Diaper Don?

Decades before he started making headlines as a First Son with a controversial record of meeting with Russian nationals, President Donald Trump‘s eldest child was a self-confessed hard-partying fraternity brother at the University of Pennsylvania.

There, Donald Trump Jr. was so notorious for his strong interest in women that a friend who went to frat parties with him tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story: “Everyone was warned to stay away from Donnie Trump.”

It’s a warning that reverberates with similarities to the reputation his father built long outside of college.

In October 2016, The Washington Post published a 2005 video that showed Trump, then in his late 50s, bragging about forcing himself on women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” the reality-TV star and businessman said in the 2005 conversation. “Grab ’em by the p—y.”

In the months that followed, Trump was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, including PEOPLE writer Natasha Stoynoff, who alleged that Trump attacked her during a 2005 interview at Mar-a-Lago. He has denied all of the allegations.


At his father’s alma mater, the Wharton School at Penn, Don Jr.’s reputation also included getting into “drunken, ‘do-you-have-any-idea-who-I-am?’ fights,” according to a 2004 profile in New York magazine.

“To be fairly candid, I used to drink a lot and party pretty hard,” Don Jr. admitted in the 2004 interview. “And it wasn’t something that I was particularly good at. I mean, I was good at it, but I couldn’t do it in moderation.”

In another account of Don Jr.’s college years, Scott Melker, a former Penn classmate, wrote on Facebook: “Donald Jr. was a drunk in college. Every memory I have of him is of him stumbling around on campus falling over or passing out in public, with his arm in a sling from injuring himself while drinking.”

Regarding his past drinking, a source who worked for the Trump family tells PEOPLE: “‘There is a lot of impulsive behavior in the family.”

After graduating, Don Jr. initially declined to join the family business, instead moving to Aspen, Colorado, where he hunted, fished, camped, lived out of the back of a truck, and bartended, according to Vanity Fair — which also reported that Don Jr. stopped talking to his father during this time.

He returned to the East Coast to join the Trump Organization in 2001, the same year he spent 11 hours in a New Orleans jail on charges of public drunkenness.

During his partying days at college, a drunken Donald Trump Jr. once told rivals from another school, “That’s all right! That’s OK! You’re gonna work for us some day!” according to a new book.

“Born Trump,” written by Vanity Fair senior reporter Emily Jane Fox, sheds new light on the president’s four eldest children, including anecdotes from the eldest son’s hard-partying time at the University of Pennsylvania, the school President Trump attended as well.

This particular incident happened 1,500 miles away from the Ivy League school’s Philadelphia campus at a bar during a spring break trip to Jamaica, as Donald Trump Jr. and his fellow Penn students bemoaned their basketball team’s loss in March 1999 to Florida during a March Madness game.

“The inebriated fans on both sides erupted. Slaps on the back. Shots to celebrate or numb the pain. Sloppy high fives or consoling pats on the back,” Fox wrote. “But Don Jr. took it a step further. He climbed atop a table in the bar and started a chant that he’d hoped would catch on with the rest of his fellow disgruntled Quakers in the room.”

One Penn student who was at the bar pointed out, “These were kids from a state school.”

“The subtext wasn’t hard for anyone to figure out. And it just came out so easy,” the student told Fox of Donald Jr.’s outburst.

That incident was part of a broader narrative about the eldest Trump son’s college days.

He was given the nickname “Diaper Don” by his peers for his habit of passing out from too much drinking in classmates’ beds.

“Diaper Don would wake up in some stranger’s dorm room or off-campus apartment or bedroom in his frat house, covered in piss, walk back to his own room, and get blitzed that evening or the next anew,” Fox wrote.