First son Eric Trump dished on the rules his future president father laid down for their family — and what it was like living with “tough” mom Ivana — on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out Wednesday.
Eric, 41, explained to The Post’s Miranda Devine that his mogul dad gave out some life lessons early on by handing his son a hard hat and sending him to construction sites to work for minimum wage.
“His rules were always no drinking, no drugs, no smoking, get good grades, no tattoos, and don’t trust anyone,” Eric said. “That was pretty much Donald Trump summed up.
“But the other thing my father would not allow — my mother wouldn’t allow it, either — was either excess money or excess time. You give a type-A kid too much time, too much money, bad things are going to happen.”
Before attending Georgetown University, Eric Trump graduated from The Hill boarding school outside Philadelphia, whose prominent alums include his older brother Don Jr., writer-director Oliver Stone, and future Secretary of State James Baker.
“I didn’t know too many kids that didn’t find their way into rehab,” he recalled. “And most of them were plagued by two things: Way too much free time and way too much money.”
His father’s solution “got the recipe right,” Eric went on. “You were staying out of the nightclubs, you were staying away from the hard drugs. … He did it in his own way, but he got it right.”
Eric’s mother Ivana, a former competitive skier turned model, “was as tough as they came,” he said.
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“She was beautiful, she was elegant, and yet if we got this far out of line, you’d have these fake long nails dig into your throat,” Eric noted. “She always liked to wear her ring inverted, and she always would forget about it. It was just like a European thing.
“So she’d grabbed you with her long nails, and you really screwed something up at this point, right? And you get one of these, the flick across [the face]. And so on the way across, you just get diamonds across the side [of your face], and on the way back, you just get bruised,” he said. “So one side of your face would be cut.”
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When asked which of his parents was the disciplinarian, Eric responded: “If you had to get through her to go to my father, you were in real deep crap because she had already taken a pound of flesh out of you.
“That’s probably taboo in today’s culture, right? You’re not allowed to touch your kids. I appreciate that, I respect it and everything else, but what I will tell you is it worked.
“I mean, a couple times she grabbed Don [Jr.] — and [pulled his] pants down and his ass is black and blue — and it certainly worked,” Eric said. “It certainly worked for me. She was an amazing person, amazing mother …I joke that she was kind of Lindsay Vonn, Claudia Schiffer and Joan Rivers kind of melded into one — because she had no filter. That made her very special,” her son continued.
“She could be incredibly elegant, but yet she could tell the toughest construction worker to go ‘F’ himself, right? And she had that in her,” Eric said. “That was the Communist upbringing, but she could be fun. She could be glamorous. She was an unbelievable athlete.”
Ivana Trump died July 14, 2022, at the age of 73 after falling down a spiral staircase at her Upper East Side home, a trauma Eric addresses in his new memoir “Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation.”
“She suffered with certain ailments, and one of them was she just probably drank too much and that ended her life,” Eric suggested to Devine. “That was an ugly day.”
“We loved her,” he said. “She was an amazing woman, amazing woman. I mean, she taught us everything.”
