Triggered

  Since his first day as an assemblyman, for whatever reason—jealousy, probably—Nadler has hated my father. While my father was trying to rebuild the broken parts of New York in the same way he’s rebuilding the broken parts of the country right now, Nadler stood in his way. To this day, the man will go to any lengths to stop anything that Donald J. Trump does.

  In 1998, Nadler was a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the committee he now chairs. Kenneth Starr was the special counsel for the investigation into President Clinton, which led to impeachment proceedings. Nadler was perhaps the most vocal opponent of the release of the Starr Report. He called his opposition “a matter of decency.”

  “It’s grand jury material. It represents statements which may or may not be true by various witnesses,” he said. “Salacious material. All kinds of material that it would be unfair to release.”

  That quote comes from the same man who, at this writing, is still fighting for the release of grand jury testimony in the Mueller Report: Jerry Nadler, the Babe Ruth of hypocrisy.

  Luckily for Trump Org, the mayors of New York City for most of the 1990s and through the 2000s were business friendly. In 1993, Rudy Giuliani held the top city post. He inherited a New York from Democrat David Dinkins that was like a war zone. In 1990, New York City had over twenty-two hundred murders. To give you some idea of just how bad it was, the city with the highest murder rate in the country today, Chicago, only sees around 700 homicides per year. Times Square was one big X-rated pit. The brave few who would come into the city to see legitimate theater would fear for their lives. Business and construction barely had a pulse. The Crown Heights race riots in 1991 threatened to tear New York apart. A New York Post headline at the time read “DAVE, DO SOMETHING!” Then Rudy rode to the rescue. He cleaned up Times Square, oversaw a remarkable decrease in crime, and became a friend to builders. His leadership during and after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was nothing short of heroic. During his mayoralty, people started moving into the city instead of out of it for the first time in years. Companies such as The Trump Organization put up buildings that soared to the sky.

  In 2002, Michael Bloomberg carried on what Rudy had started. Bloomberg is a businessman, and his relationship with builders was good. He once called us “the great Trump Org.” It was only when my dad ran for president that Bloomberg’s attitude toward him changed. Again, jealousy is probably the reason. My father got the job that Bloomberg desperately wants but will never have. It takes guts to do it as a conservative, and most people—even accomplished people—can’t or won’t take the heat required, so they just sit and throw stones from the sidelines.

  It was around 2008, after the Chicago tower and hotel were completed, that we started our branding business, offering our name, expertise, and value engineering and marketing ability to developers around the world. One of the first deals we made was in Sunny Isles, Florida, which turned out to be very successful. It was around then that we saw the promise in a much wider market. Though our brand was very New York–centric, after a couple of successful ventures in Florida with our friends, Michael and Gil Dezer, we began to believe we had something that would sell all over the world. It was also an opportunity, first for me, but for Ivanka and Eric, too, to start doing deals internationally on our own. Over the course of the next ten years, I made deals all over the world and built a major book of business.

  Throughout that time, national politics existed somewhere in the background for me. Had I been watching Washington more closely, I would have seen what government looked like with the Republican establishment running things. You might have noticed that I’ve been beating up on the Democrats pretty good, and they deserve every punch. But they weren’t the only political party screwing up Washington. The establishment Republicans had a big hand in populating the swamp, and when DJT became the party’s nominee, they wanted him to lose to Hillary just as badly as the Democrats did.

  One of the ways they tried to sabotage my father’s candidacy was by using the conservative press. Though later in this book I dedicate a chapter to the biased liberal media and fake news, the Republican establishment had its own propaganda machine. One of it most notable propagandists is Bill Kristol, the editor of the failed Weekly Standard. Once thought of as a lion of conservative politics, Kristol was one of the first rats to attack my father. It’s hard to believe he was ever relevant, but then again, maybe that’s why we always lost.

  Along with Kristol, establishment columnists such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, the New York Times’ Bret Stephens, and Jonah Goldberg from National Review, just to name a few, furiously wrote columns trying to derail the Trump train.

  It was Sarah Palin, perhaps, talking about the Tea Party, who first talked about the relationship between the establishment and the press it controlled. “The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent,” she wrote on Facebook.

  She was right.

  Just like the mainstream media, however, the establishment press seriously underestimated DJT’s ability to punch back. My father called them out for what they are: irrelevant. Existing in a bubble floating high above what was happening on the ground, they championed policies that kept the status quo or tried to talk us into another unpopular war. Meanwhile, down here on the ground, real people watched the middle class dwindle, the borders get thrown wide open, and the United States get clobbered in trade while our factories turned to rust.

  When it comes to handling the press, my father is the undisputed heavyweight champ. It really wasn’t a fair fight.

  There’s no better example than Bill Kristol to show you how badly the establishment press lost to DJT. His high-profile career has hit the canvas with a thud. Today, you might catch him doing a Sunday-afternoon hit on MSNBC. The only thing lower than that is maybe an infomercial for wrinkle cream on Sunday morning. Keep an eye out for Bill holding up a jar to the camera.

