If you’ve watched U.S. politics from the sidelines and wondered how “lawfare,” media narratives, and family loyalty collide behind the scenes, Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation claims to be the missing backstage pass—told by the son tasked with running the Trump Organization while everything was on fire.
Eric Trump argues that a coordinated political, legal, and media “siege” targeted his father and the broader “America First” movement—and that surviving it required disciplined leadership, relentless resilience, and a values-anchored family/business culture.
Under Siege threads together first-person anecdotes (e.g., running the company during investigations and trials), on-the-record citations (e.g., news stories, court filings, and congressional references in the endnotes), and contemporaneous episodes like the Supreme Court immunity decision and press coverage that, in Eric Trump’s telling, reveal institutional bias and “lawfare.”
Under Siege is best for readers of contemporary political memoirs, business-leadership case studies under pressure, and those interested in first-person accounts of media strategy and legal combat; not for readers seeking a neutral, academic history or a critical distance from the Trump family perspective.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation by Eric Trump, with a foreword by Donald J. Trump, is published by Simon & Schuster. The publisher summarizes it as an “eye-opening memoir” spanning childhood and campaign war rooms to corporate triage through investigations.
Genre-wise, Under Siege sits at the junction of political memoir and business-leadership reflection, with recurrent themes of lawfare, media framing, and organizational endurance. Eric Trump emphasizes his unusual vantage point—“a thirty-three-year-old tasked with running a multibillion-dollar empire for the commander in chief”—and frames the narrative as both personal and institutional survival.
Under Siege’s thesis is telegraphed early and often: that “censor, de-bank, and de-platform” tactics and serial investigations aimed to “erase our voices” and “crush political opponents by any means possible,” and that beating this “siege” required clarity of mission, disciplined leadership, and family unity.
This is a memoir written from the inside lane.
The foreword underlines Eric’s bona fides—“He just works, fights, and WINS”—and situates the book as a look “inside our world” of campaigns, courts, and company triage. The author’s rationale for writing is explicit: he believes most Americans “don’t grasp the extent of the corruption and hate” directed at his father and those around him, and he wants to log both the playbook and the costs.
It is not a neutral chronicle.
It is a survival brief.
It is framed as a movement manual as much as a memoir.
Across scenes of leadership hand-offs, Eric Trump describes how a company that preferred “steel… chandeliers… marble… and every office lease” had to reorient toward legal defense, reputational risk, and employee morale. He recounts shifting from “boss” to “leader,” calibrating when to “zoom in—or out,” and harvesting his father’s habit of condensing complexity into memorable directives. These sections will appeal to readers looking for practical leadership heuristics under duress, whether or not they agree with the politics.
The tone is assertive.
The reference scaffolding (endnotes and contemporaneous clippings) is thick enough to orient fact-checking.
2. Background
The family and firm are the protagonists as much as Eric.
The narrative’s backdrop includes celebrity-culture glare, campaign cycles, and a global portfolio whose operational continuity and financing were repeatedly stress-tested by litigation and reputational waves. Family vignettes—foreword praise, acknowledgments to team members, and interior anecdotes about siblings and spouses—are used to demonstrate cultural capital (loyalty, stamina, “no problem children”) and to contrast internal cohesion with external “siege.”
Under Siege’s legal-political context includes the Russia-collusion saga, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and downstream trials.
These are presented as evidence of weaponization rather than isolated disputes.
Eric Trump’s background chapter interleaves business mechanics (property standards, renovations, operating discipline) with political proximity, reinforcing the position that the family had to learn governance and law quickly—and expensively.
The claim is not simply that institutions err but that they coordinate.
The endnotes section demonstrates Eric’s attempt to anchor arguments in outside reporting (CBS News on the special counsel’s Biden documents report; Fox News coverage of the Mar-a-Lago “deadly force” line in an operations order; Politico posting of Trump’s own statement, etc.). Readers should understand these citations reflect the author’s selection and emphasis.
3. Under Siege Summary
This is a long book, and the following extended overview is designed so you don’t need to flip back to the text to remember its argument.
