Name: Eric Trump Opens Up About How Relentless Attacks Impacted Him and His Family
Uploaded: 2025-11-25T09:46:24.000Z
Description: How did the last nine years change Eric Trump? How did the second son of President Donald Trump react to the assassination attempt on his father’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania? And does he plan to run for political office in the future?

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[TRANCRIPT BELOW] How did the last nine years change Eric Trump? How did the second son of President Donald Trump react to the assassination attempt on his father’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania? And does he plan to run for political office in the future?

His new memoir is titled “Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation.”

“It’s the thousands of stories behind the scenes of how they try to dismantle our family and the greatest political movement in American history,” Trump says.

Your family has been under siege for some time, and this is something that’s discussed in your new book. What about yourself? What was the key moment when you realized things had changed irrevocably?

I’ll never forget. My father handed me the company when he went to Washington, D.C. I never realized I’d be the person who didn’t have constitutional protection. You know, the president of the United States has constitutional protections. I didn’t, and I became the most subpoenaed person in, arguably, American history.

I got 112 subpoenas in a very short period of time. And these are big subpoenas, right, from the Senate, from Congress, from the biggest attorneys general in the country, district attorneys in the country. They wanted to see our family out of business. They wanted to see us bankrupt. They wanted to see my father in jail. They wanted to see me in jail. They wanted to see the Trump name off of every building around the globe.

They wanted to break up our relationships. They wanted to break up the family ties I have with my siblings. They wanted to break up his relationship with Melania. They raided our homes. They tried to impeach him. They took us off of Twitter and Instagram and X.

They weaponized the DOJ, they spied on his campaign, they made up the Russia collusion [hoax]. They made up the dirty dossiers. They took him off the ballot in Colorado. Then they took him off the ballot in Maine.

Then they had how many indictments, 91 indictments: in Fulton County, in deep left New York City, and in Washington, D.C. They took his mug shot, and then they tried to kill him.

And that’s what they tried to do to our family. They tried to kill our family. They tried to kill the MAGA [Make America Great Again] movement.

And two weeks ago, you saw what they did to Charlie Kirk, right? It was the same thing. They wanted to silence that voice. And that’s what “Under Siege” is about. It’s the thousands of stories behind the scenes of how they tried to dismantle our family and the greatest political movement in American history.

I think it probably turned us into rocks, to tell you the truth. I mean, it probably desensitized me. I remember the first time I got a subpoena, and it almost hurt. [Then] 10 subpoenas in, it’s like, “Yeah, here we go again.”

I know the game [now], and it’s all a game. It’s not a fun game, it’s not a nice game, but it’s a game, and you start compartmentalizing it as exactly that. It’s evil. You have sick people on the other side.

You had people who wanted to destroy this country. You had people who wanted to destroy a man just because he had differences of opinion.

First, they tried to laugh at him, mock him. You remember that from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Then they tried to silence him. They stripped him off of social media. I mean, Boko Haram, the Ayatollah, the Taliban, Hezbollah, they all had Twitter accounts. But guess who couldn’t? The 45th president of the United States. He couldn’t have a Facebook account. They were writing my wife letters, [saying], “If you talk about Donald Trump on YouTube, we’re going to throw you off.”

And then they exerted physical violence on him after they couldn’t get him with legal lawfare.

And it was a crazy battle, and it’s a battle that we won against all odds. And again, it’s really what the book “Under Siege” is about.

Can you tell me about one instance when it just seemed very, very dark?

I sat next to him every day in the trials in New York. And I remember, they stood up and read 34 indictments, which were just bogus.

He was gagged. I was the only person who wasn’t gagged, so I was on the steps of the courthouse every day, yelling and screaming about how rigged the whole trial was. And I remember, after 34 felony convictions, he turned around, shook my hand. We walked out together, we hopped in the car, and we were actually going to a fundraiser. We were in court by day, fundraising by night.

And I remember, as soon as we got in the car, he looked at me, and he goes, “I don’t know how, but we’re gonna win.”

And he wasn’t just talking about the court case, but the overall election.

You had every press member in the back of those courtrooms, and they were giving him a zero percent chance. And it’s funny, in his early life, he wrote “The Art of the Deal.” Then his second book was “The Art of the Comeback,” talking about his business career in the ‘90s, when everybody thought he was down and out.

