Eric Trump has hinted that he or another of the Trump family could run for president when his father’s second term in the White House comes to an end.
Eric, who is co-executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, said, the road to the White House “would be an easy one” if he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps.
In an interview withe the Financial Times, he said: “The real question is: ‘Do you want to drag other members of your family into it?… Would I want my kids to live the same experience over the last decade that I’ve lived?
“You know, if the answer was yes, I think the political path would be an easy one, meaning, I think I could do it,” he added. “And by the way, I think other members of our family could do it too.”
Unlike his other siblings, Donald Jr and Ivanka Trump, the 41-year-old has mostly stayed away from politics, focusing instead on running the family business since his father entered the Oval Office in 2017.
However, he seems to have kept one eye on politics this whole time, saying he found himself “wholly unimpressed by half the politicians” he sees and that he could do the job ”very effectively”.
The US vice-president, JD Vance, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, are expected to be the frontrunners for the GOP nomination, but when asked if 2024 would be the last election with a Trump on the ballot, Eric Trump said: “I don’t know … Time will tell. But there’s more people than just me.”
He added: “The question is, do you want to do it? And do you want to subject the people that you love to the brutality of this system? And I’m not sure if I can answer that question yet.”
The president’s son also addressed criticism that his family has profited from the presidency. When asked whether the White House has become another means by which is family could make money, he was adamant in his denial. “If there’s one family that hasn’t profited off politics, it’s the Trump family,” he said.
“In fact, I would sit there and say that we [would have] had many more zeros behind our name had my father not run in the first place. The opportunity cost, the legal cost, the toll it’s taken on our family has been astronomical.”
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He said that the Trump family had spent close to $500mn “just defending ourselves from Russia shams, fake hoaxes, dirty dossiers about the unthinkable”.
The president’s stake in Trump Media & Technology Group is now worth about $2bn on paper, a valuation rivalled by his family’s crypto holdings.
President Trump received $630m alone last year from a range of products, including cryptocurrency, as well as licensing his name for real estate projects, watches, guitars, and Bibles. According to Eric Trump, the Trump Organization is worth between $8bn and $12bn.