Shooting Sports Helped Eric Trump Avoid Substance Abuse

Eric Trump is an avid and enthusiastic hunter. (Photo: Maggie Haberman/The New York Times)

Eric Trump, the middle son of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, could be in a much different place than he is today. The stereotypical rich kid, he could have spent his life partying, abusing drugs, and shirking responsibility. Like many of his peers, he could be in rehab right now.

Instead, he’s risen to be the Executive Vice President of the Trump foundation, the President of Trump Winery, and the founder of the Eric Trump foundation, a charitable organization that raises money for children battling life-threatening diseases at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

In a recent interview with Circa, he credits his ability to stay out of trouble to three things: hunting, fishing, and shooting sports.

• “People often ask me, ‘Eric, I see so many people of your generation, and so many people that you went to school with that went a very, very different track than you in life.’ They got caught with substance abuse problems, they got caught with drug problems, they went to rehab and I certainly saw that in various peers of mine.”
• “I often tell people I credit a lot of that to the shooting sports. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed competing in trap and skeet shooting. They were things that grounded me. I loved going out fishing with my grandfather as a kid.”
• “We’d get up early in the morning and we’d go out on his little boat and we’d just have a great time and it was an amazing experience and I really still hold those experiences true to my heart and even now as I watch the next generation of our family grow up, my little nieces, my little nephews, I don’t have kids yet, but there’s nothing more that I love than taking them for a walk in the woods or taking them fishing, and something again that I think kept me on the right path in life and something that I appreciate.”
• “So the second amendment is a big part of my life and I believe in because I think it can do tremendous good. The outdoors, I’d love to see more millennials, you know it’s beautiful, it’s peaceful, and you know it’s been something very special to my life.”

Both of Donald Trump’s sons—Eric and Don, Jr.—are ardent proponents of the Second Amendment. Trump, Sr., has mentioned his sons’ love of hunting and shooting on numerous occasions, telling Outdoor Life that “they have a tremendous passion for it.”

“I don’t devote very much time to it because I’m so busy with everything,” Trump, Sr., continued, “but Eric and Don absolutely love it, and they’re expert at it. They’re expert shots, and they’re expert at it.”

Trump isn’t the only presidential candidate to tout his experience with guns and hunting.

In what now seems like an alternate dimension, Hillary Clinton once claimed to have learned to shoot from her dad “behind the cottage that my grandfather built.” She also said she’s been duck hunting though she admitted (in the understatement of the century) that she’s “not a hunter.”

That was eight years ago, when Clinton was running for president against a little-known senator from Illinois named Barak Obama. Today, she’s outpaced her former rival in her calls for gun control. Clinton has unabashedly pushed for a reinstatement of the failed “assault weapons” ban and makes no effort to hide her disdain for the firearms owners from whom she once sought support.