And it’s the perfect parallel. I mean, this was the comeback. No one would ever have thought a guy who was just charged with 91 felony convictions—for doing nothing wrong, but because we had a system that was totally weaponized against him—could ultimately become president.

And not only did he become president, he won every swing state. He won the popular vote; every state in the nation went to the right. We picked up 11 counties in California that had never been Republican. Miami Dade, which hadn’t been Republican in 37 years, we won by 11 percent.

You want to talk about the art of the comeback? It was a great foreshadowing in his early life, when he named that book, of exactly where we sat a year ago.

Talking about the art of the comeback, when he got up in Butler after he was shot and said, “Fight, fight,” what was your experience of that from the outside?

I took a lot of heat about six weeks before Butler, [when] I said, “Listen, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to inflict bodily harm.” They’d tried everything. First, they tried to laugh at him, “Hahaha, he can never make it.” I remember Barack Obama saying [Donald Trump’s] not a serious guy. This is coming from a guy who’s a community organizer—give me a break, he’s never built anything in his life.

And then obviously they tried to silence [my father], and then all the lawfare wasn’t working. And I said, “Listen, the next logical course of events is violence. That’s what they do. When they lose the narrative, they resort to violence.” And I called it right.

And I got absolutely shelled—you know, “He’s an alarmist”—but then sure enough, six weeks later, you know, Butler. And then, two months after that, you know what happened at the golf course. And about a year after that was obviously what happened to our good friend [Charlie Kirk].

It’s crazy the times that we live in, and never did I think that the country would get to this point at the same time. I can tell you, universally, people are sick and tired of the games and nonsense, and they’re all seeing it.

And I think that’s why you’ve had the mass exodus from the Democratic Party in this country. I think that’s why, in a four-year period of time, it turned every college kid in this nation from having been indoctrinated by every teacher and tenured professor, having been taught revisionist history, to solidly being in our camp. The pendulum has swung in ways that I think most people in most countries probably can’t even comprehend. And I’m very proud to have played a big part in that.

How big of an impact do you think what happened in Butler had on the 2024 election?

A massive one. When I saw [my father’s] hand in the air, I thought to myself, “We just won the election. People aren’t going to stand for this. People know the radical left for who they are. The radical left isn’t hiding who they are anymore. We know exactly who they are.”

They’re the ones who will call you a fascist, yet sit on a rooftop in all black holding a sniper rifle and shoot somebody who’s peacefully exercising their First Amendment right. To me, that’s what fascism looks like, not the person speaking on the other end of it.

The bullets are only flying one way—Steve Scalise, my father, Charlie Kirk, what they almost did to Kavanaugh, and so many others, right? They don’t want guys like me on that stage. They want us in their basement. They want us doing effectively what Joe Biden did during 2020, where he didn’t leave his basement, he wasn’t heard from. We didn’t stand a chance if that was our playbook.

Hillary Clinton outraised us in 2016 five to one, right? If we weren’t loud and slightly un-PC, and hadn’t spoken from the heart and stood on every tractor with a bull horn in every single swing state, as we did, and spoken at every church and every house and every picnic that we possibly could, there’s no chance we would have [won]. And they realize that, and I think that’s why they want to make sure that you don’t go outside and you don’t assemble in large crowds.

And that’s exactly what we can’t allow to happen. We have to be more vocal than ever right now. I think people are realizing, again, exactly who that party is. Hence the fact that 50 states again swung to the right, and we won the popular vote, and we won every swing state by a major factor. I think people are solidly coming into our corner right now.

You know, if I may, of the two older brothers, you seem to be the more low-key one, but in 2024, you seemed very active. Do you have any aspirations for political office sometime in the future?

I’m one of those guys that doesn’t need to be in the spotlight. I’ve run our company for a very long time. I’m very good at it. I love work. I love capitalism. I love hotels. I love real estate. I enjoy politics. It’s not my first love. Frankly, I detest half the people in politics because I think most of them are freeloaders who’ve never actually accomplished anything. The person who’s never signed the front of a check is writing legislation that’s gonna apply to every business and every person in our country. The person that doesn’t know the first thing about health care is making decisions for the lives of millions of people. It doesn’t seem to compute.

You see all these 20-year-old kids who get into politics, e.g., Joe Biden, and they’re in politics for 50 years, and then they become president, and you wonder why our country is totally dysfunctional under their leadership when they’ve never seen an outside perspective. Their entire lives have been dependent on checks from the government for making “yes, no” votes.

