Triggered

  When we allow mediocre men to compete in women’s sports, we do a disservice to all the hardworking young women who have fought to get where they are. I sometimes wonder where the feminists are on this issue. They sure don’t speak out much, to be honest.

  I harbor no ill will toward CeCe Telfer, and I wish her well in all other areas of her life. But she needs to understand that it’s not fair to push women around because you need to win. They have rights, too, and those rights include the right to a level playing field.

  In the cases of some young women, excellence in a sport can be the difference between going to the college of their dreams and not going at all. Often, the parents of female athletes who go to college would not be able to afford the tuition if it weren’t for athletic scholarships. And there’s no way to get help with tuition like that unless you’re one of the top female athletes in the country. Sometimes dropping one place in the rankings—say, because a faster woman named Bill showed up and started winning all the races you used to win—can cost a young woman her first-place ranking and eliminate her chances of getting a scholarship. This is not fair, and it shouldn’t be allowed to continue.

  But it does continue, as shown recently at the University of Connecticut, where two male students competing as women blew away the real women student athletes in several track and field races.

  As I write this, three female athletes in Connecticut have filed a complaint with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. As one of their legal counselors put it, “Women fought long and hard to earn the equal athletic opportunities that Title IX provides. Allowing boys to compete in girls’ sports reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women under this law. We shouldn’t force these young women to be spectators in their own sports.”

  I couldn’t have said it better myself. I wish those girls all the best. For the sake of my own daughters, who are shaping up to be pretty good golfers and basketball players, I hope they can compete under fair circumstances. My daughter Kai, who’s twelve, can really smoke me playing one-on-one. Maybe she has the potential to be amazing. Then again, maybe I’m just terrible at basketball. Maybe both.

  From track and field to volleyball to weight lifting, trans athletes are smashing women’s hard-earned records. Now, before all the liberal elite go screaming murder, let me reiterate: I don’t care what outfit you wear or whether you choose to identify as gay, lesbian, or trans. What I care about is redefining fair practices, such as allowing men to compete as women in sports. It’s funny, you never hear about trans men (women) dominating men’s divisions. I’ll wait for that to happen before I start rooting for trans women (men) who compete in the women’s divisions.

  Cheating hardworking young girls out of their scholarships is bad, but it’s far from the worst symptom of this recent social trend. At least when you’re talking about track and field, there’s no physical touching allowed. No one’s going to get hurt because a man in women’s clothes runs past her at top speed on the track.

  But when it comes to contact sports, there’s more than just our sense of fairness and lost scholarships on the line. This is where it becomes a safety issue. I don’t think anyone was totally comfortable, for instance, when a mediocre mixed martial arts fighter named Fallon Fox decided he was going to transition to a woman. This wasn’t just a man who wanted to run races in lanes next to women. This was a man who was losing bouts to other men, so he decided he wanted to beat up women instead. In one of his last fights, against a woman named Tamikka Brents—who held on for a very long time, considering the circumstances—Fox used his big hands to beat Brents into an early technical knockout. Hours after the match, doctors discovered that Brents’s skull had been fractured. There is no universe in which that should be acceptable, nor is there anyone who can argue that it was a fair fight!

  Outside the sports world, this trans trend goes from the bad to worse. Take, for instance, Bobby McCullough and Lesley Fleishman, a couple in Brooklyn who became internet famous in 2019 for raising their child without a gender. As McCullough told New York magazine in one of many profiles that were written about him and his gender-neutral baby—which the article called a “theyby”—he warned the hospital staff on the day his baby was born that they were not, under any circumstances, to refer to the baby’s anatomy. He went on to say that he wanted to prevent his baby from “being gendered in that intense moment.” Apparently, McCullough and Fleishman thought that just the mere mention of the baby’s biological sex would screw up theyby’s ability to choose their own gender. Oh, man. This gets nuttier by the minute.

  And these people are not alone! Though I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that the gender-neutral craze caught on in Hollywood, there are at least a half-dozen stars who are reportedly raising gender-neutral children.

  Look, as I said, do what makes you happy. If you want to name your child after a blender, teach him or her the tuba, or hold off on assigning a gender for a while, go right ahead. She/he/they/zim/zer is your kid. No one should be able to tell you what to do. Least of all the government! But there’s a point at which this behavior stops being funny or eccentric and starts impacting your child.

  Or starts becoming ridiculous, such as transgender “teaching tools” for children. Devised by transgender activists, these tools include the Genderbread Person and the Gender Unicorn. (The unicorn came about because of complaints that the Genderbread Person looked too much like a man.) These tools teach children that when it comes to gender, there are plenty of options to choose from. Just some of the options include: genderqueer, nonbinary, pangender, androgyne, neutrois, gender variant, cyborg, two spirit, glitterbutch, genderfluid, trigender, and genderless.

  Apparently, according to the tools, children can think they’re male, have the biological sex of a woman, dress like a man, be sexually attracted to women but romantically attracted to men, or any combination or percentage thereof. “Gender isn’t binary,” read the instructions for the tools. “In many cases, it’s both. A bit of this, a dash of that.” Again, I don’t care what you do, but when you start to insert the wrong genders into sports, it’s no longer just impacting you.

