He’s the beloved “New York meathead” on “The Kirk Minihane Show” podcast at Barstool Sports, a digital media company that writes less about sports and more about the increasingly reactionary things that certain millennial sports bros talk about between games. He gabs with Jim Norton and Sam Roberts, two comedians and radio personalities enmeshed in the wrestling and UFC worlds, impresses Adam Carolla with his knowledge of power saws, recaps legendary WWE matches with pro wrestler Chris Jericho, and kvetches about left wing #canceling with all of them. Through his fluency in internet manliness, Trump Jr. has tried to teach a younger generation how to fight the left, the Trump Jr. way: Punch hard, talk fast, protect dad at all costs and damn the consequences.

“When you see Don speak at a college, he doesn’t come across like a buttoned-up politician guy,” said one person close to Trump Jr. “It doesn’t come across like a phony news anchor. He comes across like a guy shooting the shit on a podcast.” A podcast that is now, incidentally, spreading pro-Trump content.

So, it was no surprise when Trump Jr. brought this persona to “The View.” Within 30 seconds of taking his seat, the hosts were grilling him on why he tweeted out the name of the whistleblower who filed the initial complaint about Trump’s approach to Ukraine. Prepared, Trump Jr. swiftly punched back with an accusation that the hosts’ network, ABC, was being hypocritical.

“Right now, ABC is chasing down a whistleblower about all of the [Jeffrey] Epstein stories that were killed,” he said, referring to a leaked video of an ABC anchor complaining that the network had prevented her from publishing a story about the convicted sex offender who committed suicide in a jail cell.

The rest of the interview continued in the same vein. Trump Jr. belittled his hosts over their past liberal misdeeds — alleged blackface, comments about film director Polanski — declaring that he was fighting back against the media on behalf of conservatives.

He likely knew exactly how his presence — and those comments — would come across on a show like “The View,” and the kind of culture-war content that would emerge as a result. That was the point.

“I mean, I could go on there, be the nicest guy in the world, use very measured and reasonable arguments and you know, that no matter what I said, [the headlines would be] ‘Don Jr. gets DESTROYED, they OWNED HIM,’” he told Minihane before his taping with “The View.” “It's literally a no-win for me, you know, in the social justice wars.”

By infuriating “The View” hosts, Trump Jr. may have opened himself up to condemnation from mainstream journalists, but created a work of #triggering performance theater in the process — one that was broadcast on network television, went viral among die-hard Trumpists, and, more importantly, landed on the radar of the increasingly young free speech crowd on the internet.