Weird Things About Eric And Lara Trump's Marriage Everyone Ignores
Lara Trump used to work in television for a living, which made her a useful mouthpiece for her father-in-law. Her involvement in Donald Trump's campaign also led to one of the strangest chapters in her marriage to Eric Trump.
Donald didn't immediately realize that Lara's background as an "Inside Edition" producer made her a valuable asset. However, at some point during his first presidential campaign, she caught his attention by being on television. "I remember him calling me and saying, 'Wow, I had no idea that you could do that,'" Lara recalled to USA Today.
As a campaign adviser, Lara was one of Donald's staunchest defenders. She impressed him so much that he endorsed her for the position of RNC co-chair. Lara's subsequent RNC takeover was controversial because she vowed to funnel most of the committee's funds to her father-in-law. However, Jimmy Fallon found her hiring surprising for a different reason: He suggested that Trump had overlooked his own son when choosing who to endorse for the job. "That had to be an awkward phone call," said "The Tonight Show" host. "It's like, 'Eric, I need a smart family member for this job. Put your wife on the phone.'" But "Late Night with Seth Meyers" host Seth Meyers joked that Donald gave Eric a consultation job: "ambassador to wherever's farthest." This is a Trump couple we're talking about, so you know that Lara doing some ethically questionable work for Eric's dad isn't their only marital oddity.
Donald Trump reportedly wanted Eric to marry someone else
Lara Trump told Fox News the first thing she noticed about Eric Trump was his height. "Being probably the two tallest people in the room was really helpful," she said. Lara had no clue the guy who caught her eye during a night out was a Trump. In an interview with She Rises Studios, she shared her reaction to learning who his parents were. "To then think, 'Oh, I'm gonna have to meet Donald and Ivana Trump,' that's kind of terrifying." However, she felt that she received a warm reception from the entire Trump clan.
While Lara believed she had successfully charmed her future in-laws, Michael Cohen claimed that Donald Trump didn't want to share his last name with her. Cohen used to work as the family's attorney, so he possesses some primo Trump gossip. On the "Political Beatdown" podcast, he claimed that Donald wanted to make like a king and orchestrate what he viewed as a more advantageous match for his son. "He had found somebody else that was working at the Trump organization that he wanted Eric to marry," Cohen said. Cohen added that Eric's siblings, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., also weren't fond of the athletic blond. But according to Cohen, Donald's feelings about Lara changed when she discovered the secret to winning his approval. "He couldn't stand her until she started kissing his a**." Even better, Lara did it on TV.
Odd details about the couple's wedding
When Eric Trump asked Lara Yunaska to marry him, the couple had been dating for over five years. "Eric wanted to make very sure," Lara told Fox News. Eric took full advantage of his family's property holdings and businesses when planning his 2013 proposal. According to Haute Living, he got down on one knee on his father's Seven Springs estate and presented his future bride with a ring from Ivanka Trump's now-defunct fine jewelry collection. There's no word on whether he got a discount for limiting his options to his sister's merchandise.
Lara suffered an unfortunate accident before the wedding: Mere weeks before she was supposed to walk down the aisle, she broke both wrists. "I gave myself about three or four hours of a full pity party the day it happened," she told Fox News. On Instagram, she showed off the gruesome surgical scar on her right arm. Despite the severity of her injuries, she ditched her casts for her wedding ceremony. However, she told Grace Ormonde Wedding Style that she wore them underneath fingerless gloves during her reception.
Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner, officiated the wedding at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club. Because Kushner is Jewish and Lara and Eric stood underneath a chuppah to recite their vows, some outlets erroneously reported that the couple had a Jewish wedding. Per Page Six, Jared told Lara during the ceremony, "You are not just gaining a family, you are getting 6 million Twitter followers."
The couple uses their kids to promote their political views
Eric Trump and Lara Trump's son Eric Luke was born in 2017. Two years later, they welcomed their daughter Carolina Dorothy. When Lara was pregnant with Luke, she was concerned about Donald Trump being unable to keep the pregnancy a secret until she was ready to share the news with the public. "We were worried he'd blurt it out at a press conference," she told People.
Her kids didn't just give Donald something to go off-topic about while ranting at the "fake news" media. By 2020, Lara and Eric had become so deeply entrenched in Donald's world that they were using their kids to demonstrate their disdain for his political enemies. On Instagram, Lara shared a video of the children watching their growling dog aggressively shake an unflattering Nancy Pelosi doll. Some Instagrammers were outraged, with one person writing in the comments, "Wow aren't you mother of the year! Way to go — teaching children aggression towards those you differ with politically."
A year later, Eric posted an Instagram photo of Carolina wearing an orange "Make America Great Again" hat. In the caption, he directed his followers to click the link in his bio to purchase the MAGA merch. "Truly scary indoctrination of innocent children," one critic responded. According to Lara, bedtime even gets a bit political at her house. At CPAC 2024, she told the crowd that her children recite the Pledge of Allegiance every night.
How Eric Trump supported his wife's singing career
When Donald Trump decided to add Tom Petty's 1989 classic "I Won't Back Down" to his political rally playlist, the late rocker's family was not happy. In 2020, the Tom Petty estate tweeted that it was issuing a cease and desist order demanding that Donald Trump's campaign stop using the tune. While he was alive, Petty issued similar notices to Republican politicians John McCain, George W. Bush, and Michele Bachmann. But Lara Trump ignored the notice from Petty's family and their advisement that the performer would not have wanted to be associated with what they described as a "campaign of hate." In 2023, she decided to record her own version of the song — and Eric got busy helping her make blatantly disrespectful music great again.
Eric celebrated on Facebook when the song rose to the No. 7 spot on the iTunes country chart, and he fired off a since-deleted rage tweet when he believed that Apple was trying to deter his wife from launching a country music career. "Breaking: @Apple appears to be viscously shadow banning @LaraLeaTrump new song, which immediately upon release, was 31st on the ITunes charts," his tweet read in part (via Mediaite). On Instagram, Eric promoted the cover not by praising its quality but by encouraging his dad's supporters to purchase it to make a political statement. "Let's show the left that we won't back down!" he wrote.
Eric and Lara Trump's peculiar podcast moments
Eric Trump occasionally joins his wife on her podcast, "The Right View." Things can get weird when the couple isn't exalting Donald Trump or complaining about his treatment by the media and the American legal system. In 2021, Lara opened an episode with a comment about how she had her hair styled. "I'm gonna go ahead and start off by apologizing to Eric," she said. "He doesn't like my hair as much straight as he does curly." Eric responded by assuring her that he likes it either way.
When Jay Cutler appeared on the podcast in 2022, Lara asked the former Chicago Bears quarterback and her husband some truly bizarre questions. One of them was, "How many full-sized 6-year-olds do you think you could fight at once before you would become completely overwhelmed?" Eric managed to avoid answering that question, while Cutler's response was 20. As for Lara, she believed she'd go down if attacked by three kindergartners. Lara then asked Cutler and Eric, "What's the largest mammal you think you can knock out with a single punch?" After Cutler said "a baby llama," Eric joked, "So you went from a child abuser a second ago to an animal abuser." Again, Lara didn't press Eric to share his own answer.
Elsewhere in the interview, Eric and Lara agreed that their son could go up to be the next Elon Musk. "He's got a hyper-savant in him," said Eric.