Triggered

  But it is worth noting that during the nomination process, the National Women’s Law Center—an organization whose motto is “Expanding the possibilities for women and girls since 1972”—came out against Judge Barrett, saying she was a threat to “civil, constitutional, and reproductive rights.” The organization is actually interested in expanding possibilities for only some women. It’s no different from the American Civil Liberties Union, which stopped fighting for the civil liberties of all Americans a long time ago. Now, they just cherry-pick the woke ones.

  It was Judge Barrett’s religion, however, that the Senate committee targeted. Democrats on the committee blasted her for her “dogmatic” belief in Catholicism. Barrett is a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic university. How dare she believe in her faith! Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s ranking Democrat, scolded her for doing just that.

  “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said of Barrett’s writings regarding the professional obligations of Catholic practitioners. “And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.” The writings she referred to expressed the professional obligations of Catholic law practitioners.

  One of the people who came to Barrett’s defense was the president of Notre Dame. In a letter to the senator, the Reverend John I. Jenkins reminded Feinstein of the role religion had played in our nation’s beginning. “Indeed, it lived loudly in the hearts of those who founded our nation as one where citizens could practice their faith freely and without apology.”

  Judge Barrett’s experience wasn’t a one-off by any measure. In November 2018, senators Kamala Harris of California and Mazie Hirono from Hawaii suggested that Brian Buescher, my father’s nominee for the US district court in Nebraska, be disqualified because he belonged to the Knights of Columbus. The Knights of Columbus? What’s next to disqualify someone? Membership in the American Automobile Association? The Book of the Month Club? The Cub Scouts? Come on! The Knights of Columbus has been doing charitable works for 136 years. What in God’s name would membership in it be disqualifying of anything?

  Then there was the confirmation of Trevor McFadden to the district court in DC. During his confirmation hearings, Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat senator from Rhode Island, grilled Judge McFadden about statements made by his pastor about same-sex marriage. Hey, Sheldon, you remember anything about separation of church and state?

  It scares me, however, that the kind of anti-Christian bias shown to Judge Barrett and the others has become so common in this country that we barely notice when US senators engage in it. The left in this country has completely forgotten the Judeo-Christian values on which the United States was founded. Democrats forget that the only reason we have a country in the first place is because a bunch of people got onto a ship and sailed here from England so they could practice their religion freely. Then, when it came time to write their laws, they looked to the Ten Commandments for guidance.

  Separation of church and state in this country means that the government can’t tell people what faith they can practice. It doesn’t stop people from making laws based on their religious beliefs.

  But let’s pretend for a moment that we lived in a world that had not yet been turned entirely upside down. Let’s say that I, a white Christian male, sat on a committee that reviewed prospective justices. Let’s say I was questioning a young Muslim woman who wanted to be a judge (or a senator or a PTA president) about her religious beliefs. How far down that line of inquiry do you think I would be able to go before the riots began? Five seconds? Maybe ten if the C-SPAN connection was slow? Do you think Dianne Feinstein would ever ask a Muslim nominee to a court if he or she believed in Sharia law? Or if he or she would discriminate against those who drink? Give me a break! No one, for instance, has asked Ilhan Omar in a public forum whether or not she married her brother to commit immigration fraud. Of course, that’s off-limits.

  And what do you think would happen if I told this imaginary Muslim woman that I was “deeply uncomfortable” because I thought the “dogma” of Islam “lived loudly” within her? Yeah, it wouldn’t have been pretty.

  Unlike the fake grandstanding we hear from Senate Democrats, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles is one of the great examples of those who take a real stand against intolerance. Wiesenthal tracked down and brought to justice Nazi war criminals from around the world. Today the center serves to educate the next generation when horrors of humanity are ignored. My friends Carol and Larry Mizel chair the center, which ensures that all those who visit never forget the horrors of the Holocaust. Incidentally, Carol was one of the first to endorse and actively support my father.

  At the time, the fact that we had any support in the Jewish community was baffling to many pundits. But it shouldn’t have been. He made promises to them, and he kept every single one. He campaigned on appointing conservative judges, and he’s delivered in a spectacular way. He campaigned on restoring fairness in trade and he’s taken the Chinese and other nations head on. Similarly, he promised to move the United States Embassy to Jerusalem, something which multiple presidents including George Bush, Bill Clinton, Other Bush, and even Barack Obama also promised to do but never delivered. Barack Obama made no secret of his disdain for Israeli leadership, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised in his lack of support to move the embassy. My father, however, has always been and will always be a friend to Israel.

  Let’s take a step back and see how this simple move has been delayed for years. In 1995, Congress passed overwhelmingly the Jerusalem Embassy Act which called for the United States to relocate our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The law allowed for the White House to sign a waiver to delay the move if it wanted. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all chose to delay the move for a total of almost twenty-three years!

