Words: Tom Ward
Last Monday, Donald Trump Jr took to the stage at the Republican National Convention to deliver what he surely hoped was a powerful and forceful rallying call to the American public. Bearded and bleary eyed, Trump Jr. gave a speech reminiscent of a pre-battle rant from a minor Star Wars villain. Surely it’s only a matter of time until someone cuts in the Imperial March in the background.
More deluded fairytale than coherent manifesto, Trump Jr.’s blusterous endorsement of his dad garnered some choice YouTube comments:
“Dude looks like that guy in Die Hard who tries to become friends with Hans Gruber.”
“If you close your eyes, he sounds exactly like Christian Bale in American Psycho.”
“I’m switching Republican they got the good coke.”
Trump Jr. of course denied he was on cocaine during the speech; in an interview with Fox News he blamed the lighting on his sweaty, watery eyed appearance. Either way, there was something unsettling about his fervour, and the mannerisms so clearly borrowed from Daddy Trump.
In a piece published the day after Trump Jr’s speech, BBC White House reporter Tara McKelvey wrote that Trump Jr. is “Trumpier than Trump”. McKelvey went on to say that Trump Jr., “is treated like a rock star at conservative venues” and that “many of the president’s base like the way that the younger Mr Trump has at times gone even further than his father, supporting, for example, the gun industry’s efforts to have restrictions on silencers eliminated.”
Trump Jr. with Kimberly Guilfoyle
His support for his father seems unwavering, but in a piece entitled Donald Trump Jr. Is Ready. But For What?, the New York Times published reports supposedly leaked by unnamed Trump campaign officials claiming that Trump Jr is the “only person who thinks [the Republicans are] going to lose. He’s like, ‘we’re losing dude, and we’re going to get really hurt when we lose’.”
Big game hunter, former reality TV star, fourth generation businessman, and (publicly at least) his father’s number one cheerleader, who is Donald Trump Jr. really?
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The media image of Donald Trump Jr. is very much of a man in his father’s shadow. When he released his book bemoaning political correctness, Triggered, last year, transgender rights activist Parker Molloy posted a blank template of the cover online encouraging followers to come up with their own tagline and title. Unsurprisingly, ‘Daddy, Please Love Me’ was a popular alternative.
Born in 1977 to Donald and Ivana Trump, Trump Jr. never really stood a chance. Despite being Trump’s eldest child, they weren’t always close. In Ivana Trump’s book, Raising Trump, she claims that when she told Donald Jr that his father was having an affair, Trump Jr became enraged at how his father’s actions had broken up the family and didn’t speak to him for a year.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with a B.S. in Economics, Trump Jr. (according to a Vanity Fair profile) lived in Aspen, Colorado, for a year, hunting, fishing, working as a bartender and – bizarrely – living in a truck before taking his place in the Trump Organisation.
Not that the year out was a waste of time; as Jason Zengerle reports in his New York Times piece, Trump Jr. had little role in his father’s 2016 election, apart from being pictured hunting. (Amusingly, Vanity Fair reports that Trump Jr and Eric Trump referred to themselves as “the brutes” on the campaign trail.) Trump Jr.’s most noteworthy involvement in his father’s political career came in the wake of allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. On 9 June 2016 Trump Jr. attended a meeting in Trump Tower with Azerbaijani-Russian businessman Emin Agalarov and others. Trump Jr. told the media that the meeting was about the adoption of Russian children.
But, in 2017, under pressure from the New York Times, Trump Jr. tweeted his emails regarding the meeting, revealing that Trump Jr. had actually agreed to attend the meeting with the hopes of obtaining information damaging to Hillary Clinton. In June 2019, the Senate Intelligence Community made a criminal referral of Trump Jr. to federal prosecutors on suspicions that he misled the committee with his testimony.
Elsewhere, Trump Jr. has been under fire for racism and xenophobia, notably when he tweeted an image of a bowl of Skittles in 2016 with the caption, “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”
Also in 2016, Trump Jr. appeared in an interview with white supremacist James Edwards. Then, in 2017, he said anti-feminist, men’s rights activist and white genocide conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich should win the Pulitzer prize. Then, in July 2019, he was pictured at a far-right “We Build the Wall” event with Neo-Nazi Jack Posobiec.
Five years ago, any of the above would have been political suicide. But we’ve seen Donald Trump win the presidency since then and this sort of rhetoric has shockingly become the new norm in Trump’s camp. And, just like his father in 2015, Trump Jr. must not be under-estimated. No longer quietly lending his support from the back row, Jason Zengerle argues that these days Trump Jr. is making himself useful to his father, partly through a savvy command of social media and meme culture.
Zengerle points to Trump’s 78 minute speech given on 4 February at a joint session of Congress after which Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, ripped up her copy of Trump’s speech on air. Trump Jr. saw this snub as an opportunity. Within 24 hours he had had Trump’s speech edited down to its most unobjectionable parts – mostly praising US service people – and edited the video to look like Pelosi objected to this, not the rest of the President’s unfocused diatribe. The edited video has since been seen over 50 million times; the epitome of ‘fake news’.
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While a grim humour can be found in his recent Republican National Convention speech, it nevertheless shows that Trump Jr. is doing more to actively move out of his father’s shadow, while still remaining loyal. Whether Trump Jr. sees the Trumps as a new political dynasty and has his own political aspirations, or, as the New York Times suggests, he’s simply desperate for his father to remain in power for fear of what might happen to the Trumps should the Democrats win this year, it’s clear Trump Jr. increasingly sees himself as his own man whose opinions about how great his daddy is should be valued.
Don’t believe him? Look, he even has a beard now. Maybe one day his father will teach him how to shave.
More people in power: Who is Crispin Odey?
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