Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is already looking ahead to forming his top White House team and is considering one of his sons as the head of the Interior Department.
In an interview with Petersen’s Hunting, he offered both his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, as the cabinet secretary because they are hunters and anglers and members of key conservation and Second Amendment groups.
In the interview with editor Mike Schoby, Trump said that “ideally” he wants an outdoorsman to run the agency that manages federal land.
“Ideally yes, they’d be better at it,” said Trump.
In the interview with his father, Donald Trump Jr. said that the Interior job has been the talk inside the family for months.
“We understand hunting as conservation,” said Donald Jr. in the interview Schoby did for his magazine and its parent company, Outdoor Sportsman Group.
Donald Jr. said, “Our big inside joke over Thanksgiving and Christmas, now that this thing has become very real with the presidency, is, ‘Hey Don, the only thing you’d be doing in government is actually Interior.’ So I don’t know if I’d be the head of it or just informing the [head], but rest assured that hunters and shooters and others know that I’d have his ear.”
Both sons are long-time hunters and Donald Jr. said that he just became the youngest board member of Boone & Crockett Club, the nation’s oldest hunting and conservation group founded by former President Theodore Roosevelt.
Donald Trump Jr. with a brown trout in Petersen’s Hunting.
In the interview, Trump also said he would end gun free zones around military bases and local schools even if he has to “override the states” with federal laws.
And the long-time National Rifle Association members warned that Democrat Hillary Clinton wants to eliminate the Second Amendment. “I think it’s going to be gone,” he said, adding, “she will destroy the Second Amendment as you know it.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
