On a recent Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. buckled himself into a coach seat on a packed plane—just like any nameless fellow might—and flew west to Utah. There, for a few blissful spring days at a hunting retreat far from his myriad worries in New York and Washington, Donald Trump Jr., eldest son and namesake of the president of the United States, was simply Don.

He rode through the mountains, gabbing with Robert O'Neill, the former Navy SEAL who has said he was first into bin Laden's bedroom and who, after taking careful aim over the shoulder of the terrorist's youngest wife, shot him square in the head, killing him instantly. O'Neill is a big supporter of the president, but he and Don didn't talk politics. “I was really impressed with his knowledge of ballistics and harvesting animals,” O'Neill told me. “I was a sniper in the SEALs, and he knew pretty much what I knew about ballistics.”

More than once during their time together, O'Neill says, Donald Trump Jr. called attention to the fact that he must come off like a walking contradiction. “You didn't think the son of a billionaire would be a hunter,” he said again and again, according to O'Neill.

Don is hardly shy about this particular passion. His neighbors in upstate New York complain that his tract of land there sounds like a military-grade shooting range (perhaps ironic, given that he's appeared in a promotional video for a manufacturer of gun silencers).

For much of Don junior's life, the hunter's camo he's worn has helped him not to disappear but to stand out, to differentiate himself from his father, the real estate tycoon who never understood his son's fascination with the outdoors. (“I am not a believer in hunting, and I'm surprised they like it,” Trump told TMZ of his two eldest sons.)

Only when he began campaigning for the White House did Donald Trump see some value in his son's bloody pastime. According to Sam Nunberg, a Trump adviser at the time, when an invitation arrived from the governor of Iowa to go hunting ahead of the state's crucial caucuses, Trump joked, “Don, you can finally do something for me—you can go hunting.”

It's hard being Don. Struggling to make a mark. Living as the junior to Trump senior. Existing as the shy kid who takes solace in the outdoors. Growing into a man who desperately wants his father's love and pride yet is always mindful of the distance between them. His struggles are compounded by the perception that his life of privilege ought to be effortless. Though to understand the strange gantlet of duty and drama that has marked that life is to wonder how anything would be simple for Donald Trump Jr.

“I think Don gets it a lot. Everyone talks about Ivanka, but Don also has a lot of pressure on him,” says a former Trump adviser. “Everyone wants approval from the father, especially if the father is Trump. He has a special place in his heart for Ivanka. But Don is the eldest son, he's named after him, he's doing the nitty-gritty on the real estate, he's got a lot of responsibility, and Trump is tough on everybody. He's the alpha male. He sees his son as somebody he has to groom.”

When a Brazilian journalist asked Don in 2010 whether there was much pressure being Donald junior, he replied, “There probably shouldn't be. But there is for me, because you want to please someone like that, and he's a perfectionist. There's definitely always that shadow that follows you around, like how is this guy, the son of someone so good at what he does, going to act?”