompanying his father to job sites and negotiations from a young age.

He has said he mowed lawns, laid tile, and did other work on his father's properties in his youth.

Trump briefly considered other careers but decided to join the family business while a high school student.

Trump is the Trump Organization's executive vice president of development and acquisitions.

He worked with his sister, Ivanka, to redesign and renovate Trump National Doral and its Blue Monster course in Miami, Florida.

In 2007, Trump established the Eric Trump Foundation, a public charity to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee.

In 2008, Trump said that "in terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets", and that "we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia".

Trump was a boardroom judge on his father's reality television series The Apprentice (2010–2015).

He appeared in 23 episodes.

On November 30, 2012, the foundation committed to raising $20 million over ten years for the naming rights to the new Eric Trump Foundation Surgery & ICU Center in the Kay Research and Care Center, a $198 million tower that opened on February 19, 2015, on the St. Jude campus.

In 2013, Trump received Wine Enthusiast Magazine's "Rising Star of the Year" Award.

Amid the Trump–Ukraine scandal—where President Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter—Eric Trump strongly criticized Hunter, accusing him of nepotism.

Eric claimed that, unlike Hunter, "When my father became president, our family stopped doing international business deals".

But when Donald Trump became president, rather than place his assets in a blind trust, he made Eric a top executive in the family business, which continued to operate and promote business transactions across the world.

PolitiFact and the Washington Post fact-checker rated Eric Trump's assertion that the Trump family "got out of all international business" false.

PolitiFact noted that not only had the Trump family engaged in international business dealings since Trump became president, but that some of the president's children, including Eric, had openly celebrated their international business activities during that time.

St. Jude stated in 2013 that the 7th Annual Eric Trump Foundation Golf Invitational on September 9, 2013, at the Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff, New York, had "...raised $1.5 million for the kids of St. Jude", for a total of $6 million since 2006.

On December 30, 2016, Richard C. Shadyac Jr., the president of the fundraising organization of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, wrote the Eric Trump Foundation a letter stating that the foundation and "...related efforts, such as an Eric Trump Foundation-affiliated team that participates in the New York City Marathon", had raised $16.3 million for the hospital since the charity's inception ten years earlier.

On December 21, 2016, Trump announced that he would stop active fundraising for the Eric Trump Foundation as of December 31.

The move came to avoid the appearance that donors were using him to gain access to his father after he won the presidential election.

The foundation's 2016 tax return, filed under its alternative name the Curetivity Foundation, shows that the contributions it received increased from $1.8 million in 2015 to $3.2 million in 2016.

The foundation gave $2,910,000 in donations to St. Jude and several smaller donations to other charities while paying a total of $145,000 to various for-profit properties the Trump family owned.

In 2016, the fundraising president of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital stated that the Eric Trump Foundation had raised and donated $16.3 million to the hospital since the charity's foundation.

He is the third child and second son of Donald Trump (the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021), and his first wife, Ivana Trump.

Trump is a trustee and executive vice president of his father's business, the Trump Organization, running it alongside his brother Donald Jr. He also served as a boardroom judge on his father's TV show The Apprentice.

During their father's presidency, the brothers continued to make new investments in foreign countries, as well as collect payments in their U.S. properties from foreign governments, despite having pledged not to do so.

Eric Trump was born in New York City and attended Trinity School.

In 2017, it was reported that Eric Trump had said that "we don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia", and that "we've got some guys that really, really love golf, and they're really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time."

In June 2017, Forbes reported that the Eric Trump Foundation shifted money intended to go to cancer patients to the Trumps' businesses.

In October 2019, Eric Trump complained of the Bidens, "Why is it that every family goes into politics and enriches themselves?".

Shortly before he made that statement, President Trump had decided that the G-7 summit would be held at the Trump Doral resort, owned by the Trump Organization.

President Trump reversed his decision amid bipartisan condemnation.

A ruling which was handed down on February 16, 2024 barred Trump from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York, including the Trump Organization, for two years.