Eric Trump: It’s ‘Fake News’ That I Said ‘We Have All the Funding We Need Out of Russia’ to Build Golf Courses

Like Father, Like Son

Like father, like son.

Both Donald and Eric Trump Monday morning bright and early were tweeting about “fake news.” The President’s shot was at the “fake news” media that (he says) doesn’t like to mention that the Obama administration gave General Mike Flynn his security clearance. (It wasn’t the Obama administration, it was career security professionals during the Obama administration – and important distinction.)

But Eric Trump was on an entirely different mission.

Here’s the background.

Three years ago, according to award-winning sports writer James Dodson, one of Trump’s PR people urged him to attend the opening of the company’s newest course, the Trump National Golf Club in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Dodson told WBUR when he first met Donald Trump, “I asked him how he was — you know, this is the journalist in me — I said, ‘What are you using to pay for these courses?’ And he just sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million.”

“So when I got in the cart with Eric,” Dodson said in his interview, “as we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’ And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’ Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting.”

Apparently, Eric Trump is furious, and taking a page out of his father’s book, has now decided that a sports writer whose main focus is golf, is now a card-carrying member of the “fake news’ media.

Re-tweeting The Hill’s pickup of the story, Eric Trump says it “is completely fabricated and just another example of why there is such a deep distrust of the media in our country.” Of course, that was followed by the hashtag, “#FakeNews.”

The Trump has funding from Russia isn’t fake news, per Donald Trump, Jr. who in 2008, according to TIME, talked about Russian funding:

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. told a Manhattan real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of trade publication eTurboNews. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

In February, President Trump made clear what constitutes “fake news”: “Any negative polls are fake news,” he said, weeks after being sworn in.

Like father, like son. 

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