Triggered

  Meanwhile, it also took two months for me to realize the enormity of what my father had accomplished, and the weight of the job that he’d won. It was the day before the inauguration, and we were driving into Arlington National Cemetery, where he was to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I rarely get emotional, if ever. I guess you’d call me hyper-rational, stoic. Yet, as we drove past the rows of white grave markers, in the gravity of the moment, I had a deep sense of the importance of the presidency and a love of our country. I was never prouder of my father than when I watched as he stood before the tomb, his hand over his heart, while the Army bugler played “Taps.”

  In that moment, I also thought of all the attacks we’d already suffered as a family, and about all the sacrifices we’d have to make to help my father succeed—voluntarily giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals to avoid the appearance that we were “profiting off the office.”

  We’re not talking about business with any foreign government agencies. This was based on the idea that we might be taken advantage of by a private business that would then have leverage on us. First of all, I don’t think Trump Org has ever gotten duped by anyone and, second, the chances of something like that even being attempted are pretty remote. Frankly, it was a big sacrifice, costing us millions and millions of dollars annually, a huge book of business that I had personally built.

  But it was a sacrifice we were more than happy and willing to make. Of course, we didn’t get any credit whatsoever from the mainstream media, which now does not surprise me at all.

  Still, we sidestepped the headache the liberal press would have given us if we didn’t give up the business. Every deal we made would be twisted until they could find a serviceable lie. They would write that we were enriching ourselves; or that my father would use the presidency to somehow make money; or that he was under the thumb of some foreign government, a popular theme with the tinfoil hat gang and the MSM. We also had to give up a lot of domestic business because, as ridiculous as this sounds, we didn’t want to run the risk of our domestic partners being branded racist, misogynistic, or any of the lies and labels the press had manufactured about my dad. Candidly, the additional scrutiny made even the most basic tasks virtually impossible. Yet it was, and continues to be, a small price to pay to watch America become great again and to regain our place as the rightful leader of the free world. No more Obama apology tours.

  In one sense, the left and the liberal press effectively put me out of work. All that was left for me to do was spend my time campaigning for my father.

  They might have been better off letting me just do my job.

  The phonies came out of the woodwork after the election. I had thousands of emails on my phone by the next morning. All of them said practically the same thing: “We were with you from the start, buddy.” Yeah, right. You haven’t taken a call in 18 months, but now you’re with us? Even worse. The same people who would text me telling me how much they loved our ideas would then be on Facebook deriding Trump the very next minute, probably looking for some “woke” points. You can’t have it both ways, folks. But in politics everyone always tries.

  I remembered back to my father’s words in the elevator before he announced, “Now, we find out who our real friends are.”

  I don’t think I made any truer friends than I did on the campaign. One of the reasons Tommy Hicks joined us, he told me, was because he was worried about some of the people we’d be around in politics. I told him I was pretty sure I’d be able to take care of myself, but the sheer audacity of some people was pretty staggering. On the night before the Inaugural, one donor called and asked if I could ask my father to appoint his friend’s daughter to be the US Ambassador to Great Britain. “She’s a reasonably successful investment banker,” he added, as if that was enough to seal the deal. I’ll get right on it, pal.

  Plenty changed after my father took office, too, and much of that change was good for the American people. I guess I changed too. Politics had entered my bloodstream for all the good reasons. The opportunity was there for me to help forward my father’s agenda, and help him accomplish his goals.

  What didn’t change was the attacks from the left. If anything, they only got worse. Let them take their best shot, I thought, because there was something else that hadn’t changed.

  The fight in us.

  10.

  A DEADLY FORM OF HATE

  My father didn’t take a lot of time to make good on his campaign promises. On the first day he sat behind the Resolute desk, he began signing executive orders that covered everything from expediting environmental reviews that were slowing much-needed infrastructure projects to improving border security to slashing two regulations for every one a federal agency added. He also began to undo some of the most disastrous policies of Barack Obama’s presidency.

  The EO that caused the left to nearly implode was the one that banned mass immigration from countries that harbored radical Islamics. The ban was temporary, and it wouldn’t have allowed spying on Muslims who live peacefully in this country, as the fake news would have had you believe. It was a preventive measure so that the secretary of state and homeland security secretary would have time to review the admissions process. Its purpose was to find ways of keeping people who hate the United States from coming into the country. I don’t know about you, but to me it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. It would have affected a tiny number of people.

  It didn’t take long for the liberal news media and the left to lose its collective mind over that one policy. Within just a few days, there were a dozen people on television every day, comparing my father to Adolf Hitler and that simple travel ban to the Holocaust. The left at large was doing the same thing they do on campuses: saying “Forget about facts, it’s only the outrage you feel that matters.”

