‘Owning the libs’: How Trump Jr Became His Father’s Unlikely Political...

Standing on the pickup truck of an 18-wheel truck in the rodeo grounds in Williams, Arizona, Donald Trump Jr. made his father’s re-election open to a seemingly unlikely audience: Native Americans.

The US President’s campaign claims he was the “fiercest ally” of the Indian community. Don Jr. was here on October 15th to form the Native Americans for Trump coalition of the Navajo, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Lumbee, Zuni and White Mountain Apache tribes.

But Don Jr., 42, had also come to beat up Democrats. “They rave about it,” he said, according to the Arizona Daily Sun. “They tell you everything you want to hear and do exactly the opposite. They’ve been lying to you for years – you understand this better than anyone else. ”

It was one of many campaign stops for Trump’s eldest son, who was seen by many as the heir to the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement. Like his father, Don Jr. makes fiery populist speeches, tweets conspiracy theories, and most of all enjoys poking, shocking, and outrageous liberals in the air and online. Like his father, he came to embody modern republicanism.

And while Trump continues to lag behind his Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the polls, attention has turned to who might take on his coat after November.

“Trumpism replaced conservatism as the ideological foundation of the Republican Party, and because of that, they no longer really argue over issues,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime co-founder of the Republican strategist of the anti-Trump group Lincoln Project.

“They fight over affects and whether or not they win these short-lived social media battles. In this world the goal of the highest order is to ‘own the libraries’. It’s a throwaway phrase that replaces the validity or strength of an argument with a kind of complacency that you have been in any way transgressive towards liberals or progressives. ”

Wilson added, “Donald Trump Jr. is a master at this. He is a post-republican republican. He’s only there to get involved with this performative bullshit that lib has in the Trump world. It is political performance art to show your disdain for norms, institutions and education.

“It has become the ideological basis of the GOP [Grand Old Party, or Republican party]. There are no more ideas. There’s nothing there but some sort of screeching anger of Trumpism. ”

After spending several years finding his way around, including a period as a “ski bum,” Don Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps. He is a graduate of his father’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and joined the family business. He is now Executive Vice President at the Trump Organization and a senior replacement for the President.

Now Don Jr., whose father was concerned about naming his son after himself in case he turned out to be a “loser”, is adept at throwing red meat on the base, sometimes with greater discipline and precision than his father . He has written books titled Triggered: How the Left Live By Hate and Silence Us and the self-published Liberal Privilege: Joe Biden and the Democrats’ Defense of the Defenseless.

His girlfriend, the former Fox News personality, Kimberly Guilfoyle, often accompanies him to rallies and virtual fundraisers. She gave a memorably loud speech in an empty room at this year’s Republican National Congress and culminated in the Stentorian battle cry: “The best is yet to come!”

When a January SurveyMonkey poll for Axios asked who Republicans would vote for in 2024, Don Jr. was second only to Vice President Mike Pence (Ivanka Trump, who was considered for the role of her father’s runner-up in 2016 finished fourth).

When asked if he was considering running for political office during an interview last month on CSpans Books TV, Don Jr. replied, “People did that after the RNC [Republican national convention]”It’s Don Jr. vs Nikki Haley for 2024!” I say, “Oh, that’s interesting, I didn’t even know I was running.”

He added, “Whether I run or not, I have no plans right now. My goal is 2020. After that we will take care of everything, but I’ll stick with it one way or another, that’s for sure. ”

Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies and Running Against the Devil, argues that Don Jr is “fluent in Maga” and is indeed the front runner.

“What I’m saying to all of these Republicans who think they’re going to run for president in 24 – Ben Sasse and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz – is that they are going nowhere,” he said. “You should stop now, you are wasting your time and everyone else’s, because the candidate in 2024 will be Donald Trump Jr.” He will come in, he will have his father’s approval, and he will promise great accomplishments in owning the library. ”

Libraries’ ownership leaders including Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that wages cultural wars in schools and universities, and Candace Owens, founder of Blexit, an organization that urges blacks to leave You the Democratic Party and a sense of the “permanent victim role”.

Your social media score is symptomatic of an age of negative partisanship in which many voters’ support is motivated by dislike of the other side rather than belief in their own. Some Democrats have also acknowledged that their excitement for this year’s election is more about voting against Trump than against Joe Biden, a 77-year-old white presenter who is running for the third time for the White House.

Conversely, when Don Jr. and his father beat up Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Biden at campaign events, they generate louder reactions in the crowd than they do when they present agenda items or achievements. Don Jr’s Twitter feed offers little politics to its 5.8 million followers, but a stream of democratic bait and conspiracy theories.

In May, he posted a meme on Instagram falsely suggesting that Biden was a pedophile and later insisted that he was just “joking around” despite the disinformation getting into the minds of voters.

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1316465614823862274?s=20 is a video claiming without evidence: “The Biden family spent decades in Washington, DC making money selling access to Joe Biden’s taxpayer-funded office. Hunter Biden is corrupt. Jim Biden is corrupt. Joe Biden is corrupt. ”

Critics say this abuse fills a vacuum that ideology used to be in. David Litt, a former speechwriter for Obama, asked, “What does the Trump Republican Party stand for? They do not represent small deficits. They don’t stand for the rule of law. They do not stand for the export of democracy around the world. So you really do stand for upset Democrats.

“One way to be sure that you are part of the Trump-era conservative movement is if respectable liberals are either afraid or appalled, or both, by some of the things you have said. So it becomes such an identity politics where identity is based not on who you are but on who you are not and who you upset. ”

Litt, author of Thanks, Obama: My Hopeful, Changed Years and Democracy in the White House in a Book or Less, added, “I think Donald Trump Jr. is a perfect example of this because he’s a white, straight man, who is supposed to inherit hundreds of millions or billions as long as the tax situation works, and for all that he seems pretty sure that he will be persecuted.

“I think this idea of ​​saying the true civil rights movement is the Republican billionaires’ struggle to do what they want has become this strange tenet of the Trump-era Republican Party.”

But Don Jr’s fate could be decided on November 3rd. If his father suffers a humiliating defeat, according to polls, he could find himself embroiled in a battle with senators, governors and other political veterans for the future of the Republican Party.

Joshua Kendall, author of First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama, said, “It really all depends on the elections. There are basically two scenarios. If his dad loses, Don Jr. and his dad could use all of those Twitter followers to create some kind of right-wing media empire. If his father wins, Don Jr will be in front and in the middle. ”