Triggered

  First, I’ll give you an example of a stupid way the press does this, then a serious one. At the end of his first year in office, my father went to Japan to visit Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. Right before a working lunch in the Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, the two leaders stopped at a koi pond. The video of the moment that went viral and ran on every liberal news outlet shows my father dumping a whole box of fish food into the water. New York magazine’s headline read: “Trump Under Fire for Improper Fish-Feeding Technique.” The entire video, which CNN ran much later, shows Prime Minister Abe dumping his whole box in a moment before. DJT had a quizzical expression on his face, but he didn’t want to embarrass his host so he did exactly what Abe did.

  Maybe the most infamous manipulation of my father’s words came after the Charlottesville riot. First, let me say, I think the hate crime committed by the neo-Nazi sympathizer—running his car into a crowd of protestors, killing a young woman, and injuring thirty-five others—was a despicable act of a coward. He’s going to be in jail for the rest of his life, and that’s where he belongs. But almost from the moment the incident happened, the press was trying to somehow blame it on my dad. It didn’t matter if they had to lie or not. Donald Trump had to be at fault.

  They got their chance when my father held a press conference at Trump Tower about week after the incident. The media that day was in a lather, shouting questions at my dad, trying to get him to say something they could use against him. When they couldn’t (DJT is a cool customer in the most heated press situations), they made it up. So inflammatory was the lie, it led the news cycle for weeks. In fact, it is still told over and over by the liberal press to fuel the bigger lie that my father is a racist. The press reported that my dad had described neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” Nothing could have been farther from the truth, and yet those words were repeated an infinite number of times in the media. The short video clip of the news conference that was played incessantly showed him saying there were very fine people “on both sides.” Viewers of the clip, already biased by liberal news channels and newspapers, naturally assumed he was talking about neo-Nazis. But he wasn’t. If you watch the whole press conference, you would see that my father was talking about a different set of protestors. Not the neo-Nazis or Antifa, not the conflict that exploded in bloody carnage, but the protest about the statue of Robert E. Lee. Some people wanted the statue taken down; some wanted it to stay and have the park in which it stood renamed after the Confederate general. And guess what? There were fine people on both sides of that protest.

  Now it wasn’t as if my father was vague. He was the opposite. His words were absolutely clear.

  “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists,” he said. “They should be condemned totally.”

  So, in what universe does they should be condemned totally become very fine people? In the echo chamber of lies that is the liberal media. Leading Democrat contenders are still campaigning on the totally fictitious part of the story in order to hurt Trump. And you know who’s calling them out? That’s right, absolutely no one.

  By the time of the Republican National Convention, the press had already turned their sights on us, his children. I wasn’t shocked. By then, I knew that any sense of fair play and dignity, if there were any in the first place, had gone out the window.

  Maybe the worst of it, at least in the beginning, was how they treated my sister. Before my father ran for president, Ivanka was the darling of those glossy magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. Even the New York Times ran complimentary pieces about her. As my father’s chances to be elected improved, those same glossies and newspapers started publishing hit pieces on her. Ivanka is one of the nicest, most brilliant people I know, and I’m not saying that because I’m her brother. She is. And yet, one reporter for Cosmopolitan was so rude, Ivanka got up and left in the middle of the interview.

  Though Ivanka might have been the first target, the press wasted no time going after all of us. Right after the convention, GQ ran an article titled “Donald Trump’s Family Is Just as Bad as Donald Trump.” Why take shots at us one at a time when you can lump us all together? But it also showed us how much the left feared us as a collective fighting force for our father.

  One of the fake narratives the press created about us was that we are all spoiled rich kids.

  As the child of one of our country’s wealthiest men, I was placed squarely in the top 1 percent of our society from birth. As much as the press seemed to want me to be ashamed of that or apologize for it, I’m not and I won’t. As the son of a rich white man, I know I’m not allowed to have an opinion, let alone voice it these days. I do recognize I’ve been blessed, but I was blessed with parents who taught me a work ethic and the value of a dollar. I knew that my father would never give me a dime that I hadn’t worked for and earned myself. The liberal press will tell you that I got into Wharton because my father’s donations to the school, but they won’t tell you about how hard I worked for the grades to get in on my own. The press portrayed me as a rich brat from one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country, but they won’t tell you how I spent every summer in communist Czechoslovakia when I was a kid or the manual labor I did growing up for my father (I remember my father saying, “If you’re going to build a building, you better know how to dig a foundation”) or that I spend weeks sleeping on the couches of my hunting buddies, or about the twelve-hour days I worked at Trump Org. And, it didn’t take long for them to start calling me a white supremacist. When they run out of lies about us Trumps, that’s their default.