  THE WORLDWIDE WAR AGAINST CHRISTIANS

  The bias against Christians on the part of the left and liberal lawmakers is bad, but at least liberals tend to just whine, while terrorists actually act on it. The same can’t be said for the radical Islamic terrorists around the world. It’s an empirical fact that radical Islam is waging a worldwide war against Christians, Jews, Hindus, and even Islam itself. According to Open Doors USA, a nonprofit organization that supports persecuted Christians around the world, each month 345 Christians are killed and 219 are imprisoned without trial because of their faith. “The primary cause of persecution is Islamic oppression,” Open Doors stated. “This means, for millions of Christians—particularly those who grew up Muslim or were born into Muslim families—openly following Jesus can have painful consequences.”

  Yet according to the narrative pushed by the left in the United States, it is Muslims who are under attack and must be a protected class—one whose ideas we are prohibited from criticizing, even if we’re not criticizing the people themselves. A victimhood complex has taken root in the American left, and it has done so while radical Islamic terrorism is on the rise. This has made it impossible to have anything resembling a real debate about radical Islam without being shut down or called a racist.

  Democrats will tell you that being critical of radical Islam is the same as being critical of all Muslim people in the world. Obama ordered his entire administration to use the phrase “violent extremism” so as not to hurt the feelings of murderous cowards who strap suicide vests on pregnant women and sell children as sex slaves.

  As cowardly as Obama’s orthodoxy is, it gets even worse. You can almost understand, from a political point of view, the Democrats’ reluctance not to call out these terrorists for what they are. They certainly don’t want to piss off the left-wing media complex and the Hollywood propaganda machine. It is an act of unconscionable disgrace, however, for them to refuse to acknowledge the true identity of the victims of these attacks.

  Last Easter in Sri Lanka, radical Islamic terrorists wearing suicide vests entered churches and other places where Christians were celebrating the holiday and detonated the devices.
Some 250 people, mostly Christians, were blown to bits. Another 500 were wounded. When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton finally got around to offering their condolences, they did so like this:

  “The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity,” the former president tweeted.

  “I’m praying for everyone affected by today’s horrific attacks on Easter worshippers and travelers in Sri Lanka,” the former First Lady remarked.

  Easter worshippers?

  Are they kidding?

  What would they have called them if it had happened on December 25? Christmas carolers? Why don’t they just slap the victims’ families in the face?

  Yet a month earlier in New Zealand, when a white extremist had shot fifty people in a mosque, they’d made sure you knew the victims were Muslim. “We grieve with you and the Muslim community,” Obama had tweeted.

  Not only is the liberal press complicit in this; it has made an art form out of covering for radical Islam.

  Take the coverage of Omar Mateen, for instance. He’s the monster who a couple of years back walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and shot and killed forty-nine innocent people. He committed the act in the name of radical Islam. We know that because he told us so. In a call to 911, made as he was still shooting people, he swore allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. You might remember that al-Baghdadi crawled out of his hole after the Sri Lanka attacks to praise the suicide bombers and renew his vow to kill Christians. “The battle of Islam and its people against the cross and its people is a long battle,” he said on the video he released.

  As you can see, there’s very little room for the interpretation of Mateen’s motive.

  Yet here’s what the liberal media does: When someone commits an act of terror in the name of radical Islam, be it a bombing, a shooting, or a beheading, the press goes out of its way to call the perpetrators “sociopaths,” “lone-wolf extremists,” and every other label for their behavior other than the one that is patently obvious or, as in the case of the Pulse nightclub shooter, what the terrorist himself tells us. When terrorists say they did something because they want to conquer infidels and establish a caliphate that covers the entire earth, the New York Times says, “Ignore that; they’ve probably had very hard lives.” When Omar Mateen, the Pulse shooter, told us he had killed in the name of al-Baghdadi, the Times asked if he was a closeted gay man consumed by feelings of self-loathing and revenge. Instead of an editorial denouncing the ideology that had led to the attack in the first place, the Washington Post published one chastising officials for not seeing it coming.

  This has been going on for as long as radical Islamic terrorists have been killing Americans.

  Remember the Fort Hood shooter? The radical Islamic army major who shot and killed thirteen people at a military base? CNN labeled him only as an “army psychiatrist,” with no mention of his religion or his extremist views, which had been documented in uncovered emails.

  When some homegrown piece-of-shit militia group commits a terrorist act, however, the press will run out of ink calling its members Christians. Even its use of the phrase “white supremacist” is a lightly veiled pseudonym for “Christian.” The double standard that exists in the media would be laughable in a less serious context. It’s the Christians, they say, who bomb abortion clinics, but it’s an army psychiatrist, not a radical Islamic, who murders more than a dozen people in cold blood. It’s an evangelical who attacks gays, but it’s a closet homosexual who kills dozens of people in a nightclub. It’s a white nationalist Christian who attacks a mosque, but it’s a man with a troubled mind who kills his coworkers in San Bernardino.

  During the campaign, I sent out a tweet that had a photo of a bowl of rainbow-colored Skittles accompanied by the following text: “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”

  As metaphors go, I didn’t think it was so terrible. Maybe not F. Scott Fitzgerald, but not bad for a guy with a business degree from Wharton, right? I was immediately labeled a soulless monster and, of course, a white supremacist (the left’s go-to). You would have thought by the response from the left that I had murdered the Easter Bunny. It was an analogy that put our problem into perspective. Just numbers, folks.

