Triggered

  GIVE US YOUR HUDDLED MASSES—OH, AND YOUR GANGS AND DRUGS, TOO.

  IT WAS ON JUNE 16, 2015, two days after Flag Day and his birthday, when my father announced that he was running for president of the United States. Fifty years from now, they’ll be talking about the escalator ride he took with Melania. Among his many talents, DJT certainly knows how to make an entrance. What people don’t know, however, is what happened right before that entrance. It was then when my father said what might be the most prophetic statement he’s ever made.

  Melania and Barron; Ivanka and her husband, Jared; Eric and his wife, Lara; my kids Kai and Donnie, my then wife, Vanessa, and I had gathered in his office. Together we rode the elevator down to the first-floor atrium with my father. People have asked me if we had a family sit-down like you hear about, where the candidate discusses the decision to run or not with his family. Doesn’t happen like that in the Trump family. DJT is his own man, and when he makes a decision, we all do whatever we can to help him. Just before the doors of the atrium opened, my father turned to me and said, “Now we find out who our real friends are.”

  His announcement speech, one still played all the time as proof my father is racist, didn’t, at first, cause a blowback in the press. Almost all of his remarks that day, even the most controversial, came off the top of his head. He had a sheet of paper with a few notes scratched on it in his suit jacket pocket, but I don’t think he looked at it once. What caused the left to explode in outrage came a few days later. It was then that Hillary Clinton all but blamed my father for the actions of a maniac named Dylann Roof who had walked into an all-black church and shot nine people to death. This is a common theme for Democrats. Anytime anything horrible happens, such as a mass shooting, my father is to blame. It’s insane and insulting.

  Two things happened at that moment. First, the presidential election essentially became a race between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump; and, second, the press began to invent a racist narrative about my father, one that would become an avalanche of lies.

  A little more than a year after my father made his famous proclamation about the scourge of illegal immigration, I stopped in a hotel outside Denver, Colorado, to catch a few hours of sleep between campaign events. By then, the race truly was between Hillary and my father. It had been a brutal couple of weeks out on the trail, and both campaigns were feeling the heat. (By that point, DJT was doing multiple events each day, including major rallies, and shaking a few thousand hands at every stop; Hillary Clinton was collapsing into her SUV from sheer exhaustion after trying to keep up for a few hours.)

  I’d realized how crazy our schedule was on a stop in Detroit (where, by the way, no one thought we should be). It was 9:30 p.m. I remember the time because I was doing a hit on Sean Hannity’s TV show later that night. We’d already done a couple of rallies and stopped at a Muslim-owned eatery and then a college campus. I looked over at Tommy Hicks, my friend since my early days in New York after college. Tommy had left a very lucrative job with his family’s business to join me on the campaign and had then stayed with us every step of the way. Tommy was a lifesaver. He helped us with everything from crowd control to fund-raising at a time when the Republican National Committee wasn’t exactly breaking its neck to support us.

  “Man, I’m hungry,” I said.

  He looked back at me as though I were nuts. “That’s because we haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday,” he said.

  It had been almost forty hours since my last meal, and I hadn’t thought about eating once. It wasn’t just me. All of us—family members and a handful of surrogates—were stretched thin across the country and running on fumes. We spoke at rallies, sat in on meetings, took pictures, did radio and TV hits, county fairs, fund-raisers—you name it, anything that might enable us to scrape up a couple more votes, and having a meal stole valuable time. If we were going to lose—which, if you believed the mainstream media, was exactly what we were going to do—we wanted to go down fighting.

  The hotel lobby in Colorado was starting to come to life. It must have been around six in the morning. There were newspapers stacked on the front desk, but they were all folded up and unread, meaning that the hit pieces and liberal tirades about my father hadn’t yet been disseminated. I was grateful for the quiet. Part of being on the 2016 Donald J. Trump for President campaign was keeping your guard up. For the tens and tens of thousands of supporters we saw every week, there were plenty of haters, people who bought what the fake news peddled hook, line, and sinker.

  But here in the semi-solitude of the lobby, I had a chance to take a rare deep breath. Maybe have some coffee. Just as I was feeling comforted by the calm, however, I saw a cashier in the coffee shop staring at me. Her eyebrows were arched as though she were ready to give a big speech. I immediately assumed that it would have something to do with my father and his immigration stance. There goes the coffee, I thought. But then the woman smiled and leaned over the counter toward me.

  “You know,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper and looking around, “my husband and I voted for your father yesterday in early voting.”

  She was a recent immigrant from Ethiopia who, along with her husband, had gone through the proper channels and filled out all the paperwork required of them. She said it was something they were proud to have done.

  “Your father’s right,” she said. “People who think they can just come into America and get whatever they want makes it so much harder for people like me.”

