Triggered

  Follow this principle and you might lose some sleep and miss a lot of meals, but you also might just help your father win the White House. So it’s kind of a good trade-off.

  One morning in 2016, a few minutes before one of my many solo campaign events, I took a walk around the rope line outside a large venue in Wisconsin. I would like to tell you that I drew bigger crowds than Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin during that campaign, but I can’t. That’s because she didn’t draw a single person. She didn’t visit the state even once! (I’m sure the Dems will fix that this time around—not because they want to but because they have to. Thanks to my father, they learned that they can’t take those votes for granted anymore.) My speech was only a few days before the election, so I’m sure I was running on pure adrenaline fueled by about 100 calories (mostly from Red Bull) and something like two hours of sleep. Looking back, those last weeks on the campaign run together like one very long day. Not that I’m complaining. As you might imagine, it was a pretty exciting time, and I loved the action and the fight. One thing about being on the Trump train is that it’s never boring.

  Beyond the rope, toward the front of the line waiting to get into the event, there was a rowdy group of guys in orange vests and soiled carpenter jeans. A few wore yellow hard hats, while the rest sported the classic red MAGA caps. It’s the kind of gathering you don’t come across too often at Manhattan dinner parties. It’s also the kind of group, I came to find, that will tell you exactly how they feel and what’s on their minds. So I went over to hang out for a few minutes. They couldn’t have been nicer. For a while, it was the usual stuff: “We can’t wait for you to make America great again!” “Your dad’s the best!” “We hate Hillary!” and so on, all smiles. They told me that they were all union carpenters and they all loved my father’s message. I posed for a few pictures and was about to take off for the backstage area when I noticed a guy off to the side.

  He was dressed in pretty much the same manner as the other carpenters, but he wore no Trump swag and he didn’t seem all that happy to be there. Honestly, he looked as though his pals had stuffed him into the trunk against his will and forced him to attend. I went over to him and shook his hand. As I did, he shook his head and laughed. “Sorry, man,” he said. “It’s just that if my grandfather knew I was about to vote for a Republican, he would roll over in his grave.”

  I could appreciate his concern. Both my grandfathers are heroes of mine. I’ve lived my whole life with their examples in mind, and my views on politics are pretty similar to what theirs were. I’d also heard a similar line from other union workers.

  “Just curious,” I said. “Why is that?”

  In response, my new friend—let’s call him “Rusty”—went on to tell me that he and his buddies were all from the same union local. They’d traveled more than a hundred miles to come hear my dad’s speech. Rusty in particular had come from a long line of union people, mostly carpenters and electricians from Wisconsin, who’d all followed the same path in life. They’d grown up in small towns around the smell of cut lumber, gotten jobs on the same crews as their fathers, then gotten their union cards on their eighteenth birthdays—right around the time they cast their first votes for Democrats.

  For Rusty’s grandfather, that Democrat was probably Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who practically invented the labor union and brought the whole American working class out of the Great Depression. At least it can be argued that his vote made some sense at the time. Then for his father, it would have been John F. Kennedy (JFK would be considered alt-right today) or LBJ. In keeping with family tradition, Rusty joined the local and cast his first vote for Barack H. Obama, a man who took more money from the paychecks of blue-collar workers than any president since the Great Depression. Clearly, Rusty’s presidential votes to that point were votes against his own self-interest. It wasn’t really his fault, though. From the days when he was playing with his first Fisher-Price hammer-and-nails toy set, his father and grandfather had been telling him about how Democrats were the only true party for the working class. According to that line of reasoning, Democrats cared about wages and benefits, while Republicans cared only about lining the pockets of the corporate overlords and company bosses. And why wouldn’t he believe them? To that point, the guy’s life had been like one long Bob Dylan song (the early stuff). And it hadn’t been only his grandfather and father feeding him the line. Fat-cat Republicans taking advantage of poor workers played on a loop on television news and in Hollywood scripts. It appeared in liberal newspapers on a daily basis. I’ve always said that if you actually work for a living and don’t have time to scour the world for the few shreds of actual real news that remain, it can be very difficult to determine what’s true and what isn’t.

  What is true is this: His grandfather and father hadn’t been lying to him. For much of the twentieth century, the Democrat Party really was the party of the labor unions and blue-collar workers. No doubt about it. Sure, at first, the party opposed civil rights legislation and had some pretty big problems letting black people actually join those unions, but it did a lot to lift the American working class out of poverty. It’s the reason we have a forty-hour workweek, a two-day weekend, and benefits programs for workers. If you were an electrician or a plumber in the 1930s—again, as long as you were white and male didn’t have any black friends—you’d have been forgiven for voting Democrat all the way. But somewhere in the late twentieth century, the liberals changed their tune on working-class voters. During the administration of Lyndon Johnson, when the Democrats started to realize that pretending to be for civil rights reform would keep them in office, they started to replace their support for workers with a support system for workers. Instead of pooling resources so they could cut taxes and grow US businesses, the federal government under Democrat control started to promote public spending and enormous welfare programs. Instead of enacting pro-business policies that would enable American workers’ wages to go up, they put those workers on welfare. Then they raised taxes to pay for bloated programs, such as food stamps and federally funded housing, that work only to keep poor people poor. Democrats wanted and still want to keep the masses dependent. Their party became the party of dependence, because without dependence, what else did they have to offer?