Across early chapters and flash-forward scenes, Eric Trump constructs “siege logic”: that from 2016 onward, political, bureaucratic, and corporate actors tried to delegitimize his father before governing began—“night after night… the goal wasn’t truth—it was to delegitimize the presidency and poison the minds of millions.” He then widens the frame to a claimed ecosystem that “censor[s], de-bank[s], and de-platform[s]” dissidents, “erase[s] [their] voices,” and “starve[s] [the] movement of… oxygen.”
Operationally, he writes, that siege forced the Trump Organization into perpetual crisis mode, redistributing executive attention from building projects to survival tasks.
He narrates the Mar-a-Lago search, the civil fraud case in New York, and what he characterizes as judicial malpractice—where “the judge… said I was not credible,” despite witnesses, and where he and Don Jr. were fined and barred as New York corporate directors. His takeaway is that the process is the punishment: bonds and sanctions drain liquidity, while reputational harm poisons counterparties regardless of verdicts.
He sketches his father’s method: micro-attention to detail paired with message compression—the ability to “distill complexity into clarity” in a “superpower” that carried rallies and negotiations alike. He contrasts talkers and doers; he explains how he learned to move from hands-on scrutiny to scalable delegation. These pages read like a field manual on running an enterprise through asymmetric political risk.
The media chapter recapitulates conflicts with platforms and broadcasters.
Anecdotes about the Steele dossier, FISA warrants, and the infamous Lesley Stahl exchange are marshaled to argue that the collusion narrative was “fabricated,” with warrants later found to include “material misstatements.” The claim is that investigations “cost Americans hundreds of millions” and distorted U.S.–Russia signaling, all to muddy a 2016 election’s legitimacy.
Part One — “Before the Siege”
Eric Trump opens by framing the “siege” as a years-long campaign against his family and the political movement he associates with “foundational American values.” He bookends this claim with two hard dates: the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022—an event he says personally jolted him—and, later in the narrative, the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt, which he calls a culmination rather than a beginning.
Part One then rewinds to portraiture: Donald Trump as a contrarian, relentlessly detail-oriented builder and father, and Ivana Trump as a tough, no-nonsense parent who pushed the children to work early and often. Eric recalls summers of manual labor on golf courses and boats and relates a formative anecdote about negotiating a $2-per-hour raise as a teenager—“you don’t ask, you don’t get.” The passages underline the family’s emphasis on craftsmanship, frugality, and hustle.
A key business thread is the 2007–2008 cycle: while the siblings pursued a billion-dollar Charlotte tower, Donald Trump warned a crash was imminent; they backed off. When the 2008 financial crisis hit “like a tidal wave,” the company faced fewer liabilities and moved to acquire distressed, high-quality assets—club by club, hotel by hotel—often “for pennies on the dollar.” Eric presents this as a study in timing and discipline, learned from Donald Trump’s survival of the high-interest-rate 1980s–1990s and near-$1 billion debt fight.
Part One also charts Eric’s pivot from investment banking to the family firm (Houlihan Lokey’s FRG, then into a “windowless cubicle” at Trump Organization). He stresses an internal “sink or swim” standard—no nepotistic sinecures, heavy emphasis on operations—and a hands-on culture where loading docks and back-of-house inspections set the bar.
Finally, the section turns to media and 2016 politics. Having mastered unscripted TV on The Apprentice, the family brings that improvisational style to the campaign.
Eric emphasizes how live rallies and constant cable appearances delivered “ratings” and free reach, contrasting that with other candidates’ scripted “zingers.” He spotlights moments such as Mike Huckabee’s debate defense and describes how networks aired full rallies because they drew viewers.
Overall, Part One is a values-and-skills prologue: hard work and timing in business; a family apprenticeship in detail, resilience, and live-fire media; and the claim that the “siege” pre-dates any single legal case, with 2022 and 2024 representing highly visible inflection points.
Part Two — “Under Siege”
Part Two begins with the practical problem of a business empire as a president enters office. On January 11, 2017, attorney Sheri Dillon publicly announced that Donald Trump would have “no role” in new deals; Eric and Donald Jr. would run the company, and Eric received power of attorney over hundreds of legal entities.
Eric highlights that declining opportunities carried real financial cost, citing Donald Trump’s claim he turned down a $2 billion Dubai deal “over the weekend” before the inauguration.