  Still, getting rid of the entire Republican establishment political-media-industrial complex is like trying to pull an oak tree out of the ground by its roots. Back in the early 2010s, the Tea Party gave the Republican establishment a pretty good shake. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin led the revolution. But it was DJT who took a buzzsaw to it.

  If you remember back to the beginning of the campaign, the Republican establishment called themselves “Never Trumpers.” Made up of RINOs (Republicans in name only), huge money donors, and a variety of interest groups, the list of them is as long as John Kerry’s face. In March 2016, 122 “Members of the Republican national security community” signed a letter denouncing my father’s candidacy. The following August, 50 “Republican national security officials” signed a second letter announcing that they would not vote for Trump under any circumstances. According to a Washington Post article from last July, many of those same people are now looking for jobs in the Trump administration. Magically, DJT’s foreign policy has started to look pretty good to them.

  After my father was elected, some members of the establishment weaseled their way into the White House. They were supposed to act as “the grown-ups in the room” or “guardrails” to keep the Trump presidency from driving off a cliff. Yeah, right. When DJT got into that car, it was just about to do a Thelma and Louise. He was the one who slammed on the brakes just before it went over. He was the one who got us back up onto the highway. One by one, DJT got rid of the guardrails—or speed bumps, as we like to call them—and got the West Wing humming just like Trump Org, or the 2016 Donald J. Trump for President campaign: lean and mean.

  In less than three years, my father has almost completely reconfigured the Republican Party, a political entity that, frankly, was headed toward extinction. In less than one term, he’s torn down an establishment structure that took fifty years t
o build. Today, most establishment Republicans have little or no significance in the political world, certainly not the ones who oppose Donald Trump. Some saw the error of their ways and joined the Trump team (I’m sure there’s a phony or two in that group, but they always eventually show their true stripes). Others, it seems, have fallen off the face of the earth. Today, Bob Corker and Jeff Flake couldn’t get elected dog catcher. Paul Ryan got so embarrassed by how out-of-touch he’d become that he had to retire. Out of all the establishment Republicans who didn’t understand my father, Paul Ryan was by far the most confused. Good riddance. Whether relevant or not, most members of the Republican establishment now realize that the Trump administration is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to right the wrongs of a couple of generations of Democrat and old-guard Republican rule. The ones who don’t will be unemployed soon enough.

  It’s been amazing to watch.

  Until my father announced that he was running for president, the idea of my entering politics was about as remote as my becoming a vegan. Sometimes, however, circumstances direct the roads you take. If you remember back, the press and the political world at large didn’t take my father’s campaign seriously at first. They called it a publicity stunt that would last a couple of weeks at best. That belief was pervasive and didn’t help our recruiting efforts, so we did it ourselves, our way, without the so-called experts. We weren’t exactly the Jeb Bush juggernaut. Without political professionals, we did what we always do as a family: we filled the voids. I had experience on TV, so I became a surrogate before we even had surrogates. I still had responsibilities with Trump Org, but I helped as much as I could. So did the rest of the family. That’s the way we are. We just did more and slept less… a lot less.

  Along with being pretty handy in front of a camera, I also brought something else to the campaign. Like everyone in the beginning of the race, we focused on the Iowa caucuses, the first of the presidential primaries. It was in Iowa that I began to realize that my life up until then had prepared me for my father’s campaign.

  In January 2014, Terry Branstad, then the governor of Iowa, invited me to his annual deer hunt in Centerville, Iowa. The hunt is sponsored by Knight Rifles, which is located in Centerville. It hooked me up with a volunteer guide named Doug Hurley. For the last twenty-five years, Doug’s been a special agent with the narcotics division of the Iowa Department of Public Safety. He and I hit it off right away.

  As it happened, the day of the hunt, a polar vortex from Canada descended over Iowa. Saying it was cold that week is a distinct understatement. I’m sure Doug thought that some Fifth Avenue billionaire’s son wasn’t about to go out and hunt with a −50° F wind-chill factor. I might have surprised him when I showed up, ready to go.

  For five hours, we stood on a hillside with the wind in our faces, waiting for the deer to come through. Doug was behind an evergreen tree, while I used a fence post for protection. When we called it a day, Doug came over and fist-bumped me. “New York City!” he said. “I never thought you could handle this!”

  I stayed in touch with Doug and called him before the Iowa caucuses. I flew into Des Moines about one in the morning and drove down to Appanoose County, where he lives.

  Doug was nice enough to let me stay on his basement couch for four or five days. I’d do radio hits in the morning; then we’d go hunting the rest of the day or just hang out with his pals. The governor’s deer hunt was held that week also, and we hunted again in that.

  A few weeks later, I was with Doug again. This time it was a pheasant hunt, and Maggie Haberman from the Times and a couple of other reporters tagged along. By then my father was locked in a tight race with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (and about one hundred other people) and, though biased, the press was all over our campaign.

