Eric Trump is picking up where his dad left off.
The president’s second son teased in an Instagram post on Wednesday that he is reviving Trump Vodka, a liquor brand launched by the Donald in 2007 that flamed out just four years later due to low sales.
“COMING SOON,” Eric captioned the post, taking after his father’s signature all-caps typing style.
Before Trump was even inaugurated for a second term in January, Eric had already been mulling launching a vodka line hitched to the family name, according to CBS News.
“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,” he said at the time. “These conversations, while exciting, have been preliminary and nothing has been finalized.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the Trump Organization for comment.
Just like his father, however, Eric isn’t big on drinking.
“I’m not really a drinker,” he told the New York Post in August. “I really just work.”
Trump Vodka was first announced publicly in 2005.
“By the summer of ’06, I fully expect the most called-for cocktail in America to be the ‘T&T’ or the ‘Trump and tonic,’” Trump, then a famous businessman and TV personality, said in a news release.
The $30 bottles, clad in Trump’s favorite gold, burst onto the scene in 2007 through a glitzy launch party in Los Angeles attended by soon-to-be big names in Hollywood, including Kim Kardashian.
“It’s a smooth vodka, it’s a great-tasting vodka,” Trump said during the launch, even though he’s famously known as a teetotaler.
Trump acknowledged the irony of his latest business venture in a 2005 interview with radio personality Don Imus.
“I know it’s like tobacco companies making cigarettes and then advertising ‘Don’t smoke,’” he said. “But it’s a legal product, and if I don’t sell it, someone else will.”
In the six months before Halloween 2008, Bloomberg reported, Trump Vodka did only $805,000 in sales, down by half from the previous year. By 2011, the drink was no longer being produced.
Trump Vodka is set to join a host of other product lines bearing the president’s name, from $1,000 Bibles to $300 sneakers and his-and-hers perfumes.
Trump snapped earlier this month when an Australian reporter confronted him about whether a president in office “should be engaged in so much business activity.”
“Well, I’m really not. My kids are running the business,” he said. “In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now, and they want to get along with me.”
The post Eric Trump Revives Dad’s Failed Vodka Brand appeared first on The Daily Beast.