The narrative quickly shifts from ethics walls to investigations and what Eric calls “lawfare.” He recounts how in 2017—months after the inauguration—New York authorities subpoenaed his pediatric-cancer foundation. He contrasts the Eric Trump Foundation’s low expense ratios and St. Jude accolades with contemporaneous criticism of the Clinton Foundation, including “over $50 million” in travel since 2003; he argues the scrutiny of his charity served as a distraction and a headline-generation machine. The paperwork haul took nearly three months.
The section then catalogs New York-based prosecutions and civil actions. He argues prosecutors went after longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg as leverage, noting a 2023 conviction and stints at Rikers at age 76. He points to Judge Juan Merchan’s role, Alvin Bragg’s 2022 election and platform, and statistics such as Bragg’s downgrading of 52% of felonies to misdemeanors and a felony conviction rate “barely half.” These numbers are presented to contrast leniency for street crime with aggressive pursuit of Trump-world cases.
The largest single financial figure in Under Siege appears here: after a New York civil verdict, Eric describes being told to secure a bond against a penalty he characterizes as unprecedented, detailing public posts showing accruals—“$464,576,230.62” on February 23, 2024 and “+$114,553.04” the next day—as well as a later appellate action that reduced the bond requirement to $175 million and stayed enforcement, which also lifted prohibitions on Eric and Don Jr. doing business in New York. He claims New York regulators quietly told financial institutions, “Don’t touch that Trump bond.”
Beyond New York, Eric threads in national “weaponization” themes: surveillance of financial transactions for “MAGA/Trump” terms in early 2024; pressure campaigns against attorneys and potential gag orders; and what he calls media-driven delegitimization during the first term (“Russia,” impeachment, and Charlottesville controversies). He cites John Durham’s findings about predication failures for “Crossfire Hurricane,” with the claim that 2025 releases reaffirmed problems and that the FBI apologized for errors in 2020.
Finally, he returns to a refrain: that this “siege” is designed to drain time, sap resources, and chill supporters—extending to debanking and de-platforming—and he quotes headlines promising prosecutions beyond Election Day. The section ends with an argument that the costs were vast: “hundreds of millions” in legal fees and opportunities foregone.
Part Three — “Crushing the Siege”
The final part shifts tone from defense to counteroffensive. Eric describes relocating the Trump Organization’s headquarters to Florida after he and Lara moved, noting that “more than half” of employees volunteered to move—an anecdote meant to show internal cohesion under pressure. He also lists new international licensing projects announced in 2025, stressing they were years in the making and not a reaction to 2024.
He then revisits the legal front. The Mar-a-Lago search on August 8, 2022 is recounted in granular detail: an attorney kept outside the gates; an instruction to turn off security cameras refused. Later, he highlights the July 15, 2024 ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon granting a motion to dismiss the classified-documents indictment on appointment/funding grounds—what he casts as a constitutional vindication after months of procedural disclosures.
The section’s emotional apex is the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Eric writes that he had publicly warned the escalation would turn physical; Under Siege describes seconds of chaos, Secret Service CAT operators surging, his father rising with a bloodied face, pumping a fist, and shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The scene ends with transport to Butler Memorial Hospital—about eleven miles away—and what Eric frames as a spiritual reaffirmation and political inflection. He repeats that opponents had by this point “charged him ninety-one times,” tried to bankrupt and silence him, and ultimately “tried to kill him.”
Eric also narrates election-night rhythms and early-vote strategy, crediting Lara Trump’s push to embrace mail-in/early voting. He lists several real-time calls (Indiana ~7:07 p.m. ET, then Kentucky, Florida at ~8:01 p.m. ET) and describes county-level litigation and poll-watcher disputes in Pennsylvania. The throughline is organizational discipline—“one team, one fight”—and a willingness to learn from 2016 and 2020 tactics.
Part Three closes by broadening beyond the family: he argues the “siege” has targeted allies and ordinary supporters through censorship, de-platforming, and de-banking, and that victories—legal, organizational, electoral—are cumulative. The tone is defiantly forward-looking: winning commercial “warfare,” weathering court fights, and channeling the shock of July 2024 into renewed mobilization.
Combined Highlights
- Aug 8, 2022: FBI search at Mar-a-Lago; attorney initially kept off the property; request to shut off cameras refused.
