Former president Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. share more than just their names, the two are also teetotalers.
In his book Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, published in 2019, Don Jr. disclosed that, like his well-known father, he has decided to give up alcohol entirely, per Nicki Swift. “One thing about us Trumps is that we have plenty of willpower,” he declared, explaining why he thinks so: “I would come to find that it was easier for me to ignore alcohol than it was to try to control it. Eventually, I would give up drinking for good.
Alcohol was something that Donald Trump Jr. used to truly enjoy throughout his time in college. But gradually, it became clear that he was an alcoholic without a cutoff point. “Once I got going, it wasn’t easy to stop me — which, when you’re in college, isn’t a huge problem, as long as you’re getting your work done,” he explained in his tell-all book.
After starting to work in Aspen, while planning a career, Don Jr realized if he wanted to do something in life, he needed to think about sobriety. “Once I started thinking about a career and a life beyond school, it was. To be honest, I didn’t know how to drink in moderation,” he confessed. In the end, he concluded that while his “all-or-nothing personality” was excellent for his business sense, it was “not so good for vices.” He added, “With my personality, drinking alcohol was a recipe for disaster.”
In his book, Donald Trump Jr. also shared candidly that his decision to stop drinking for good was significantly influenced by “warning signs” within his family, namely the passing of his uncle, Frederick Trump Jr. who died of a heart attack caused by alcoholism when he was just 42 years old.
Don Jr’s famous father Donald Trump also felt the same way about alcohol. “I never had alcohol, for whatever reason,” the former president once disclosed while speaking to a group of people in the White House Rose Garden. “Can you imagine if I had? What a mess I would be. I would be the world’s worst,” he quipped.
Donald Trump has also never shied away from frankly speaking about his late brother’s drinking. “He was a great guy, a handsome person. He was the life of the party. He was a fantastic guy, but he got stuck on alcohol,” Trump opened up in a 2015 PEOPLE interview about how his older brother’s life influenced him. “And it had a profound impact, and ultimately [he] became an alcoholic and died of alcoholism. He would tell me, ‘Don’t drink ever.’ He understood the problem that he had and that it was a very hard problem.”