  That’s the difference between my dad and Obama, Bush, and Clinton. When he makes a promise, he follows through. One of his top priorities was to move the embassy to Jerusalem, so he got right to it with our friend and great Ambassador David Friedman to start planning for the move.

  The media went wild. Political pundits lost their minds. Even some politicians who had voted for the very law started questioning the wisdom of the move. All these geniuses proclaimed that the move would result in an all-out war between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a new intifada. Everywhere you looked someone was condemning the move, from world leaders to the Pope who called for the “Status Quo” to be respected. Even the Chinese urged caution. Give me a break. The United Nations, which rarely makes an effort to condemn anything, convened the Security Council, which promptly and almost unanimously voted to condemn the United States over the move. The United States ultimately vetoed the resolution. Even jihadi and terrorist groups weighed in and called for armed struggles against the move.

  Pundits in the United States declared it irresponsible, reckless, and hurtful to the peace process! Remember, every single time this law has come up for a vote in the Senate, over 90 percent of the Senate has supported it. Sometimes, it’s passed with literally zero opposition. And yet, when President Trump tried to do what everyone really wanted, people were absolutely triggered!

  And how much of the doom and gloom happened when my father followed through on his promise? Practically none. Casualties were minimal; smaller acts have caused much larger violence and death in the Middle East. Millions of people did not die as many in the media claimed would be the result. In Bethlehem they turned the lights off on the Christmas tree. There were some protests outside the Middle East but they quickly disappeared. What happened to the inevitable intifada? What happened to the war that never materialized? What happened to the start of World War III that the often wrong but never in doubt “experts” claimed would result from this move?

  Courage takes action, and my father is never afraid to act. He believed it was the right thing to do. The sta
te of Israel gets to decide where their capital is, and the United States should support the only democracy in the Middle East. You see, the United States is a leader, and others follow us. It’s called leadership—something Obama sorely lacked. It’s time for America to take its rightful place as the leader of the free world once again.

  11.

  MISS GENDERED

  EVER SINCE THE DAY I gave my first campaign speech in support of my father, there’s been a fair amount of speculation as to where my own political career might take me. For instance: Would I resign from the The Trump Organization and go on the road indefinitely? Take a permanent position on my father’s campaign? Maybe run for office myself one day? Well, here, right now, at long last, I would like to put all those rumors to rest. I will not be seeking political office. In fact, I won’t be continuing in politics at all. I have my sights on something much bigger.

  Effective immediately, I am going to concentrate all my efforts on becoming the greatest, most powerful player in the nine-to-twelve-year-old division of my local girls’ softball league.

  Now, look, I know what all you transphobic bigots are thinking. Don! You’re not a girl! You’re forty-one years old! You can’t do that!

  Well, dear reader, that’s where you’re wrong. In this new alternate reality of the left, crazy old ideas such as “age” and “gender” and “sanity” don’t matter anymore. It is no longer anyone’s business what sex you were assigned at birth; all that matters is how you feel. If I wake up one day feeling like a thirteen-year-old girl named Susan (which would come as a pretty big surprise to my girlfriend, Kimberly), then you are required—by law in some countries—to call me that. And if I, speaking as little Susan, decide that I want to start absolutely crushing home runs over the center-field fence in my daughter’s slow-pitch softball league, you are required to let me suit up in my pink pinstripes and get out onto the field. If you don’t, you’ll be “misgendering” me.

  And misgendering people can get you into a lot of hot water.

  Just ask Kate Scottow, a woman who lives in Hertfordshire, England. In February 2019, she was arrested by local police for “harassing” a transgender woman (which means a man who identifies as a woman). You see, she referred to her as a “he” on Twitter. (I know, I know. This can get confusing.) Police showed up at Scottow’s apartment and arrested her in front of her autistic ten-year-old daughter and her twenty-month-old infant son. In court, the prosecutor accused Scottow of engaging in a “campaign of targeted harassment” against the transgender activist, all because she refused to call the activist by her preferred pronoun.

  This is how far the left’s nonsense has spread. Not only will you be shunned from public life for pushing against its radical agenda, you could actually face jail time for it.

  Now, for those of you who haven’t heard about all this transgender news, let me see if I can catch you up.

  According to liberals today, many of whom reside in their mom’s basements or their university dorm rooms, babies are born with a biological sex, but they are not born with a “gender identity.” Male babies—excuse me, babies with a Y chromosome—are not necessarily boys, just as babies with two X chromosomes (formerly known as female babies) are not necessarily girls. It’s only when they get old enough to decide for themselves whether they’re a boy or a girl—I guess when they choose to play with either G.I. Joe or G.I. Jane—that the gender is decided. In the meantime, they grow up gender neutral.

