![]() He's accessible, he's in the trenches, he's sharing the memes, pushing out stories that other people aren't. “Don junior is royalty,” says Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist. This sort of thing has endeared him not only to pro-Trump Republicans but also to the populist fringe that propelled Trump to power. At age 40, he has become like every other angry white man raging on the Internet, exorcising his psychic traumas through ghastly rhetoric and febrile conspiracy theories, like when he retweeted Roseanne Barr's false claim that George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, was actually a Nazi collaborator. His once private desires to win his father's approval now come packaged as angry tweets and memes tearing down his dad's opponents as illogical, histrionic socialists. ![]() “ a name I hate,” he explained in The Art of the Deal.įraught though their relationship has sometimes been-at one point Junior refused to speak to his father for a year-Don has lately found improbable purpose and renown as a savage defender of his father. When he was growing up, his dad called him Donny-a moniker the elder Trump would never go by. So began the difficult, defining struggle of Donald Trump Jr.'s life-to make himself useful while carrying a name so beloved by the man who bestowed it that he put it in gold letters on buildings all over the world. “I like to joke that my dad wanted to be able to claim me as a dependent on his taxes for 1977,” he once told Forbes, “so he told my mom she had to have me before midnight and, if she didn't, he'd make her take a cab home.” (Ivana wrote about her labor being induced by doctors.) “What if he's a loser?”ĭon tells his own story about coming into the world on December 31, 1977. “You can't do that!” Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana's memoir, Raising Trump. It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald junior. 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?”Īccording to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody. But there is for me, because you want to please someone like that, and he's a perfectionist. When a Brazilian journalist asked Don in 2010 whether there was much pressure being Donald junior, he replied, “There probably shouldn't be. “You didn't think the son of a billionaire would be a hunter,” he said again and again, according to O'Neill. called attention to the fact that he must come off like a walking contradiction. More than once during their time together, O'Neill says, Donald Trump Jr. “I was a sniper in the SEALs, and he knew pretty much what I knew about ballistics.” “I was really impressed with his knowledge of ballistics and harvesting animals,” O'Neill told me. O'Neill is a big supporter of the president, but he and Don didn't talk politics. 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. 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. buckled himself into a coach seat on a packed plane-just like any nameless fellow might-and flew west to Utah. It’s how things should be.On a recent Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. ![]() It feels very different to work for a company that you have a hand in building, and one that you have a real claim to. Stick to the truth and everything else falls into place.Īt Puck, I found colleagues who believe in the same thing-and who gave me both the freedom to pursue this mission while giving me an ownership stake in it. If Trump taught journalists anything, it’s that no amount of sucking up will save you or grant you access. And both readers and sources respect you more when you’re doing the former, rather than the latter. People know when you’re being honest and when you’re trying for a balance you don’t believe in yourself. If I had to write one more paragraph starting with “to be sure,” I was going to kill myself. I wanted to be able to speak directly to my audience in a clear and honest voice, to write candidly about what I saw happening around me without contorting myself into an artificially disembodied posture of false objectivity. There’s a reason I’m no longer at those places, but at Puck: freedom. You may remember me from such publications as The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine. Hello! I am Julia Ioffe, Puck’s Washington correspondent.
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