  I don’t know what Maggie and her reporter friends were expecting. Maybe they were hoping for me to shoot myself in the foot or pull a Dick Cheney and shoot a pal in the face. At one point, one of the reporters asked how they would know I was for real—meaning, not just one of these politicans who shows up with a smile on their face and brand new hunting gear looking for a photo-op.

  “How many birds did you see go up?” I asked.

  “Nine,” they said.

  “How many shots did I take?”

  “Nine,” they answered.

  “How many birds am I holding now?” I asked.

  “Nine.”

  “Do you have any other questions?” I said, smiling.

  “Damn, you’re a pretty good shot,” Doug said afterward. “Especially under pressure with camera crews and Jake Tapper in tow.” It was high praise coming from a hunter like him.

  The ease I had around people like Doug and his friends started to multiply on the campaign in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Look, I know my appearances on The Apprentice gave me a touch of celebrity, and I also know that my father’s message was like water in the desert for his people. They wanted it that much. But I was able to talk to people who came to events in a way the other surrogates, even candidates, couldn’t. I had spent most of my youth out in the Rust Belt. In a very real sense, these were my people. Unlike many New York City socialites, I didn’t have to try to connect with them. I was one of them. They saw that I’m not an out-of-touch elitist, that I relate to people and people relate to me. They liked that I was a hunter and that I had a good sense of humor. They liked that I felt at ease in front of a crowd. When I added it all up, I realized that I brought something to the campaign that no one else on our team could. Although I didn’t know it then, because of that something, I would become the tip of the spear of the greatest political campaign ever. I distinctly remember the moment I began to sense something special was happening. It was in the Western Slope of Colorado, doing a solo event in a gym auditorium where Hillary had spoken a few days before. The state campaign people called me and said, “Don, we have a problem. We have to move the venue.” I thought they were going to tell me that not enough people were showing up.

  “We were hoping for three hundred,” they said, “and we’ve already got twenty-four hundred.”

  “Do they know it’s Donald Trump Jr.?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” they said. “Your photo is on the advertisement.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I don’t want to get sued for false marketing. Don’t want people to think it’s the old Donald Trump bait-and-switch.”

  When I found out that Hillary had drawn only 150 or so when she had done her event, it just about knocked me over. I felt the same way when I started having people come and help me out on the stump. All throughout the campaign, I had some terrific opening acts. Mark “Oz” Geist is one. A retired Marine, Mark was a member of the annex security team in Benghazi and survived to tell the story. Mark would show up and campaign with me all across the United States. He introduced the campaign to countless veterans and current active duty members. A true patriot, Mark is who you want next to you in battle.

  Soon I learned that when it came to campaigning, the only place it made absolutely no sense for me to be was wherever my father was. We were only wasting our resources by going to the same cities. Plus, in case you haven’t noticed, wherever my father goes, all eyes are on him; when he’s talking, no one really cares who else is there. He’s a big personality, and only a certain kind of person can complement that. In some sense, this is the dilemma we faced when trying to decide on a running mate during the campaign. We’d had a lovely breakfast with Mike Pence and his family, during which we noticed that the Pences’ approach to life was a lot like ours—no cooks and maids doing everything for them, just dinner every night like a normal family. Bear in mind that this breakfast occurred in the Indiana governor’s mansion. The Pences could have had dozens of aides and staff members catering to their every need, but they chose not to.

  But we had also been considering Newt Gingrich, who seemed like a viable choice. After all, Newt was a tremendous Speaker of the House and a great advocate for my father during the early days of the campai
gn. While we were in Indiana visiting the Pences, Newt Gingrich met us in a hotel room. A few minutes into the conversation, though, I noticed that Newt seemed hesitant about the whole thing. I finally decided to mention the elephant in the room.

  “Mr. Speaker,” I said, feeling slightly awkward. “Forgive me for asking, but… do you really want this job?”

  Newt was very gracious in his response, but the bottom line seemed to be that no, he really did not. Over the next few minutes, he explained that if he was asked, he would give the vice presidency 110 percent of his energy, and would be happy to do it. But he also said he could probably be of more help to us on the outside, where he could be as brash and abrasive as he wanted to be without worrying about the political ramifications. When it comes down to it, I’m happy he decided that. We already had one pirate on the ticket; we didn’t need two.

  Still, I knew drawing crowds meant nothing if you didn’t have a message. I had one that was set in stone.

  During my speech to the Republican National Convention, I brought that message to millions of people across the country. Even Politico, no fans of me or my father, said that a “political star may have been born” that night. I don’t know about that, but I do know something got started. That convention speech was the spark that lit the fire of my political life. But all I did was speak from the heart, saying what I knew to be true about my father that I didn’t think anyone else knew. I barely had to write it down.

  Left-wing pundits and fake news told you that my father was making promises on the campaign trail just to be provocative, just for the attention. Those who said and wrote that, however, were about to experience a rude awakening.

  6.

  NOT EXACTLY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY