Don Jr. Shares 3 Lessons He Learned in 1st Salary Negotiation with Dad
With all the talk from the establishment media and the ironically loaded anti-wealth Democrats, you would probably think President Donald Trump is a Scrooge McDuck-esque billionaire who spits on the poor and bathes in gold coins.
Of course, if you took even a second to listen to the words of those closest to him — his family, his employees, his business partners — you would watch that narrative melt away like the wax figures at Madame Tussauds on a 100-degree day.
And judging by one of the childhood stories recounted in his newly released bestseller “Triggered,” Donald Trump Jr. seems intent on turning that thermostat up well past 100.
In an excerpt from the book that was published last week by The Washington Times, Trump Jr. reveals a side of his father that the media is rarely interested in showing with a glimpse into, of all things, the younger Trump’s first salary negotiation.
According to Trump Jr., he walked headlong into his first lesson in negotiation some time after his 15th birthday.
Having previously worked a summer on the docks at his father’s Atlantic City casino, Trump Jr. writes that he was eventually given a “promotion.”
But that promotion landed him far away from the “good tips” and “pretty girls” of Atlantic City. Instead, Trump Jr. was stuck doing manual labor on one of his father’s work sites — and making less money in the process.
So, he did what any uppish teenager would do: He hatched a plan to confront his boss and ask for a better shake.
“Going in, I’m sure I thought, Hey, I’m this guy’s kid, he’ll go easy on me, cut me a break, treat me different from everyone else,” Trump Jr. writes. “I was very wrong.”
Instead, Trump played hardball with his son, telling him flatly that he had not been given more because he had not asked for more.
And, more importantly, he had not earned more.
“That day I learned a few lessons that have stuck with me,” Trump Jr. writes, before detailing the three lessons.
“Number one: You shouldn’t expect to get anything in life that you didn’t work for. Number two: If you don’t ask for it, don’t expect it,” Trump Jr. continues. “And number three: When someone goes around offering things for free, don’t believe them. In most cases, that person is either a liar or an idiot.
“Or a leftist,” he adds, “which means they’re both.”
And this was not the first — or the last — lesson the elder Trump would give his children in work ethic, according to Trump Jr.
Despite a running narrative from the left that the president and his children have no love or respect for the common, working-class American, Don Jr. and his adult siblings — Ivanka and Eric Trump — have long praised their father for making them a “priority” and keeping them away from feelings of entitlement or superiority.
“We grew up walking construction sites,” Ivanka Trump told ABC News in 2015. “He found a way that was true to him to connect with us that maybe is a little less traditional because he was working so hard.”
“During our weekends and summer vacations, my father would take me, my brother, and my sister out to his job sites,” Trump Jr. elaborates in his book, “letting us trail alongside him the way his own father had done with him.”
“We would arrive early in the morning as the crews were setting up, and I would walk with my dad while he inspected.”
“To this day, Eric and I are probably the only sons of a billionaire who could parallel park a Caterpillar D-10 in Manhattan if we had to, because that’s what we did all summer as kids,” Trump Jr. later adds.
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