  The logic in this may have been devious, but it certainly wasn’t stupid. Like the Democrats of today, those liberals realized that when people are dependent on you, they’re much more likely to go to the polls and cast a vote for you. It’s just basic psychology. It is not in the best interest of the Democrat Party to give workers money and let them make their own decisions. If they do that, the Washington establishment that creates wasteful spending programs and doles out food stamps to out-of-work coal miners would become obsolete, and there would be no reason for those coal miners to get out to the polls and vote for a Democrat next November. The Democrats also managed to create a split between the leaders of labor unions and the actual members. A big part of the reason for that divide is the rampant corruption in union leadership. More than ever, union leaders have become part of the Washington establishment—veritable swamp creatures in their own right—while the actual workers continue to suffer through flat wages, high taxes, and glacial economic growth. Along the way, union bosses realized that they could “represent” the membership by doing nothing: not working and being completely subsidized by the workers of their own unions! Meanwhile, they threw their support behind a party that did nothing for them but ship union jobs overseas. They were literally helping to export the American dream that they were initially created to protect.

  For example, take John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty. As of this writing, the boss of the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council and Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is awaiting trial on a 116-count federal indictment that includes the embezzlement of more than $600,000 in union funds. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dougherty had union workers power wash the sidewalk in front of his hous
e, water his tomato garden, and make sports bets for him. For the past fifteen years, he practically ran the Democrat Party in Philly and its suburbs. So deep into the Democrats’ pocket was he that he made sure his union local did the wiring for the 2016 Democrat National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. He met with Hillary Clinton during the campaign. Dougherty might be a throwback to the days of the movie On the Waterfront, but he isn’t an anomaly. Union leadership across the country is rife with corruption. According to data released by the US Department of Labor, since 2001, the Office of Labor-Management Standards has investigated and prosecuted union leaders for embezzling more than $100 million in union dues. Union leadership also spent something like $100 million in collected dues on Hillary Clinton’s campaign while supporting an agenda (immigration reform, climate change, and other Democrat favorites) that sounds like talking points for a Bernie Sanders speech.

  To be honest, Rusty probably knew all that better than I did. He just needed someone to tell him what he already knew. By the time I went inside the venue for my speech, he was looking a little more secure about the vote he would cast in a few days.

  When I asked Rusty what modern Democrat policies his grandfather might have supported, from socialized medicine to giving amnesty to millions of illegals, he couldn’t name a one. “How about keeping more of the money you earn from working?” I asked. “How much more of your paycheck do you want the government taking away?” Rusty shook his head and said, “None.” I smiled. “Look, Rusty,” I said, “I understand the tradition. I understand that being a Democrat is all your family has ever known. But, man, today’s party is not your grandfather’s Democrat Party.” You could almost see the light go on behind his eyes. I put my hand out and he grabbed it. “Welcome to the GOP,” I said. “We’re glad to have you.”

  I’ve had this talk many times since then, and I’m sure I’ll keep having it.

  BLUE-COLLAR BILLIONAIRE

  In the aftermath of the election, the so-called experts and geniuses on TV were shocked to find that my father had gotten unheard-of levels of support from voters who belonged to labor unions. In fact, the only Republican presidential candidate to get a larger percentage of the union vote had been Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election. For weeks, op-ed writers and data journalists seemed baffled that in all the years that Republicans had been running for president, the candidate who had finally broken through and gained the support of rural union workers was a billionaire who lived on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue high-rise. They pored over my father’s life story, trying to find some way to explain it all away, even saying that the voters must not have had all the information, that they had gone with Trump only because they were “non-college-educated,” or that they just hated Washington and wanted to burn it down.

  What all those morons with Ivy League journalism degrees failed to see was right there in plain sight. As I’ve often said, if you want to wear yourself out, follow Donald J. Trump around a job site someday. My father doesn’t just visit a construction project; he stays the whole day and then comes back the next day. By the time he’s through, he knows most of the workers’ names, every problem they’ve encountered, and just about exactly how much he’s spent. At The Trump Organization, we’ve hired thousands and thousands of union workers over the years, including Teamsters, union carpenters, and union electricians. Thanks partly to my father, many of them kept working for years, bought homes, and sent their kids to college. Democrats can pretend to be the party of the American working class, but those men and women aren’t easily fooled. To voters like Rusty, the billionaire from Fifth Avenue is just as blue collar as they are. To the idiots on television who ended up with egg on their faces: shame on you. The same goes for the executives who kept these idiots employed. Only in the world of fake news can someone get something so wrong, such as the 2016 election, come back the next day, and pretend nothing ever happened! Where the hell is the accountability, people? Heads should have rolled! Do you remember the meltdown on CNN? What a glorious early morning as those who had predicted for weeks that Hillary would win by double digits had to eat their words. Still, they got away with all their lies. Trump exposed the supposed experts for what they are: full of shit.