  Her smile was so genuine, her handshake so warm, it nearly made up for all the smears and slams we had taken for months.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

  Over and over during the campaign and after the election, people came up to me, people of all nationalities and from all walks of life, to tell me how proud they were to have come to the United States legally.

  These are the people that the liberals would rather not talk about. They like to pretend that there’s no difference between a good immigrant and a bad one. In other words, someone who enters the country illegally, carrying ten pounds of heroin, should be afforded the same rights as someone who has come in to be a doctor. Their rationale is ridiculous. We should be supporting those who followed the rules to come here, not criminals whose first act on US soil is a violation of our laws.

  Like many Americans, I come from a family of immigrants. As I’ve mentioned, my mother grew up in a small village in Communist Czechoslovakia. She came to the United States legally through Canada to escape the Communist ideal that so many of the liberal elites are now espousing. My father’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, the youngest of ten (apparently I’m an underachiever; I have only five kids!), came to the United States from a small island off the coast of Scotland during the Great Depression.

  Maybe my favorite family immigration story was that of Frederick Trump. In 1885, my great-grandfather came to America from Germany at sixteen years of age with nothing but the clothing he could fit into one small suitcase. He lived in New York City with his sister, who had come over a year earlier, and her husband. In those days, there was no social safety net like there is today. Even if he’d wanted to exploit the system, he couldn’t have. There was no system to exploit. It was only work and survive. So he went to work instead. Seven days a week, for twelve hours a day, he worked as a barber in the city. He learned English by listening to the customers, and he saved his money. When he had enough, he decided to strike out on his own, chasing the American dream as so many immigrants had before him.

  In the early 1890s, with $600 in small bills he’d saved from the barbershop, he moved to Seattle and opened a restaurant in that city’s red-light district because he had been told that that was where the business was. In 1892, he became a US citizen and voted in his first presidential election. Around the same time, there was a gold rush in the Northwest. Braving the harshest elements, he made his way to the Yukon—but not to pan for gold. He did what he knew how t
o do: he opened restaurants, first in tents and later in buildings made from timber. He would go on to serve thousands and thousands of meals to prospectors in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.

  My family risked everything to come here and kept taking risks to rise up in American society. Our stories are not unique. They’ve been replicated millions of times. They are the stories that made America great. Make no mistake, I come from a family of immigrants. My girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, comes from an Irish-born father and a Puerto Rican mother (you don’t want to make her mad). I have many good friends who are immigrants, and I have met thousands of immigrants who contribute financially, socially, and educationally to this great nation. That’s just not the case with far too many illegal immigrants.

  The left will argue that today’s immigrants pull their own weight, but the facts tell a different story. The immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s legally entered an America that was experiencing a spectacular rise in industrialization. There was a great need then to fill entry-level jobs, and our ancestors gladly filled them. Today, no such job pool exists. So instead of a hardworking, grateful pool of workers, there are people who evade the law to enter the country, pay minimal or no taxes, and then rely on government handouts to survive. This invasion—and that’s what it is using any metric—doesn’t hurt people like me. I have private medical insurance, and my kids all go to good schools. The people who really get hurt are the ones on the lower ends of the economic ladder. They are the ones who will experience the decline in the quality of health care that will come about when the system is overstressed by illegal immigrants who have no insurance. They’re also the ones whose children will see the quality of their education decline with overcrowded classrooms. They will face competition with entry-level workers and others who work for cash off the books.

  Now, I don’t blame illegal immigrants for trying to come to the United States. Who wouldn’t want to with all we give away? But comparing today’s illegal immigrants to the ones who built this country is ludicrous. In fact, the immigrants of today never had the chance to replicate the experience of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers mostly because of legislation championed and passed by Democrats more than fifty years ago.

  After President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963, the sympathy of the nation was with the Kennedy family, particularly his brother Teddy, who was then the newly minted senator from Massachusetts. At the time, Ted Kennedy could have proposed a bill that required all men to wear pink pants with little whales on them, and Congress would have passed it.

  The younger Kennedy, undoubtedly a smart fellow (except when he was drunk behind the wheel in Chappaquiddick), knew that the population of the United States was growing and prospering, which was not necessarily the best thing for the Democrat Party. Soldiers who had returned from World War II bought houses, built businesses, and began voting Republican because Democrats had nothing to offer them other than higher taxes and more spending on government programs that didn’t work (sounds all too familiar, huh?).

  So Senator Kennedy hatched a plan to get some new voters. In short, he would need poor people who spoke very little English and who would want to take advantage of some of the massive welfare programs the Democrats were selling to the American people. That year, he proposed a bill that would do away with the old quota system used to govern immigration, which gave equal weight to immigrants from stable, friendly countries and blew the doors wide open for people from Third World countries. Not only would poorer immigrants flood our shores and social services, but Teddy’s plan also enabled the families of those people to be brought in for generations, beginning what we now call “chain migration.”