  When it starts to get harmful, in my opinion, is right around the time some of the crazy parents begin going to “gender specialists,” who wear white coats and stethoscopes, to discuss whether or not their little theybies should begin the process of transitioning genders in a medical way. In some cases, parents whose children express tendencies of genders other than their own—boys who like to play with dolls, for example, or girls who like little toy army men—are told by these specialists that hormone therapy to suppress puberty, and/or a full-on surgical transition, might be the only way forward.

  The social justice warriors’ assault on basic sensibilities has spiraled out of control. After the all-gender bathrooms debate—when the left demanded that confused old men in dresses be allowed into the same restrooms as little girls—it was pronouns. After pronouns, it was men playing on female sports teams. If things keep going the way they are, don’t be surprised if in a few years, you see a bill on the House floor—likely with “Ocasio-Cortez” and “Tlaib” written somewhere on it—that forbids all parents to assign their babies gender identities at birth. And don’t be surprised when it gets passed. Like every other crazy idea that the left has had—from the Green New Deal and free college to prison voting and unlimited abortions—this one will come from the far left and then creep slowly but surely toward the center. It’ll start with one of the crazy people, the avowed socialists and Marxists. Then it’ll find its way to the more centrist Democrats, who know they need the crazy vote to get elected. Then, before you know it, it’ll be brought up during the Democrat primaries in front of the whole country on national television. This is how the left lost its mind in the first place, and it’s not going to stop anytime soon. Just watch and see.

  If you want to ask people to refer to you with the pronoun “they” instead of “he” or “she,” go right ahead. Most people wouldn
’t have a problem with that if you asked nicely. But I have a problem when you start threatening consequences if I don’t call you “they” instead of “he” or “she”—especially when those consequences involve the full force of government.

  I also have a problem when people start saying, as some researchers have been saying over the past few months, that trans people are being discriminated against because straight people don’t want to date them. I’m a live-and-let-live type of guy. I’m fine with people transitioning, using different pronouns, and referring to themselves with whatever names they see fit. But men shouldn’t be branded transphobic, homophobic, or bigoted just because they’re not lining up to date women with beards and penises.

  For too long, we have allowed the laws of our nation to be written by its most aggrieved, least stable citizens. We’ve pandered to ideas that have no basis in reality because we know that the people who came up with those ideas will turn the social justice mob on us if we don’t.

  I guess I should probably get back to telling you about my impending Little League softball career. Then again, maybe I’ll try junior women’s golf instead. Nah, better not. There’s already one Trump in junior women’s golf: my daughter Kai. For my dignity’s sake, I should stick to softball. Kai would kick my ass on the golf course and on the basketball court. Legitimately.

  12.

  THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE?

  BACK DURING the previous administration, when former president Obama took a trip to England for a state visit, he was met with a relatively small but vocal protest that flew a diapered baby Obama balloon over the streets of London… Yeah, right. Like that would have happened in a million years. If it had, the liberal Twittersphere would have blown up. Sparks would have flown from keyboards in newsrooms around the country as writers pounded out outraged headlines. Liberal pundits’ heads would have exploded on television screens.

  So, it’s no surprise that when a similar balloon caricature of the current president flew over London, the press expressed the same shock… About Donald Trump? Not a chance in the world. Instead, we had a photo or video of the balloon on the front page of nearly every liberal newspaper and leading every newscast, all accompanied by some snarky elitist-liberal attempt at humor. It didn’t come as a surprise. I didn’t expect the press in England to be any fairer than the media here—my father’s poll numbers in England aren’t so hot. But guess what? Neither were George Washington’s. You know why? Because he fought for America.

  I don’t really care how my dad polls in other countries, and neither should you. I don’t give a damn about balloons, either. The liberal press can write their little jokes until they run out of ink, for all I care. What I do care about, however, is the hypocrisy that is pervasive in the mainstream media. When a balloon depicting London’s liberal mayor, Sadiq Khan, in a bikini flew over London, the United Kingdom’s Metro newspaper ran a headline warning that “Flying the Sadiq Khan balloon is not an exercise of free speech—it is a party for bigots.”

  So, a Sadiq Khan balloon is bigoted, but a Donald Trump one is a big joke? You want to know a real joke? How about Barack Obama’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize just eleven days after he took office. Eleven days! What in God’s name could he have done in eleven days to warrant one of the most prestigious awards in the world? Well, the nomination was just an aberration, right? The judges were just swept up in the whole Obama hysteria, and they would never present him the award, right? Well, they did, just eight months into his presidency. And how did Obama live up to that lofty distinction? By increasing troop levels in Afghanistan to seven times that of George W. Bush, by overseeing a dramatic increase in drone strikes, and by being responsible for the death and injury of tens of thousands of people in wars across the Middle East. So, of course, he belongs with other Nobel Peace Prize winners such as Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela.