  It all reminds me of another trip I took early on in the campaign, this one to Trump Turnberry, my father’s golf course and country club a few miles from Glasgow, Scotland. We were about to reopen there after a year of extensive renovations. As it happened, the trip took place just as British citizens were getting ready to vote on whether or not their country would leave the European Union. As we were getting ready to cut the ribbon at one of the famed golf holes, I was hanging around with some of the guys who look after the course—people from the local towns who drank in the pubs and worked all day out in the sun (and the rain… it is Scotland, after all). As usual, they were the people I spent most of my time with. In my years of going to Turnberry for Trump Org, I’d gotten to know most of them well.

  A few yards away, a group of reporters was gathering around the stage. Most of them had come to ask my father questions about his presidential campaign and his views on Brexit, which was the big story of the day. None of them cared very much about the golf course. From where I was standing with the maintenance guys, we could hear the television news anchors giving some early poll results on the referendum that was going to happen later that week. According to those news anchors—a small subset of the British population, say 1 percent, who lived almost exclusively in London and other metro areas—there was no way their countrymen would vote to leave. That, they seemed to suggest, would be ridiculous and stupid—not unlike the election of a certain brash billionaire from Manhattan that was happening across the Atlantic Ocean.

  When I turned to the guys I was talking with—the other 99 percent of the British population, the ones who’d actually vote and be affected by what they were voting for—they had a different answer.

  “Absolutely no way we don’t vote to leave,” one of them said. “It’s one hundred percent certain. We’re out.”

  Across the golf course, there were dozens of reporters looking (or pretending to look) for the story on Brexit. When I asked one of these reporters before we left what he thought was going to happen with Brexit, he said the same thing as his buddies on TV: “We’re staying. I don’t know anyone who would vote to leave. Not a single one.”

  If he had wanted to meet one, all this guy had to do was walk a few feet and talk to some regular people. But he didn’t. Neither did any of his counterparts in the British media or the United States. Then, when the unthinkable happened and the people spoke up for what they wanted, all the reporters were dumbfounded. How could this happen? How did we get it so wrong?

  They got it wrong because they didn’t get out and talk to voters. That’s it. End of story. They knew the outcome they wanted and they wrote accordingly. But these words didn’t give them more of a say than anyone else. They certainly didn’t give them more of a vote.

  And for all the things my father has supposedly “revolutionized” about US politics—all of which he deserves full credit for, of course—his most revolutionary tactic was a pretty simple one: he knew his voters, and he listened to them. I wish I could tell you there was some other big secret or a fifty-point strategy you haven’t heard about for winning the presidency, but that’s really it. When my father stepped out onto the stage for the first time, he was talking to people he had been working with his entire life.

  No one else in the race could say that.

  When my father emerged on the scene in early 2015, everyone assumed that the support of local unions and blue-collar workers belonged exclusively to establishment Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. By all accounts, they had strong support in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. They were going to take the entire black and Hispanic vote easily. No one even stopped to think about why that had always been the case or whether it made any sense anymore—at least not until my father started cha
llenging the established norms of politics and speaking to voters who’d been ignored by Republicans and Democrats alike for decades. During that campaign, we all learned what could happen if you just sat down and listened to people, then came up with policies that addressed their concerns.

  As is often the case with politics, this sounds simple. But the Republican Party had managed to screw it up in just about every election of my lifetime. No party had a more stellar reputation for losing big and ignoring the issues that mattered. The Republican Party under George W. Bush and Mitt Romney could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory better than any other organization in history. For years, the party had been refusing to speak to workers in small-town America who were getting laid off by the second. They were too focused on getting more donations or getting reelected to see that there was real pain in the center of the country that couldn’t be fixed without major changes. Compared with past Republicans, we outperformed in almost every category and with every demographic despite the BS narrative the media was selling with such glee. All they had given was promises; we gave people real results.

  Luckily for people like Rusty, my father came along. Now the working men and women of America actually have someone in the White House who knows what they need and how to get it for them. Ask yourself this: What politician today has a history of dealing with unions and labor in business? Who has done thousands of jobs employing union labor? Who has worked with labor and not for its leadership, as many Democrats have? Name one substantive thing that Democrats have done for the union men and women of America over the past decades. NAFTA was horrible. Democrats did a great job for other countries that wanted to build up their manufacturing base. Meanwhile, union leadership pretended that Democrats are good for union workers? Give me a break! How dumb do you think we are? As I mentioned, my father renegotiated NAFTA into a new deal, USMCA, which does so much for American workers. Unions applauded that new deal, yet now Nancy Pelosi refuses to even bring it up to a vote in the House! I wonder why…