- Jan 11, 2017: Public pledge to separate Donald Trump from new business deals; Eric/Don Jr. take control; Eric receives power of attorney over “hundreds” of entities; $2 billion Dubai opportunity declined.
- 2017: New York subpoena of Eric Trump Foundation; three months of document production; comparison to Clinton Foundation’s “$50+ million” travel spend since 2003.
- 2022–2024 (New York cases): Public tally posts show $464,576,230.62 (Feb 23, 2024) plus $114,553.04 (Feb 24); appellate court later reduces required bond to $175 million and stays enforcement.
- Prosecutorial statistics cited by the author: Alvin Bragg’s office “downgraded 52% of felony cases” and “won barely half” of felony convictions (context: Merchan/Bragg/Weisselberg passages).
- July 13, 2024: Attempted assassination in Butler, PA; the author’s account centers on the “Fight! Fight! Fight!” moment and the 11-mile transport to Butler Memorial Hospital.
- July 15, 2024: Judge Aileen Cannon grants the motion to dismiss the classified-documents indictment against Donald Trump.
- 2025: New overseas projects announced (framed as multi-year pipelines); continuing expansion from Florida HQ.
The book’s central claim is that the Trump family—and by extension, a political movement—was “under siege,” a term Eric uses in its literal sense of compulsion and sustained attack. He frames years of investigations and media cycles as coordinated pressure to force surrender, culminating symbolically in the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Key proof-points, as presented by Eric, include: (1) the Durham critique of the FBI’s predication and methods in the Trump-Russia probe; (2) acknowledgments about FISA “misstatements/omissions” in the Carter Page context; (3) the 2024 Cannon ruling dismissing the classified-documents case; and (4) his own charity episode—heavily publicized but, he says, unsupported—leading to a strategic pause to protect donors.
The personal costs recur—112 subpoenas, business headwinds, reputational fire—but so does the resilience script: compartmentalize at home, lean into craftsmanship and work, and keep the family bond primary. That resilience culminates in the 2024 win and an epilogue that reframes prior losses as catalysts for institutional learning and staffing reform.
Above all, Eric positions the story as both a memoir of apprenticeship and a case study in political hardening: the builder’s mindset transferred to campaigns and courtrooms, the family’s inner discipline made public, and the siege repurposed into a claim of mandate. Whether readers accept his interpretation will hinge on how they weigh those cited episodes; the book’s narrative is clear—“Welcome to the fight. Welcome to my family.”
4.Under Siege Analysis
The author states three aims: document the breadth of attacks, narrate what it was like to run the company during them, and honor teammates.
He supports these aims in several ways: (1) documentary endnotes (mainstream and partisan outlets alike), (2) first-person contemporaneity (who said what, where he was), and (3) institutional texture (what it meant for financing, operations, and morale). The method is polemical but self-aware—he concedes the tone is not an attempt at more “media exposure” so much as a ledger of grievances and grit.
Does the book fulfill its purpose?
As a movement memoir, yes: it is readable, quotable, and emotionally direct; as a leadership case study, it is strongest where it details process (delegation, morale, rhythm under subpoena tempo). As a balanced historical document, it is necessarily incomplete: cross-examination is rare, and counter-evidence is often presented only to be dismissed as proof of bias.
The strongest parts are undeniably vivid.
The weakest parts show the hazard of advocacy prose posing as historiography.
Where the claims intersect with verifiable timelines, the publisher page and major retailers corroborate basic publication facts; however, the public reception is polarized, ranging from best-seller spikes to comedic TV skits and negative coverage—underscoring that readers will receive Under Siege through their priors as much as its pages.
Evidence and external context (select corroborations & counter-signals)
- Publication details (publisher, format, date, ISBN). Simon & Schuster listing confirms title, author(s), and marketing copy that matches the memoir’s scope (campaigns, lawfare, organizational leadership).
- Retail metadata & charts. Amazon/Waterstones entries corroborate ISBN and page count; retailer copy mirrors the publisher blurb. (Retailer rankings and pricing fluctuate and should be treated as ephemeral marketing signals, not scholarly measures.)