  By the way, the idea of not wanting immigrants who would drain our social safety net is nothing new. A good friend recently took a tour of Ellis Island, where this quote about the Immigration Act of 1882 was displayed:

  Any immigrant deemed “liable to become a public charge” was denied entry to the United States. To Ellis Island inspectors, this clause, which has been a cornerstone of federal immigration policy since 1882, meant those who appeared unable to support themselves and were therefore likely to become a burden on society. Influenced by American welfare agencies that claimed they were being overwhelmed by requests for aid from impoverished immigrants, the Ellis Island inspectors carefully weighed the prospects of new arrivals, especially those of women and children intending to rejoin husbands and fathers in this country.

  Those words were in force during a time when immigration truly made our country great. (And I’m sure the sign will be removed about five minutes after this book is published. Facts hurt!)

  You have to give him credit: Teddy was playing the long game. He knew that the Democrats needed poor immigrants if they were going to stay in power. He knew that the trap of the welfare state was waiting for them. Once they started to feed off the system, they would start families who would be Democrats forever. That is what Democrats won’t tell you, and it might trigger many of them: they want immigrants to rely on welfare. They want individuals to depend on the government from cradle until grave. Forget upward mobility; Ted Kennedy had his yacht and his parties, but he envisioned a dependent class that would forever vote Democrat. Without dependence on big government, the Democrats have nothing to offer. It’s their power source, and self-sufficiency and independence are their Kryptonite. I believe the saying goes: teach a man to fish, and he’ll probably still vote for the guy who gives him a fish for free.

  Ted and his brother Robert Kennedy, who happened to be the attorney general of the United States at the time—something I like to remind people of when they start talking about “nepotism” in the Trump White House—helped draft the legislation. But I digress. No one pretends that we will be held to the same standards.

  Although debate on the bill raged for months, it ended up passing by a good majority. When Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in 1965, Ted Kennedy assured the American people that “Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually” or “cause American workers to lose jobs.” Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  The result of the bill was the single most significant wave of immigrants entering the United States in modern history—more than 18 million legal immigrants and “uncountable numbers of illegal immigrants,” according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Many of those immigrants came from poor Third World countries. Few of them could read and write in English. Because of provisions added late in the game, early versions of “chain migration” were incentivized, meaning that for every immigrant who came into the country, a whole family was waiting to come in behind him or her. Subsequent studies have also shown that the bill increased the education gap between citizens and noncitizens by close to 50 percent and that it decreased the number of immigrants who eventually returned to their home countries. In other words, thank the Kennedys for enabling a permanent welfare state for which their Democrat descendants blame us.

  Today the cost of illegal immigration to the American people is staggering. According to a recent report by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a supposed media watchdog that is actually fair only to the left, taxpayers “shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens.” The real number might be $250 billion.

  Forget about a wall; with that kind of money we could build a dome! The bottom line is that the cost of illegal immigration is unsustainable. And the strain on our social services is only part of the price we pay for illegal immigration. Those most hurt by it are not the rich and powerful. Candidly, they often benefit from cheap labor. It’s hardworking, everyday Americans who foot the bill.

  According to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the percentage of Medicaid funds that were paid to illegal immigrants rose from 6 percent in 2007 to 17 percent in 2017, while the increase of US citizens on Medicaid was half that or less
.

  “The average immigrant household consumes 33 percent more cash welfare, 57 percent more food assistance, and 44 percent more Medicaid dollars than the average native household,” according to Jason Richwine, an independent public policy analyst for the CIS.

  More than just our money, however, illegal immigration and its by-products take the very lives of our children. According to the State Department, about 90 percent of all heroin consumed in the United States comes from the same three or four cities in Mexico. The death toll in the American opioid crisis has now reached just over 72,000 people a year. When you consider the violence of the people who produce and sell the drugs, the Mexican cartels and their loyal soldiers, the need to act now increases dramatically. As more drugs pour over the border, more people become addicted, the demand for heroin and other drugs increases, and those brutal groups grow more powerful. As they grow more powerful, the violence expands.

  Just last year, there was record-breaking bloodshed and death in Mexico, much of it occurring less than a few hours’ drive from the southern border of the United States, much of which, because of Democrat inaction, is little more than a negligible line in the desert. The Mexican Ministry of the Interior estimates that there were 29,168 murders in Mexico throughout 2017, most of which were committed by members of drug cartels. And that’s not even counting the number of murders carried out in secret and never discovered by the government. When it comes to the cartel’s unique brand of brutality, much of the horrible stuff isn’t in the statistics—that’s the stuff that corrupt officials and criminals bury with the bodies.

  There are five or six cartels that are always at war over who gets the rights to ship drugs and other contraband into the United States. Battles with firearms and other military-grade weapons regularly occur in public places and spill out onto the streets. The streets of many Mexican cities are filled with blood, and because of a recent shake-up involving the Sinaloa Cartel, the battles are only getting worse—and they’re spreading to the United States.