Eric Trump has fond memories of his family life before his father became president.

“It seems like our lives have morphed in so many ways over the years,” the Trump Organization EVP told Yahoo Finance’s Adam Shapiro at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit in New York City on Thursday. “We were a nice real estate family. … We built condominiums all over New York and other places. And we grew that business very, very quickly.”

‘We do everything together’

While the family was already wealthy before Eric was born, his mother Ivana Trump has said he and his siblings had a normal childhood.

''Believe me, my children are not spoiled,'' she told the Chicago Tribune in an interview in 1989, when Eric was 5 years old. ''I wouldn’t be working if they were. I’m a European, a very traditional woman, and I believe in my children working hard. After school, they’re off to ballet, tennis, painting lessons, play dates, birthday parties — which keeps them out of trouble — and I’m right there at 5:30 to go from one to the other with their homework. We all have dinner at 7. No business. No phone calls.”

In 2006, then-22-year-old Eric Trump told The New York Times that his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., had “always been my best friend, a mentor… In a way, he raised me. My father, I love and I appreciate, but he always worked 24 hours a day.”

Eric Trump on Thursday stressed that the family was close-knit. “As a family, we do everything together. We love each other. We are very loyal to each other. And if one person does something, we all hop in and we help,” he said.

A series of ‘sudden’ events

The family’s success was based on a series of “sudden” and surprising events, Eric Trump said at the All Markets Summit.

“All of a sudden, we started doing some of the best hotels in the world and golf courses and wineries. And a little show called ‘The Apprentice’ came along. And all of a sudden, we were reality TV people. And I'm not really a … reality TV person. It's not kind of who we are.

But the show did incredibly well. And then, fast forward a couple of years past that, and all of a sudden, you know, he's running for president of the United States,” he explained.

Still, Donald Trump’s foray into politics wasn’t as sudden as it might have seemed. While President Trump and his allies often describe him as new to politics, the fact remains that he had dabbled in the public arena for many, many years.

In October 1999, Donald Trump announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee as a candidate of the Reform Party. He ended the campaign in early 2000.

Even as early as in 1987, when Eric was 3 years old, there were rumblings that Trump was looking into running for president.

Larry King, who had interviewed the current president on CNN, had remarked that Trump sounded like “more like a politician these days … when he disagrees with a matter of policy, he does it in a big way,” later adding: “Could the Manhattan magnate be eyeing the White House or is he just calling a bluff?”

In 1988, Trump, who attended the Republican National Convention, told King: “I do enjoy the [political] system, I find it a really, really beautiful thing to watch.”

But throughout it all, the Trumps have always been prepared for the public scrutiny.

“We always realized we had big shoes to fill,” Eric Trump said. “We always realized that we were going to be under the spotlight. … that we were probably going to be held to a different standard. And I think that's the case even more so. And I've lived a very clean lifestyle because of that.”

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Aarthi is a writer for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.

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