49 pages • 1-hour read
Under Siege: My Family's Fight to Save Our Nation
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Key Figures
Eric Trump
Eric Trump is a businessman and media figure who serves as executive vice president of the Trump Organization, where he helps oversee development, acquisitions, operations, and the company’s global golf portfolio. He appeared for multiple seasons as a boardroom advisor on The Celebrity Apprentice, a role that familiarized him with national audiences and with his father’s brand as both business and entertainment. His philanthropic profile has grown through fundraising for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As author of Under Siege, Eric frames the book as a first-person account of growing up in the Trump family, leading the Trump Organization, and participating in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns. As the son of Donald Trump, Eric knows his father very differently from the majority of the public. His book has the stated aim of introducing the public to another side of Donald Trump: the tender, caring family man whom Eric still sees as his father, rather than his President. Throughout the book, for example, Donald refers to Eric as “honey” (57), a surprisingly affectionate term for a man who has so often projected strength in the public sphere. At the same time, however, Eric’s role as the overseer of the Trump business empire means that he has deliberately separated himself from his father’s political life. He feels a frustration at watching what he characterizes as a campaign waged against his father and feeling unable to help. The book, in this respect, is the culmination of this frustration, born of a desire to show the world a different side of Donald Trump.
Just as Eric views his father in two very different ways, his role as the author is to create a synthesis between what he often views as competing worlds. His brother, Don Jr., and his sister, Ivanka, for example, are described as very different people. Don Jr. is the older brother who likes the outdoors, while Ivanka is the younger sister who is more at home in more refined circles. Together, they represent the contrasting aspects of America that Eric has come to understand. Eric, as a consequence, positions himself as the synthesis of rural, middle America and the urban, coastal elite, comfortable in “a suit or in Carhartts” (31). This ability to synthesize two competing identities is one of the many ways in which Eric presents himself as his father’s son. Just as his father is able to straddle the competing worlds of politics, entertainment, and business, Eric views himself as being required to take on similar challenges. Eric may not claim to possess his father’s talent, but he understands his responsibility to at least try.
Though Eric often veers away from making himself emotionally vulnerable, there are points in the book where he allows the audience to glimpse his raw, naked emotion. The death of his mother, for example, is followed by an anecdote in which he—as the first person to arrive at her house after her fatal fall—he took it upon himself to wash the blood from her stairs. This desire to clean, to help, or to deal with a situation shows how he navigates shocking grief and overwhelming pain by trying to make himself useful. Later, in an echo of this moment, he sees his father nearly killed on television. The sight of his father’s blood is a reference to his earlier experience of dealing with his mother’s death. Rather than make himself useful or allow himself to grieve in private, Eric responds to the assassination attempt with an angry desire for revenge. From his father, he learn that success is the best form of revenge. Yet the competing versions of Eric—the calm, unemotional operator and the impulsive, hotheaded son—are evident throughout the book.
Donald J. Trump
Donald J. Trump is a businessman and media personality who is also the 47th president of the United States, having previously served as the 45th. His second, nonconsecutive term began on January 20, 2025, following a first term from 2017 to 2021. Before politics, he ran the Trump Organization and hosted The Apprentice, building a celebrity brand that became the platform for his national campaigns. In Under Siege, he is the central figure around whom family members narrate loyalty, conflict with institutions, and the stakes of electoral politics. He also contributes the book’s Foreword. Trump’s significance to the work is twofold. First, he is the primary subject of the investigations and lawsuits that animate the “siege” (17) frame of the book. Second, his electoral victories in 2016 and 2024 supply the milestones that structure the narrative arc. The book explicitly links Eric Trump’s corporate management and campaign roles to the broader defense of his father’s presidency and agenda, providing a personal insight into what makes Trump’s move into politics so significant.
In Under Siege, Donald Trump is significant not only as a father figure and a politician, but as a literary forebear. Eric seeks to describe his father’s influence on him, and he does this in part by quoting from his father’s books. The Art of the Deal and The Art of the Comeback are two of the most famous books written by Donald Trump (with the help of co-authors). These books, written before Trump’s move into politics, are particularly influential on Eric, who chooses to remain in the world of business as the rest of his family moves to Washington. Similarly, the two books taken together form a narrative arc in which Donald Trump builds an immense fortune, loses it all, then builds it back. Eric uses this literary heritage not only to influence his own writing (borrowing many phrases and stylistic flourishes from his father), but to structure his account of his father’s re-election in 2024. To Eric, the 2024 victory is the political version of his father’s business comeback. Eric’s call for his audience to continue fighting and never give up is informed by his father’s success. As such, the narrative rollercoaster which is Donald Trump’s life is used to inform the structure of the entire book, both in the present and the past.