  The thing is, it wasn’t always like this. Before my father was a candidate, his relationship with the press was pretty good. He was friendly with all the network anchors and many of the major columnists. Reporters knew they could call him at any time, day or night, and get an excellent quote for the story they were working on. Flattering profiles of him ran when we’d open a new building, golf course, or resort.

  It wasn’t a total love affair. The media has never been entirely fair, especially the press in New York. There were always moments when someone, usually a young reporter trying to make a name for him or herself, would take a cheap shot at him. Back in the ’90s, when Dad had financial problems and when he and my mom were getting divorced, it seemed all his friends in the press turned on him. One of the reasons I wanted to get out of New York City and go to the Hill School in Pennsylvania was to get away from the cruel, nonstop coverage of my parents’ split.

  From the moment The Apprentice became a mega-hit (which is to say from the very first episode), however, the press pretty much gave DJT the star treatment. Even when my father announced he was running for president, the MSM was eager to cover him. Of course, the media—and the entire political world—didn’t take him seriously at first and believed his campaign would be a bust. Still, they knew DJT would be good copy. It’s all about ratings and clickbait today. It’s not about news.

  In a sense, you couldn’t blame the press for being skeptical. He’d been toying with the notion of running for president for a while. The first time the idea came up, at least in a public sense, was when Oprah asked him in an interview back in 1988 if he was going to run. Google that interview, and you’ll be surprised. In all this time, over thirty years, my father’s views on trade, America’s standing in the world, and other countries paying their fair share haven’t changed one bit. You could take that spot on Oprah and play it at a MAGA rally, and the crowd would go wild.

  The first time he announced his intention to run was in 1999 on Chris Matthews’s show, which was broadcast from the Irvine Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania. I remember it well. At the time, I was attending the Wharton School and was in the audience. A large percentage of the audience that day were Wharton students. When Matthews asked my father if he was going to run and my father said, “I am indeed,” the room exploded in applause. After the cheers died down, he looked at Matthews and said, “Perhaps.” He then said he would only run if he had a chance to win the nomination. Vintage DJT.

  The timing wasn’t right for him. He looked into running a couple of more times, in 2004 and 2008. With each time, however, my father got more fed up. His anger towards the incompetence of our leaders grew; he knew he couldn’t stay on the sidelines anymore. If the country were going to change direction, he’d have to be on the field. In 2015, he saw his opportunity.

  It was no surprise that DJT’s announcement drew a lot of coverage; the escalator ride is now an iconic moment. In hindsight, however, that day marks the beginning of something other than the campaign. In a sense, it was the beginning of the end of any credibility the liberal media still possessed.

  As I’ve mentioned, his announcement speech started the fake narrative of my father being racist. If the press gave him any fair coverage at all at first (very little) it wasn’t because they liked him as a candidate. They thought he could knock off the more viable Republican candidates to ensure a victory for Hillary. When DJT raced to the top of the polls and stayed there for months, the common belief in the mainstream media was that sooner or later the air would leak out of his campaign. When, in venue after venue and stadium after stadium, my dad spoke to wildly enthusiastic capacity crowds, the liberal press first shrugged it off, calling it celebrity worship that wouldn’t last. When he locked down the number of delegates necessary for the nomination, however, things got serious with the press and the propaganda and lies began to flood the liberal media. As always, however, the libs overplayed their hand. They thought that DJT would be the easiest for Hillary to beat. In their bubbles, removed from what was happening in the country, they ended up sealing Clinton’s political fate.

  For me, fake
news was an eye-opening experience. I was never a news junkie. I read the New York Post at home, and the Times and the Wall Street Journal at work. By the time I was on The Apprentice, I was getting all my news through social media. Though my news intake and awareness increased with social, I still hadn’t fully realized how one-sided reporting could be. It was while I was on the campaign, however, when I began to see the bias, the lying, the self-importance of the liberal press. I would watch Ivy League–educated news anchors sit back and feel offended on behalf of people they’ve never met. Watch as they acted all righteous and angry from behind the anchor’s chair while not having a clue about what mattered to Americans. Out in the small towns of the United States, and talking to people who come from the affected communities, I saw how vast the disconnect was between the media and the people they supposedly covered.

  Out on the campaign, I also saw the number of ways the mainstream media manipulates the news. One of the first things the press did to try and stop my father was giving up even the pretense of sourcing stories. “Anonymous sources,” “high ranking official,” “someone close to the Trump campaign,” all might sound impressive and make it seem that reporters were doing their jobs fairly, but what it actually meant was the reporter was making it up.

  Another favorite tactic of the liberal media is creative editing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched a piece on the news with a clip of my father saying something controversial and then realizing that I was with him when he was supposed to have said it. I find myself saying to the television, “Wait a minute. I was at that speech. When did he say that?” Then I realize they’ve done it again. They’ve taken something that my father said in jest and cut the piece to a soundbite, editing out all the laughter and context. A good editor can turn a noncontroversial statement or moment into an international crisis. They take a partial sentence from minute twenty-three of a forty-five-minute speech, and a word or two from minute thirty-five, splice them together, and voilà! Instant controversy. That it’s all taken out of context doesn’t matter at all to them.