  The press also committed sins of omission. How many of you know, for example, that my sister Tiffany is in Georgetown University Law school? I bet it’s not a lot of you. The media portrayed Tiffany’s relationship to Ivanka, Eric, and me as estranged. There is no estrangement. First of all, I’m fifteen years older than Tiffany, and she grew up on the West Coast, so we just didn’t have the interaction I had with my other siblings. Once she came east, however, and began working with us on the campaign, she became part of the fighting force I mentioned above. Tiffany is a wonderful, funny, intelligent woman and, as they do with Ivanka, the way the press continues to treat her is unconscionable.

  November 8, 2016, was, without question, the worst day in the history of liberal journalism. The mainstream media was in both shock and mourning. Honestly, it was as if someone died or had been assassinated. Lefty pundits such as Martha Raddatz, the moderator of the second debate who was supposed to be unbiased, cried on air as the reality of the results sank in.

  Then, in July of 2018, when Raddatz tweeted out a hateful column about my father and the press, I tweeted this right back at her:

  @DonaldTrumpJr

  Your crying on live tv on election night probably has nothing to do with the extreme bias exhibited daily by the liberal media, but in case it did why the hell would any rational person trust the media these days? Give me a break.

  But the media wouldn’t feel sorry for itself for long. Oh no. They weren’t about to let the American people choose their own president.

  It’s common knowledge now that the phony Steele dossier had been lying around newsrooms for months before BuzzFeed “broke the story” in early January 2017. Christopher Steele, as you remember, is the ex-British spy who was hired by the Clinton campaign, through an opposition research firm called Fusion GPS, to dig up dirt on my father. Steele assembled an unprecedented collection of lies that even the New York Times said was likely Russian disinformation. It was lying around for months because it was too fake for even the fake news to publish. Once my father was elected, however, the media, working in concert with the deep state elements of the FBI and the Department of Justice, saw Steele’s work of fiction in a whole new light. Still in shock and willing to believe anything that would change the nightmare of November 8, the rank and file of the left was a market for the taking. All the media needed to publish Steele’s trash was something that would give it just the slightest ap
pearance of credibility. Enter James Comey, the fired and since disgraced FBI director, who handed the mainstream media that credibility on a silver platter.

  James Comey knew the dossier was a fuse to a time bomb which he had hoped would consume my father’s presidency. That none of it was true didn’t matter to him. All he had to do was hand the phony dossier to the president-elect during an official visit and then leak the visit to the press. Presto chango! In that moment on January 7, 2016, the dossier went from a pile of garbage to a document in an official intelligence briefing.

  From then on, the media and the upper echelons of the FBI and DOJ joined forces to essentially overthrow our government.

  The FBI had already used the phony dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page, who was a volunteer on the campaign for about six minutes. With its now-infamous Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the feds had already been spying on the Trump campaign for months. Neither of those investigations or any other investigation proved any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But for the MSM, the dossier was the granddaddy of all unverified sources. If it weren’t for the phony Steele dossier, there wouldn’t have been a Russia investigation by Robert Mueller, and there wouldn’t be the biggest fake news story about me.

  On June 27, 2018, CNN broke a story that Michael Cohen, the imprisoned lawyer who had once worked for my father, was going to testify that he was present at a meeting where I told my father of the infamous Trump Tower meeting—in advance. I’m sure you remember, that was the meeting that supposedly exposed me as a Russian spy. The story, which had none other than Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame sharing the byline, blew up the internet. It was a bombshell, and the smoking gun the left had been praying for. It substantiated every Russian collusion story that came before it.

  Most importantly for the left, CNN’s story gave Robert Mueller the ammunition to take down the president. Finally, the social justice warriors of the world could stop complaining about Trump and go back to complaining about whatever they’d complained about before—probably how persecuted they felt. At long last, the left had gotten what they’d prayed for. Except for one little problem. Well, actually, a couple of little problems.

  Now I’m not a journalist, thank God. But if I were, I think I would take any information I received from a convicted liar with a grain of salt. Not only is Michael Cohen a world-class liar, he was also facing sentencing at the time. He would have given up his rabbi to stay out of jail. So that’s number one. Number two, the reporters had only one source, and that source wanted to remain anonymous. I don’t know, but I probably wouldn’t put my Carl Bernstein on top of the story which had only one anonymous source, especially when I knew the source was Lanny Davis.

  Davis was Cohen’s lawyer. He was also a longtime Clinton pal and a political operative. Oh, and one more thing: He’s not that smart.

  In the midst of all the hysteria the story caused, Lanny Davis went on Anderson Cooper’s show and said that CNN’s information was wrong and that his client was not at a meeting with my dad and me talking about Russian dirt on Hillary. He contradicted his own information! On the network where he had given the information!

  If that wasn’t dumb enough, he also denied that he ever talked to CNN about it.

  If it were only CNN that knew that Davis was the source of the story, they might have been able to cover it all up. But they weren’t the only news outlet that knew. The Washington Post was running its own stories and using Lanny Davis as the source. Needless to say, Davis’s disclosure caused a bit of a meltdown at the newspaper. In the world of fake news, you never tell anyone you’re lying, especially on TV!