- Media reception. Pop-culture and political press range from mocking segments (Jimmy Kimmel Live bit involving Trixie Mattel) to critical takes; such pieces illustrate the very “media weaponization” frame Eric invokes, though they are also part of normal cultural critique.
As a narrative of pressure, it lands.
The legal-process chapters are paced like a boardroom thriller—bonds, credibility findings, and asset valuations (e.g., the Mar-a-Lago appraisal controversy Eric flags) creating genuine stakes for an operations chief trying to keep doors open and staff paid.
As a claim of coordination, it invites skepticism and sourcing.
The book cites mainstream and right-leaning outlets alike, but readers should note selection bias: incidents are curated to reinforce the “siege” thesis.
As a leadership-under-fire text, it’s unexpectedly useful.
Five concrete takeaways emerged for me:
(1) Decision altitude—zooming in/out as the tempo demands.
(2) Ritualized standards—start audits at the loading dock; symbolic cleanliness is operational signal.
(3) Message compression—clarity beats volume in moments of chaos.
(4) Morale math—when external actors set the agenda (subpoenas, press), leaders must over-index on internal presence.
(5) Cost realism—accept the process-is-punishment dynamics and budget time/treasury accordingly.
If you want neutral historiography, you won’t find it here.
If you want a movement’s interior monologue, you will.
On statistics and claims.
The memoir references “over one hundred subpoenas” and other large-N legal frictions experienced by the family and company; while the book itself is the primary source for such counts, they are framed as lived experience and are not cataloged exhaustively in an appendix. Where broad media-system claims are made (e.g., “tens of millions” censored or de-banked), the text uses rhetorical scale more than audit trails; readers seeking policy-grade quantification should triangulate with independent civil-liberties reports.
5. Strengths and weaknesses
Strengths (pleasant).
- Voice & cohesion. The book reads like a single voice; the interleaving of family, firm, and movement adds texture instead of whiplash.
- Leadership craft. The operational pages (how to keep standards and morale under subpoena tempo) are concrete and transferable.
- Document trail. Endnotes make it easier to re-trace key public claims (even if you ultimately disagree with his interpretations).
Weaknesses (unpleasant).
- Confirmation bias. Opposing facts and counter-inferences rarely get equal airtime; the narrative can read as closed-loop.
- Causality leaps. At times the rhetoric jumps from bad optics to intentional coordination without the sort of documentary burden social scientists would require.
- Triumphalism. The epilogue’s all-systems-go victory note may gratify supporters but will feel like campaign copy to skeptics.
6. Reception, criticism, and influence
Public reception has been predictably polarized.
On one end are best-seller bursts on retail platforms and friendly write-ups; on the other are critical takes, late-night comedy bits, and social-media mockery—echoing the book’s own chapters on media dynamics. These indicators are volatile by definition, but they do reflect cultural salience at release.
Coverage also zeroed in on the promotional optics (e.g., event clips), sometimes overshadowing substantive discussion of claims and endnotes; ironically, that phenomenon itself serves as a case study in the media-framing argument Under Siege advances.
7. Comparison with similar works
If you’ve read memoirs like Donald J. Trump’s Letters to Trump or Jared Kushner’s Breaking History, you’ll recognize the insider vantage point and campaign-era recounting—but Eric Trump’s emphasis is heavier on operational leadership under legal pressure than on policy formation. Readers of Peter Navarro’s and Kellyanne Conway’s books may note similar siege-framed rhetoric, but Under Siege is more focused on running a private enterprise under a public storm than on West Wing policy mechanics.
Where it differs most is its family-as-firm perspective—how loyalty norms, property standards, and brand discipline collide with investigations, civil suits, and media cycles. The narrative often reads like a resilience playbook more than a policy manifesto.
8. Conclusion
If you want an insider’s movement memoir with leadership-under-fire lessons, Under Siege will hit your target.
If you require neutral scholarship or adversarial cross-examination of Trump-world claims, it won’t.
For general readers, Under Siege works as both story and signal: you’ll leave with a coherent sense of how the author believes the last decade unfolded and a toolkit of how one family-run enterprise tried to survive it—warts, wins, and all. For specialists (media scholars, political scientists, white-collar litigators), it’s a primary-source narrative worth analyzing alongside independent datasets and case dockets.