I dislike that system. I’m far from shy, but I can also turn off the public spotlight. Oftentimes, I like working behind the scenes and getting to an end goal without ever being seen. And certainly when I have to turn it on, I do, [such as] when I introduced my father at the RNC right in front of hundreds of millions of people. I’m no stranger to the stage.

But I was also the first person to call him up on the day that we won, on Nov. 6—early in the morning, we still hadn’t slept—and I said, “You know, Pops, I love you to death. Congratulations, we won the Super Bowl. It’s been the greatest honor of my life to stand on the stage. But I’m going to get back to our company, I’m going to get back to work. The country is in great hands, you know the business will be in great hands. You go do what you do best, and I’ll go do what I do best.” And in instances like that, I’m happy to turn it off and go back into the shadows. And I enjoy being able to do that.

So I’ll share something briefly. I had people call me up prior to 2024 and say, “Hey, people want me to run for office,” and I bet there are people who have told you that as well. And my response to them was, “You know, we need people who are consequential, who know what’s what, and who probably don’t like politics very much.” So I’m not asking you to run, but my question is, is that something you would consider?

I don’t rule anything out in the world, and the ecosystem is beautiful.

I’m watching my father make transformational change. Military recruitment under Biden was the worst it’s ever been in the history of our nation. One month later, it was like everybody was applying, everybody wanted to be in the United States military. There was patriotism again.

So there are certain things you can just make transformational change on, if you’re a real leader and you do it the right way. Forget about all these career politicians that say, “I’m going to D.C., and I’m going to make a difference.” Most of them fall prey to the Washington, D.C., mob.

But listen, I would never rule anything out. What I can tell you is, I think it’s given us a great voice. I think we’ve all developed a great voice. We had a voice from the business world, and we had a voice from the number one reality TV show [“The Apprentice”]. You know, we had some confidence, we had some backbone. And then all of a sudden, we got into politics, and I think we developed a real voice and a real comfort on that stage and a real backbone.

I mean, this stuff requires real backbone, as they try to literally and figuratively kill you in every aspect of your soul and your company and your family and your marriage and everything else.

And so I think it armored us in a unique way. I think I could do it, [go into politics,] but the question is, do you want to? We’ve seen the greatest parts of politics, we’ve certainly seen the worst parts. We’ve definitely seen the worst parts, worse than probably most can ever imagine. Hence the whole point of the book “Under Siege,” telling all those stories.

But I never rule anything out. I believe in this country; I love red, white, and blue. I love our First Amendment. I love our Constitution. We have to stay the dominant superpower of the world.

And you do need good people, and you better have people like Donald Trump who will set everything aside—set aside his wealth, set aside his fortune, set aside his family, set aside his company—to do the unthinkable. There’s not a lot of courageous people out there, truly. Of the Fortune 500 crowd, very few of them would say, “I’m going to sacrifice all of it to run against 16 Republicans who actually know something about politics,” which we did not. And then have to run against somebody like Hillary Clinton, who is one of the great political dynasties of modern times, only in the off chance of being able to win at a five to one financial deficit, self-funding your whole campaign.

Give me another billionaire who would agree to those terms. Zero, right? These people gamble on probability. And I think traditional sense would say that your probability was not very good under those odds. How many other billionaires would have taken that on? Hence the reason you get Joe Biden as your president, versus [someone like] Warren Buffett.

That said, you have to have great business leaders, people who can offer transformational change, and I’d love to see many more of them. And if the stars ever aligned and [politics] was the right calling for me at the time, I’d consider it, I guess.

You’re donating some of the proceeds from the book to Turning Point in memory of Charlie Kirk. Could you tell me briefly about that and why?

Eric Trump: That’s the whole point of “Under Siege”—exactly what they did to Charlie. I mean, Charlie would have been the final chapter of that book, had the book not come out three days before his assassination. They want our voice gone. They want it off that stage, and we can’t allow that to happen.

Turning Point is incredibly important, and [having independent voices] is incredibly important. And so I’m going to give a percentage of proceeds of the book to Turning Point so that its mission continues, and so that they can’t silence us the way they thought they could silence us.

They thought they could just remove his voice with, you know, a $1 bullet. You know they were wrong, they can’t do that.

And in fact, it’s a law of unintended consequences that the exact opposite is happening. I think our voice is stronger than it’s ever been, right now.

<em>This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.</em>

<i>Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.</i>

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