2019-11-18

The president's son writes indignantly of "sleepy liberal losers, socialist crybabies, and hypocritical politicians and media."

The nut doesn't fall far from the tree. Trump Jr. shares with his father highly specific complaints about the polity as it is, projecting madly as he goes along: Activists use Twitter in place of "our most important media institutions." The left is a fantastically well-funded machine. "My father says a place is infested with rats, the mob cries racism." The Mueller Report, written by "an old, over-the-hill puppet," exonerates father and son. (It does no such thing.) More broadly on the spectrum of paranoia, Trump Jr. is sure that "as the son of a rich white guy living in 2019, I'm essentially not allowed to have an opinion anymore, let alone express that opinion in public," a curious thing to say in a book of scattershot opinions expressed in public, presumably for a nice chunk of change. He protests that he's a funny guy, but there's not much humor in the book—unless you laugh at lines like, "Al Franken was a creepy pervert" (paging Stormy Daniels), and "I may even have pulled some pie charts out of my shorts," or unless you agree that border crossers are animals and think it's a fine jape to separate children from their families and lock them up in detention centers. Overall, Trump Jr. is not funny but rather bitterly angry, spitting invective at the likes of Pelosi and Comey, excoriating "Crooked Hillary" and insisting that, next to her, "Biden is the most corrupt establishment politician ever to take a lobbyist's checks," and reviling the media as "fake news" (unless it delivers news he agrees with, in which case it's all right). Like his father, think of a petulant toddler who has a fondness for straw men and an inability to add -ic to "Democrat" and who thinks of himself as "snarky and handsome," and you need read no more.

Trump Jr. importunes liberals to buy his book "and throw it away." Do him one better: Don't buy it at all.