  Sometimes they don’t have to pick a gender at all. That’s called being “nonbinary.” If someone is nonbinary, you have to refer to that person with whatever names and pronouns they ask you to. Judging by some of the forms I’ve seen lately—in doctors’ offices, school offices, and so on—these pronouns can be anything from “they/theirs” to “ze” or “zim” or “zer” (zer?). Last time I checked, there were about twenty-eight different options in total, and I’m sure that’s grown a lot since. Also, you don’t need to undergo any sort of gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy to change your gender anymore. All you have to do is declare that you are another gender, and people have to accept it.

  It used to be that terms like this applied only to people who had undergone surgery to change their sex from male to female or the other way around, which at least made some kind of sense. But today that’s no longer the case. Men can be women if they say they are, and women can be men if they say they are.

  This gets even crazier when you’re talking about people who consider themselves to be “genderfluid,” meaning people who believe that they can assume a different gender every day—or every minute or every few seconds. Believe it or not, these people exist. Just google it, and you’ll see. They’ll be Billy one minute and switch to Betty the next. According to the new rules of the left, all they have to do is say it—or feel it—and it automatically becomes true. You can’t say a word against them.

  So if you call a person Betty when s/he is feeling like Billy, what happens? Do you get charged with a hate crime? What if that person feels as though you committed a hate crime? Because remember: These days, all that really matters is feelings. Facts, evidence, and logic have gone out the window. Once you accept the fact that feelings matter more than facts, it doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with religion, race, or kids’ basketball games. You’re in trouble.

  Now, I am a “live and let live kind” of guy and truly don’t care what you identify as. As far as I’m concerned, you can identify yourself any way you want. Whatever makes you happy. Just don’t send me to jail if I get it wrong.

  I do have a problem, however, when some individuals take advantage of the situation and try to game the system. So if you’re a male athlete in college and you’re getting your ass handed to you by all the other big, strong males in your division, you might have a way out! All you have to do is declare that you’re a woman, and suddenly your competition gets smaller and less muscular. It’s like magic!

  Now, you might be wondering Don, how often does this really happen? The answer is “More often than you might imagine.” There are a bunch of mediocre male athletes who have suddenly decided that they’ve “been women their whole lives” when they found out it might boost their chances of winning a medal or getting some free press, or perhaps getting an athletic scholarship.

  For example, take CeCe Telfer, a track and field athlete who competed as a man until she was about nineteen years old. Telfer was born a boy, went through puberty as one, and emerged a fine specimen of manhood. In the years she competed as a man in the NCAA, running for Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, she was ranked somewhere in the 200s—a respectable position for any athlete who’s worked hard. CeCe’s hard work earned her a college scholarship, a spot on the team, and accolades from all over the country. But it wasn’t enough. During her third year at Franklin Pierce, CeCe announced that he was actually a woman and wanted to switch from the men’s team to the women’s team. She did not undergo any kind of surgery to make the change, nor did she provide any evidence that she had “always been a woman,” as she claimed. All she had to do, under some new NCAA rules put into place during the Obama administration, was undergo something called “testosterone suppression therapy” for one year.

  Over the course of her high school and college careers, CeCe had been working out hard, and it showed. She had a man’s body and a man’s muscles—which, as a matter of science, are nearly twice as durable and powerful as those of the average female. Even though she was average in the men’s division, she was still biologically equipped to run harder, faster, and longer than just about any woman in the world.

  That’s not sexist. It’s just a fact.

  Not surprisingly, when CeCe began competing against other women—meaning women who had been women their entire lives, who had worked their asses off to become the best in their division—she smoked the competition. It wasn’t even close. And why wouldn’t she? For all intents and purposes, she was a man (and a strong one at that) wea
ring women’s clothes. Before long, she was the single fastest woman in the NCAA. The transgender community celebrated.

  I thought it was ridiculous, to say the least, so I tweeted about it. Over the article announcing that a biological male was now the fastest woman in the NCAA, I wrote this message:

  Yet another grave injustice to so many young women who trained their entire lives to achieve excellence. Identify however you want, to each his own, but this is too far and unfair to so many.

  I had been on Twitter long enough to know that when you post something like that, there’s going to be blowback. (When I post anything, there’s blowback, especially when that thing takes on contemporary wokeness.) But to my surprise, the world was pretty calm about that one. Even the nuttier members of the social justice warrior left were on my side. “Cannot believe I’m saying this,” wrote one leftist activist, “but I think I’m with Donald Trump Jr. on this one.” I guess there really are some things we can all agree on.

  Even Martina Navratilova, the legendary tennis player who grew up not too far from my grandparents’ village in Czechoslovakia, weighed in. Here’s a woman who had worked her entire life to become one of the greatest of all time. To her, the idea that we were going to allow men who couldn’t hack it in their own division to start competing against women was “cheating.” The blowback she got was major (and she has since walked back her hard line on the subject after a full-frontal assault by the SJW left), but it was still nothing compared to what I get for an average tweet about politics. It seems that, by and large, the public is in agreement about this.