  Time and time again, the liberal press manufactured stories about me to take my father down. Another of their big whoppers was that I knew about the WikiLeaks dump beforehand. If you remember that little nugget, I was supposed to have prior information about a huge trove of documents on Hillary that WikiLeaks was going to publish. The story, again on CNN, was based on information from an email I supposedly received six days before the dump. The anonymous source on the story was likely Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, commonly referred to as Adam #FullofSchiff or #BullSchiff. The leaked email implicating me, he told the news station, was marked September 4. That would have indeed meant that I knew about the WikiLeaks dump before it happened on September 10. Except September 4 wasn’t the correct date of the email. The 14 was the correct one, four days after the whole world knew about the WikiLeaks dump. Someone conveniently left out the number one. It was also an unopened email, so I never saw it. But that matters not when trying to overturn the duly elected POTUS.

  Again, CNN told us it was the biggest story of the year. Again, the story blew up the internet. Again, it was total bullshit. To add insult to injury, CNN never retracted the story. Instead, the network “updated” the bullshit story they ran. They also published a small explanation of the “mistake,” in which they claimed the sources for the story had been vetted by their “in-house fact-checking team”: better known as the Three Blind Mice.

  CNN issued a statement retracting the story at the beginning of December 2017, when my father was the president-elect. It was complete nonsense, and didn’t admit any wrongdoing at all, but at least it was something. It had been a banner bad week for fake news. A few days before, ABC News fired their star correspondent, Brian Ross, after he reported that Michael Flynn was going to testify that my father told him to contact the Russians during the campaign. The story was a complete lie. Even after ABC realized it was a lie, they left a tweet up about the story that was shared 25,000 times before the network deleted it. I find it funny that it always seems a fake news story stays up for days after it’s proven false, and if there’s a retraction, it’s at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday. Remember, it’s all about clickbait.

  Then there was NPR’s big water pistol, er, “smoking gun.” They reported that I had lied to Congress about the timing of a Trump Tower deal in Moscow. According to the story, Cohen said that he sat in on a meeting during the campaign where I told my dad about meeting with Russian officials about Trump Tower Moscow. The reason this was big news was because I’d told the Senate committee that the deal had disappeared before my father announced his candidacy. If the information had been correct, not only would the president’s son (that would be me) be facing a jail sentence, but it would add jet fuel to the Russian collusion hoax. Pretty bad, right? Except the information wasn’t correct. In fact, it was dead wrong. Reporters at NPR were in such a rush to try to nail me, they didn’t see that I had told the Senate committee about two prospective projects in Moscow. The one they thought happened in 2016 had dissolved before my father ran for president. Michael Cohen put together the other one. NPR knew it was wrong ten minutes after they posted the story, but then left it up for nine hours while the rest of the news world piled on. It was too good to bother to fact-check. All they had to do was read a few more lines of my testimony. But they couldn’t be bothered. They just wanted to dunk on me. But it was another catastrophic fail. At least NPR tried and issued a correction. A half-hearted one, but it was more than CNN bothers to do. All the cable news network does is lie, get caught, and then blame someone else.

  Look, I do understand why people believe the lies the liberal press peddles. It’s hard to see past the media’s hysteria surrounding first my father’s candidacy and then his presidency. Even on a subconscious level, the constant barrage of stories about how Trump hates immigrants, women, and minorities (and how they all hate him back) has to have an effect on people. It even has an effect on me. When all you hear is nonsense, it’s the nonsense you begin to believe. But somewhere along the line, there has to be accountability in the media.

  In May 2019, Adam Schiff, a House Democrat representative from California, cosponsored a resolution calling for the US government to reaffirm its support of press freedom. “I’m proud to introduce this resolution recognizing the importance of press freedom around the world, and
affirming the need for US leadership to promote a free and fair press,” Schiff said.

  I couldn’t agree more, especially the “fair press” part of “Bull Schiff’s” statement. The mainstream media is still free to write and report what they want, and no one is going to stop them. They haven’t, however, been fair to my father since his decision to run for president, or any conservative other than the ones who try so desperately to be loved by the media so they turn on my father. There’s Mitt Romney, for instance. How quickly that weakling forgot what the press did to him during his failed run for president. But unlike Trump, he was too weak to fight back, and that’s why he lost. The media got the scalp they were looking for.

  DJT is 100 percent right when he calls the New York Times “failing.” The entirety of the print news business has been circling the drain for some time. Since the advent of the internet, newspapers no longer have a sustainable business model. Two things can happen to a failing business: Either it curls up into a ball and goes quietly, or it develops a survive-at-any-cost mentality. Even when that cost is its ethics and standards. Today, for reporters to keep their jobs at major newspapers, it’s almost mandatory for them to have a Twitter following. To have a Twitter following, you have to be opinionated.

  I know all about this. Reporters’ Twitter followings expect them to be on their side, and reporters happily comply. They have to feed the beast, and the beast is hungry all the time.