It was all love at this match.
Lara Trump met her future father-in-law for the first time at the US Open in 2008, the same year she started dating Eric — “and he couldn’t have been nicer to me,” she told The Post.
Her then-new boyfriend, the youngest of Donald and his first wife Ivana’s three children, didn’t give her advance notice that Donald was holding court at the tennis tournament.
“My husband did not prepare me at all,” Trump, 42, said.
“I thought, ‘I’m just sitting in the bleachers,’ like the normal seats cause that’s kind of how I grew up. And then we go into a suite and there’s Donald Trump and Melania Trump.”
The patriarch, who grew up in Jamaica Estates, Queens, just five miles away from the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, where the US Open kicks off on Sunday, served some questions to his son’s new love interest, who was intimidated at first.
“He wanted to know about me. The general small talk, where I’m from, where I went to school, what I was doing,” said Lara, a North Carolina native who attended NC State and was working as a producer on “Inside Edition” at the time.
“I was still kind of nervous and not sure if I was saying the right things.”
The Donald scored points with his future daughter-in-law when he broke the ice — with ice cream.
“And then he looked at me and he said, ‘You know what? I’m going to get an ice cream. Do you like ice cream? Do you want an ice cream?’” she recalled.
“And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Donald Trump eats ice cream.’ But as soon as he got an ice cream, I was like, ‘You know what? I can do this. This is going to be okay. This is a normal guy.’ I mean, as normal as you can imagine Donald Trump would be.”
In hindsight, Lara, who doesn’t remember what flavor he got, said she was glad their first meeting came as a surprise.
“In some ways, I actually am happy I didn’t know because I didn’t have a second to think about it until it was right in front of me.”
Six years later, in 2014, Lara married Eric at Mar-a-Lago, and said it was that first experience with the future president that made it easy for her to campaign for him during his initial run in 2016.
“I think the fact that I had such an easy time interacting with him and he really was nothing but nice and warm to me from the very beginning, really did make me want to go out when he started running for president the first time and at least talk about the person that I knew,” said Lara, who hosts the Fox News show “My View with Lara Trump,” which she calls “an inside look of what is happening behind the scenes in Washington.”
“I didn’t know a lot about the politics of everything at that time, but I knew the man and I knew who he was. You know, there really is only one Donald Trump. And to be able to call him my father-in-law is such an honor and just one of the greatest things I could have ever imagined.”