Lara Trump
Lara Trump is a media host and political operative whose portfolio spans television production, campaign surrogacy, party leadership, and, by 2025, a weekend Fox News primetime program. She served as co-chair of the Republican National Committee in 2024, and the following year, she launched My View with Lara Trump on Fox News, extending her role as a high-visibility communicator within conservative media. Her professional background includes producing Inside Edition and hosting the Trump Productions webcast Real News Update. In Under Siege, Lara writes the second Foreword, signaling her function as a bridge between family narrative and audience. As someone who has married into the Trump family, she plays an important role in establishing the “normalcy” of the Trump family, then dispelling this notion in a positive sense. Eric Trump, she writes, is “anything but normal—in a good way” (10). In this sense, Lara’s role as a family outsider provides a balancing perspective to Eric’s own perspective as a member of the Trump family.
Lara’s campaign work, RNC leadership, and media platform make her a pivotal figure in the book’s argument about messaging, mobilization, and defending the Trump agenda. Throughout the book, Eric underscores the family-centric structure of the political project, which is then mirrored in the writing of the book, with his father and his wife both writing Forewords. That positioning helps explain why Lara figures in the book as interpreter and validator of its themes for movement conservatives and general readers. In addition, Eric credits her work on voter outreach as being key to helping secure victory in 2024. The moment when his father wins Lara’s home state of North Carolina, for example, is a moment of vindication. The room erupts in cheers, directed at Lara who had “become synonymous with the state” (238). Because she occupies roles in party fundraising and grassroots engagement, Lara personifies the campaign-media nexus the book celebrates. To Eric, the role of Lara Trump in the campaign is evidence of the family-first nature of the Trump project, as well as a moment of personal pride in his wife’s ability.
Letitia “Tish” James
Letitia James is the 67th attorney general of New York. Before statewide election she served on the New York City Council and as the city’s public advocate. Nationally she is known for high-profile civil litigation against the Trump Organization, cases against the National Rifle Association, and other corporate accountability matters. James plays a pivotal role in the legal landscape that Under Siege describes. Her 2022 civil fraud suit against Donald Trump and associates results in a large monetary judgment and operating restrictions after a nonjury trial, though in August 2025 a New York appeals court overturns the nearly $500 million penalty, a development that reshapes the post-trial narrative. Separately, in 2024, a jury finds NRA leaders liable for financial misconduct, and a judge later bars former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre from serving as an NRA officer for 10 years, illustrating James’s broader enforcement agenda beyond Trump-related matters. These actions make her a central antagonist in the book’s account of “lawfare” (83).
While Eric uses his opportunity in the book to dismiss any of the charges of corruption levied against him and his family, he focuses on Letitia James as emblematic of the way in which the family’s opponents wield social institutions against them. James is particularly irksome for Eric because she is the attorney general of his home state. James represents a campaign of lawfare, Eric says, which made him want to leave his home and move to Florida. He says that he “didn’t want to leave, but why live somewhere you’re not welcome?” (133). As well as the way in which the legal system is used against his family, Eric uses the example of Letitia James to show how social institutions are turning Americans such as himself away from the Democratic Party.
Joe Biden
Joe Biden was the 46th president of the United States, serving from January 20, 2021, to January 20, 2025, after nearly four decades in the Senate and eight years as vice president under Barack Obama. His policies define the governing baseline against which political opponents, including the Trump movement, organize their critique. In Under Siege, Biden functions as the immediate predecessor to Donald J. Trump’s second term and as the leading figure of the Democratic agenda that Eric opposes. Eric Trump, as the narrator of the book, places himself on the front lines of the 2016 and 2024 elections and of the family’s legal and media battles, implicitly setting Biden’s presidency as the central policy and narrative foil for the book’s claims about censorship, legal persecution, and the national direction. The policy contrasts and electoral stakes that defined 2020-2024 anchor the book’s depiction of a country divided and of a family that sees itself as defending institutional and cultural ground.
In this sense, Biden represents the main antagonistic force in Eric Trump’s narrative. Behind every raid, subpoena, or court case, Eric suggests, is Joe Biden. At the same time, however, Biden himself is largely absent from the narrative. Even in discussions of 2020, Biden remains mostly in the background, a framing that feeds into the accusations made by Eric—and more prominently by his father—that Biden was a weak leader and that other Democratic operatives were pulling the strings of his presidency. Eric has no interest in foregrounding Biden in any real sense, as his accusation is that Biden is merely a puppet from more sinister, more effective, and more youthful Democratic forces. In a narrative sense, Joe Biden is presented as the antagonist in Under Siege. In a figurative sense, however, Eric chooses to criticize Biden by drawing attention to his absence. Biden is a void in the narrative, Eric suggests, just as he was absent in his responsibilities.
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