In Triggered, the president’s eldest child excoriates the left for its censoriousness, but ignores his father’s repeated demands for the same. In case Don Jr forgot, Trump père is no friend of free speech or a free press.
Donald Trump Jr’s Triggered: a litany of trolling and insults worthy of his father
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The elder Trump has called for tougher libel laws, unsuccessfully sought to strip CNN’s Jim Acosta of his White House press pass, threatened Michael Wolff with an injunction after the Guardian published excerpts from Wolff’s Fire and Fury, and turned the daily press briefing into a memory. Trump’s dad also treated the murder of Jamal Khashoggi as a non-event and made bargaining chips of the Hong Kong protesters.
Barack Obama and Don Jr get it right when they ding the left’s social justice warriors for their paroxysms of wokeness. But the president’s son has little to say about the sentinels of the right, starting with his father.
A president who finds equivalence among Charlottesville’s demonstrators, sacralizes Robert E Lee and appoints judges who declined to affirm the validity of Brown v Board of Education, the supreme court decision that barred de jure segregation, is a prisoner to the prejudices of his base.
Not surprisingly, Triggered hammers away at past Democratic support for slavery but is silent over the vitality of neo-Confederacy within the modern-day GOP. It elides David Duke’s endorsement of Trump and the latter’s tacit acceptance of the ex-grand wizard’s seal of approval. Likewise, Don Jr keeps mum over Richard Nixon’s justice department having sued his grandfather, father and their business for housing discrimination.
Don Jr has taken a page from the playbook of Yair Netanyahu, troller-in-chief of his father’s adversaries
As is to be expected, Triggered’s displeasure with social media is exaggerated and omits a key fact: the apparent Cambridge Analytica–Facebook–Trump campaign axis.
Cambridge Analytica purportedly took direction from Steve Bannon, the Trump campaign’s major-domo, while it received a multimillion-dollar infusion from the Mercer family, the campaign’s major benefactors and the owners of Breitbart. In turn, Facebook’s personal data was plundered and used to help enrage the US electorate.
True to form, only the Trump campaign and Russia have objected to Twitter’s announcement that it will bar all campaign ads.
Flogging his book, Trump Jr pulls no punches. On Twitter, he announced: “Go check out TriggerALib.com to easily send your favorite leftist commie a copy of my new book #Triggered. Maybe they’ll learn something. Also, What’s better than capitalism and trolling combined??? Answer: NOTHING!”
It appears Don Jr has taken a page from the playbook of Yair Netanyahu, the son of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s beleaguered prime minister and Trump Sr’s one-time political soulmate. For years, the younger Netanyahu has served as the keeper of his father’s ideological flame and troller-in-chief of his adversaries.
Unlike Yair, Don Jr’s proximity to his father represents an evolution of sorts, one that Triggered only hints at. Don Jr acknowledges that he was shipped off to the Hill School amid his parents’ acrimonious and tabloid-headlining divorce. He also touches on his discomfort with his father’s lifestyle.
“There was something,” he writes, “that made me feel uncomfortable around the people who populated the rich circles my father lived and worked in. Even when my father would bring home a celebrity … I would run in the other direction.”
Left unsaid is that as a 12-year-old, Don Jr did not talk to his father for a year while his father’s marriage to Ivana, his mother, crumbled before the cameras.
Unsurprisingly, Don Jr goes full bore at the Clintons and the Bidens, labelling the former family “one of the most corrupt and uncivil political machines in the history of our nation”. Unfortunately, the Trumps appear to have an edge over the Clintons when it comes to grifting: at least the Clinton Foundation was real. The Trump Foundation and Trump University? Not so much.
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Indeed, as the president framed things the other day as he backtracked over holding the G7 confab at the Doral: “You people with this phony Emoluments Clause.”
Said differently, Bill Clinton was impeached because of his zipper. The incumbent president is in hot water for making the US government a Kleenex for his raging grudges and ambitions.
As for the Bidens, Don Jr had this to say on Fox News: “I wish my name was Hunter Biden. I could go abroad, make millions off of my father’s presidency – I’d be a really rich guy! It would be incredible!”
Where to start? Moscow?
Still, Triggered’s critique of the left’s use of shaming as a cudgel should not be ignored. The fact is, members of the Democratic establishment continue to worship at the twin altars of identity politics and political correctness.
In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Richard Stengel, an undersecretary in Hillary Clinton’s state department, argued that the constitution should not protect hate speech, which should be banned “because the intellectual underpinning of the first amendment was engineered for a simpler era”. Stengel was once Time’s managing editor. Nothing like a bureaucrat who wants to play speech tsar, especially one who had previously worked at a magazine.
Ultimately, Triggered is best viewed as the opening salvo of the Trump child with real political chops. Ivanka may be the object of her father’s unsatisfied desire; it is Don Jr who truly connects with the party’s base. His convention speech warranted the attention it received.
Don Jr offers a less impulsive and younger version of the incumbent. He’s a bona fide hunter and outdoorsman. For him, guns aren’t a prop. In a rifle-centric party, that counts for plenty. Unlike Jared Kushner, there’s a there there and he’s a lot more fun than Mike Pence.
The GOP has been recast in the president’s image. Bottom line, come 2024 Don Jr could well be on the ticket, and Triggered is a better campaign biography than most.
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