Donald Trump Jr. is a passionate hunter and fisher.
He’s taking his love of the outdoors in a surprising new direction.
And Donald Trump Jr. launched a new outdoor project that had the media in meltdown mode.
Donald Trump Jr. began his outdoor life on camping trips with his grandfather, Milos Zelnicek, in the Czechoslovakian wilderness.
At boarding school in Pennsylvania, some of his friends took him deer and pheasant hunting.
“I literally just fell in love with it; I read every book there was on the subject,” Trump Jr. said.
“All of those things, I think, are getting lost in today’s instant-gratification society. You know, kids sit there on a video game. Everything’s … instant gratification.”
Now, hunting and fishing are an escape for him from the grind of the campaign trail.
“If I’m in Colorado doing an event, I’ll sneak off for half a day and go fly fishing,” Trump Jr. said.
“Today, I had a pretty crazy day of conference calls, but I’m literally in the car, banging all of those out. I’m gonna go do a quail hunt in upstate Florida before I have to drive back down to Palm Beach to have a business dinner at Mar-a-Lago. … That’s my decompression from the five-speaking-events-a-day general lifestyle that will be my next, let’s call it a year.”
Donald Trump Jr.’s outdoor passion project
Trump Jr. launched Field Ethos, a quarterly magazine and website focused on hunting and fishing, with some of his friends in 2021.
It’s become his passion project that blends the world of outdoors and politics.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem – a potential running mate for former President Donald Trump – was a guest on the website’s podcast.
Field Ethos is aimed at men aged 25 to 55 but Trump Jr. said about a quarter of the readership is women.
It highlights the higher end of hunting with features on international hunting trips and higher-end gear.
“It’s not for everybody, I fully admit that,” Mike Schoby, Field Ethos’ Chief Operating Officer, said. “But there’s plenty of other magazines that fill those niches and go, ‘Hey, you want to buy a deer rifle for under $500 … here’s a great choice for that.’”
Aligning with other passions
A project of Trump Jr. has been to keep hunters politically engaged and voting.
Hunter Nation founder Keith Mark said, “By and large, hunters, depending on the state you look at, vote [at] less than 50 percent, sometimes less than 40 percent. And a third of them aren’t even registered to vote.”
Hunters and anglers represent a potential pool of conservative-leaning voters to tap into.
Polls show that they lean Republican and are concerned about gun rights and conservation.
“They have not been sort of wooed or brought out to vote,” Trump Jr. said. “Organizations like Hunter Nation do a great job with this — understanding that, if you turn out those people, it’s going to generally [benefit] conservatives, but they have been very inactive relative to what you would actually think. And they happen to also populate a lot of the key swing states.”
Field Ethos gives Donald Trump Jr. a chance to blend his passion and politics.
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