Our Founder and Editor-in-Chief met with Donald Trump, Jr. for breakfast in Dallas at the Park City Club. Don discussed specific challenges to the hunting community. He is extremely articulate, knowledgeable, and even to a degree, charismatic. Unknown in the popular press, he is a nationally ranked competitive shooter. Donald Jr. has taught all five of his kids about shooting, the outdoors and hunting. He refuses to spend a weekend in the city with his kids and they hit the outdoors immediately at the end of the work week. He pointed out whenever his face appears on news channels they always run a script below it: “KILLED ELEPHANTS IN AFRICA”, even though these particular elephants were raiding crops and he had legal CITES permits for the hunt. (Editorial Note: Sure enough that night I saw Donald Jr. speaking on TV and the “Elephant Killer” banner ran.)
As good a shot as Donald is he concedes Hillary can out shoot him because Hillary claims she shot ducks with a rifle as a kid, and he couldn’t hit a duck with a RIFLE if his life depended on it.
More seriously he pointed to the issue of the New York Wildlife Regulation Department where 85% of the revenue comes from selling big game tags, specifically bear and deer. Yet, next year the only hunter in the entire department will retire. This disconnect between the regulators and sportsmen is institutional and endemic in state and federal governments. One important goal of his father’s administration will be to see a future for conservationist hunters making the Regs within Fish & Wildlife to even out this crippling imbalance.
More importantly, Donald Jr. said his father was considering him for the post of Secretary of the Interior. He is an outsider with feet on the ground experience in sustainable conservation. He has lived in the outdoors since he was a very young child spending every summer with his grandparents in the forest of Czechoslovakia where he learned woodcraft and hunting skills. Donald Jr. has hands on entrepreneurial experience running big building projects in his own right, and a deep love and respect for wildlife, the outdoors and our legacy of hunting. He invokes memories of another wealthy Republican New York scion that had a profound effect on conservation worldwide – Theodore Roosevelt. As a presidential aspirant, Donald Trump relies heavily on advice from his children. Unlike many of the wealthy elite, they are all accomplished and educated. More importantly, they’re perceptive about the system and its flaws.
In one context Donald Jr. possibly could have been joking, in the context of the statement, I felt he was serious. Regardless, of whether he is nominated or not; he will have input in this critical decision. He will also, at a minimum, have direct policy input on sustainable conservation. As Donald Trump Jr. pointed out, the very future of hunting is at stake in this election.
- David Sefton