Eric Trump, son of president-elect Donald Trump, reportedly has been in talks to launch a new business venture: selling a new family-branded vodka.
Eric Trump Wineries has been discussing the idea of a new vodka line with a limited liability company and the Trump name would be used under a licensing agreement, sources told CBS News. It’s not immediately clear whether the deal would come to fruition before his father is inaugurated on January 20.
“Given the success of Trump Winery and Trump Cidery in Charlottesville, Virginia, several groups have approached our team about expanding our offerings to include spirits,” Eric Trump said in a statement to The Independent. “These conversations, while exciting, have been preliminary and nothing has been finalized.”
Donald Trump is famously a teetotaler, but this isn’t the first vodka line that he has slapped his name on.
Trump Vodka — which Donald Trump once hoped would be called “T&T,” or “Trump and Tonic” — launched in 2005, when he predicted in a news release that the drink would be the “most called-for cocktail”in America by the summer of 2006, Bloomberg reported. But it didn’t go down as smoothly as he had hoped; the product was discontinued in 2011, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The president-elect’s brother Fred died in 1981 after a battle with alcoholism. Trump has said that his brother often warned him against drinking alcohol.
“And to this day I’ve never had a drink, and I have no longing for it. I have no interest in it,” Trump said as president in 2017.
Eric Trump has also said mostly steers clear of drinking. “I’m not really a drinker,” he told the New York Post in August. “I really just work.”
The new line of Trump-branded vodka is just the latest offering from the Trump family. In the 2024 presidential election cycle, the 78-year-old Republican hawked many products. In February, he unveiled “Never Surrender” high-top sneakers, gold shoes glammed up with a large “T” emblazoned on the side and an American flag stitched around the collar. They were being sold at $399.
In March, he posted a video in which he debuted “God Bless The USA” Bibles.
“Happy Holy Week!” he said. “Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.”
More recently, last month, he launched his new perfume and cologne line, including the “Trump for Men” cologne and “Trump for Women” perfume, each of which retails for $199.
When he debuted the new fragrance line, he posted a photo of himself and First Lady Jill Biden at the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris. The caption on Truth Social read: “A fragrance your enemies can’t resist!”
