Congratulations on the win. I don’t know if you see it that way, but the rollercoaster you’re on seems pretty exciting.
It’s wild, with both a lot of highs and a lot of lows. My father was shot on Saturday, and we were at the RNC on Monday. I was a Florida delegate, and I was the one who officially put my father over the line to make him the Republican nominee for president of the United States. Only 48 hours earlier I had seen him on the ground bleeding from the face, and there I was casting the deciding vote to make him the Republican nominee. So the highs and lows of politics are real, but I don’t think there was any bigger high after the hell they put us through than such a decisive victory. I told you back when we were in my office at the Trump Tower [published in Ami, Issue 622, June 14, 2023] that we were going to win, and that was a tough time. That’s when they were dragging my father through courthouse after courthouse every single day.

Let’s talk about that, because virtually everything your father stands for—including his legacy and his business, which you run—has been under attack. So this must be a major thrill for you personally.
It is a major thrill. There was no one who stood by my father’s side as closely as I did. I was in the courtroom every day for all of the nonsense trials, and I wouldn’t leave his side. I was there when they read the guilty verdicts. I was there looking into the eyes of a judge who had so much political hatred for my father. There’s no question that the entire Democratic Party, for which his daughter worked, wanted one thing, and that was to convict Donald Trump of a “crime”—any crime they could. It was a $130,000 nondisclosure agreement—thousands of those are signed in New York City every single day. It’s a simple business instrument, yet they shut down all of New York for it. And for what? Thirty-four felony convictions over $130,000? Shutting down the FDR for more than half an hour costs more than that. And no one believed it anyway. All they wanted to do was give Joe Biden or someone else the ability to run on the fact that he was a “convicted felon.”
My father kind of used it to his benefit, because every day he would come out of the courthouse and do a press conference about the weaponization of the government. Everyone knew exactly what these people were doing. They saw the Russia hoax, the saw it with the fake impeachments, they saw it when they went after Kavanaugh, they saw it when they raided my father’s home in Mar-a-Lago, they saw it when the FBI went through Barron and Melania’s rooms, they saw it when they tried taking him off the ballot in Colorado and Maine, they saw the weaponization when they took him off of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, they saw it in Georgia, and they saw it in the DA and AG cases in New York and in the boxes case in DC and Florida. He was there every single day explaining how this was just more weaponization of government.
Fast-forward six or eight weeks. We get to Butler, Pennsylvania, and someone tried to kill him. They did everything they could to subvert the will of the democracy and take him away from the American people, but it didn’t work. Instead, it ended up reinforcing the idea that he was exactly the guy America needed; otherwise, why were they trying so hard to get rid of him? The people this country trusts the least—Congress, Senate and the political animals who run this country—have a single-digit approval rating from the public. These were the people who were going after someone who was a folk hero to so many.
People stopped believing it. They said, “Hold on a second. The people I like the least are attacking the people I like the most?” That pushed people firmly into the camp of Donald Trump, saying, “This isn’t America; this isn’t right. By the way, aside from the fact that we can read through the games and understand them, in no way are we better off in our personal lives than we were under Trump. They’re attacking the guy because they have nothing; our lives are worse. They’re attacking him because it’s their only chance of winning.” Certainly the cases in New York were fake.

One thing I know from having met you in the past and from your candor is that your love for your father is exceptionally strong. Your connection to him is second to none. As you said, you were with him in the courthouse every day. What was it like to have to listen to all that and then see your father having to deal with the trumped-up charges? That must have been terrible.
I often think it’s harder when someone attacks someone you love than when they attack you. I’ve felt that for a very long time. I run a $10 billion company, and I’ve done very well. The Trump Organization is in the best place it has ever been. I’ve done a great job navigating the treacherous waters of running a company while in politics and while all this stuff was going on. I was the guy they were parodying every week on Saturday Night Live with the little fidget spinner, but none of those attacks ever bothered me. However, when they went after my father, it did bother me.
I was there when they read off those 34 felony counts. In fact, I was directly behind my father. He turned around, shook my hand, and we walked out of that courthouse with our heads high. He said a few words outside, and then we got into the car and went directly to a fundraiser, but it was business as usual. He kept fighting. There were some low moments. At one point, he said to me, “I’m not sure how, but at the end of the day I promise you we’re gonna win.” He never stopped, and he never took his foot off of that accelerator.
The natural reaction of a lot of people when they’re shot at, not just literally but also figuratively, is to curl up in a ball, go into hiding and try to shield themselves from the world. But it was the exact opposite with him. The more they shot at him, both literally and figuratively, the more fight he had in him. We saw that in Butler when he raised his hands and said, “Fight, fight, fight!” as he was under gunfire. And it was the same thing when he left the courtroom after hearing 34 counts read out. It was “I’m not going to be deterred, and I’m not going to take my foot off the pedal. I’m going to do what I would have done. This is uncomfortable, it’s not fun, it’s cold in that room, I realize how weaponized this is…” Ultimately, the Democratic Party did this to themselves.

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