  Yet when Linda Sarsour, the head of the Arab American Association of New York, and cochair of the Women’s March, declared a jihad against my father, there was not a whisper of protest. Unlike my bowl of Skittles, however, Sarsour’s message to her followers was dangerous, and she knew it full well. Afterward, trying to soften her vengeful words, apologists for her tried to redefine jihad as a “spiritual struggle against vices.”

  In other words, the left can try to retrofit Americans’ morals onto the barbaric, ancient idea of holy war to make themselves feel better, but they’re only fooling the liberal audiences of the United States and Europe. For the rest of us who live in the real world, we know the truth when we hear it.

  As it stands right now, the ideas contained in radical Islamic fundamentalism are completely at odds with the basic tenets of Western civilization. Still, anyone who dares utter this basic fact in public is decried as a racist, a participant in “hate speech,” or worse.

  Now before people in the fake-news media take me out of context and get too carried away, let me be crystal clear: I am not talking about the vast majority of Muslim people around the world

  If we aren’t free to criticize radical Islam on its merits and to speak freely about what’s wrong with people who subscribe to it blindly and do bad things in its name, we are not living up to the ideals of free expression set out by our founding documents. We’ve been told for so long, usually in the aftermath of some monstrous Islamist attack on the civilized world, that Islam is a religion of peace, but we must also acknowledge that there is a radical element that would kill you, me, and even the trans hippie who’s eating a vegan kale salad right now. Even most Muslims know this. Early in my father’s candidacy, right after the San Bernardino terrorist attack, DJT called for a complete shutdown of the country’s borders to Muslims, the same as he would do later in office. About midnight that night, I got a call telling me I would appear on one of the morning shows at six the next morning to talk about the ban. When I asked for talking points, they said, “You’re on your own.” As I’ve mentioned, we were a lean, mean team. The next morning, I hailed a livery cab. I saw the driver look at me in the rearview mirror and could see the recognition in his expression. He was Middle Eastern, and I thought, “Oh, shit, here it comes.” Instead of giving me a piece of his mind, however, he leaned back over the seat and said, “I’ve heard your father’s comments. I think he’s one hundred percent right.

  “I know it’s the ones who are preaching hate, oppressing women, killing people who ruin it for us all,” he continued. “Even the ones like this man [the San Bernardino shooter] who came to the United States legally are ruining it. They have to find a way to stop them. I don’t blame him for banning everyone until they do.”

  The vast majority of Muslims feel the same, because they’re the targets of radical Islam, too.

  During the 2016 presidential campaign and its run-up, my father used the phrase “radical Islamic terrorist” in at least sixty tweets, and in most of them he called out Obama and Hillary for not using it. Despite the tidal wave of outrage from the left, it was the first time I know of that a politician had the courage to say what a whole lot of Americans believe.

  Why do liberals go out of their way to apologize for or excuse radical Islam while at the same time they condemn Christians, masculinity, family values, and the American way of life? You can’t have it both ways!

  Maybe you disagree with my dad and the Americans who support him. If you do, guess what? You’re allowed to. Last I looked, disagreement not only is our constitutional right, it was encouraged by our founders. By definition, however, a disagreement has two sides. If one side eng
ages in a full-out war of misinformation, hurtful invectives, and physical violence toward the other, it’s not a disagreement.

  It’s called hate.

  THE WAR AGAINST CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES

  Wouldn’t it be great if there were an institution in the United States dedicated to fact-checking every word that comes from the mouths of Democrat politicians and their so-called public intellectuals? An organization whose job it would be to report on things that people say with some accuracy? Sadly, the liberal press has abdicated its role as the purveyor of truth in the United States and has become an activist organization for the American left. It has bought and sold the idea that there is a culture war going on—between the oppressed and the oppressors, the colonizers and the victims, the evil capitalist pigs and the innocent gender studies majors of the world. This might not be so bad if it weren’t for the disastrous, real-world effects these ideas can have.

  Nowhere is this upside-down thinking by the left more evident than in the way Christians are treated in our country today.

  In August 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee was supposed to review the qualifications of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. You’ll notice I said “supposed to,” because that was not exactly what ended up happening.

  Judge Barrett is a shining example of what a justice should be: always tough but fair and very concerned with looking out for those who have the least protection under the law. At the time of her nomination, she was a professor at Notre Dame Law School and a mother of four lovely children. My father had chosen her after months of deliberation because he believed she was the most qualified candidate.

  There were those who said he had chosen Judge Barrett solely because she was a woman, an olive branch to the crazed left-wing feminists in Congress. (Remember: if you’re a conservative, you get no woke points for being a female. In fact, you get docked a few woke points for being a traitor.) I don’t think that had anything to do with it. My father has hired women for major roles for about as long as Joe Biden has been rubbing their shoulders and letting out hot breath onto their necks—which is to say, a very long time.