Triggered

  There are others in the liberal media whose only concerns are air time and brand building.

  I’m going to take a big chance here with my base by telling you this: I have a friendly relationship with Al Sharpton. I see him every couple of weeks at the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club I belong to. He’s a fixture there, and we’ve chatted casually every time we’ve run into each other for years. As a funny aside, I was in the club having a cigar about a week after the election with a couple of good buddies. Rudy Giuliani was with some people at a table next to us, and Al was at one across the room. At one point he got up and walked past me to go to the men’s room.

  “Al!” I yell out. “What are you doing here?”

  “You know I’m always here, Junior,” he answered.

  “But what are you doing here now?” I said. “I thought you said you were moving to Canada if Trump won?”

  The room burst out in laughter. Even Al had to chuckle.

  We call each other “frenemies.” He’d been an acquanitance of my father’s for over thirty years and even called me when he needed a broker and reference for a place to live. For Al, and many like him, the Donald J. Trump presidency is a gold mine for brand building.

  Now, like most things, not every single solitary reporter in the liberal press is biased or has an agenda. Some actually go out and try to report the news fairly. For top-tier reporters, however, being fair is not in the job description. Still, I try to be friendly to the reporters I interact with. And some try to be friendly back.

  Maybe no other statement by my father is a more significant trigger to the MSM than when he says the press is the enemy of the people. It actually sounds terrible. But if you look at their actions over the past three years, how could a reasonable person come to a different conclusion? Inevitably, when he says those words some editorial writer for the Times or CNN, maybe Thomas Friedman or Jim Acosta, will bring up the importance of the free press to democracy. They’ll remind us of the First Amendment, quote Thomas Jefferson, and regale us with fond memories of the days of Woodward, Bernstein, and Watergate.

  Fake news is about as patriotic as a flag burning. The Washington Post’s slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness” even if we peddle BS for three years. Give me a break. Fake News.

  In early June 2019, my father traveled to the United Kingdom for a state visit. It was during that trip when protestors flew the Trump balloon. My father brought his adult children and their spouses to meet the queen, which caused a furor in the liberal press. How dare he bring his family!

  Aside from that stupid complaint, and a few other equally stupid complaints, the trip was great in just about every way. My father and the queen got on well and we had plenty of fun.

  At one point during the visit, DJT and the family took a little side trip to Doonbeg, a charming little town in the west of Ireland. Back around 2008, during the Irish economic crisis, we became interested in a property along the sea in County Clare. The setting there, with the dunes and the spray of the wild Atlantic, is breathtaking. We spent millions updating the existing facilities and building cottages and a spa. Today, it’s one of the most beautiful properties we have. We also employ about 300 locals. Given that the entire population of Doonbeg is about 740, it’s a pretty sure bet that we are the biggest employer in town.

  It was Brendan Murphy, who’s in charge of our real estate sales in Ireland, and Joe Russell, our GM at Trump Doonbeg (as the locals call it), who asked us to stop by the pubs and say hello to the locals, who’ve been great throughout the time we’ve been going. We were happy to do so.

  The people of Doonbeg were wonderful to us. The pubs, all five of them, were packed to the rafters. It got to be around midnight, but parents allowed their children to stay up late just to meet us. At Tubridy’s Bar and Restaurant, Tommy Turbridy, a legendary Irish footballer, raised his pint in a toast: “On behalf of the people of Doonbeg and the county of Clare, a big Céad Míle Fáilte to the Trump family,” he said. It means “a thousand welcomes” in Irish. At some point, a reporter called out to him and asked if it was safe to say that ninety percent of the people in Doonbeg supported Trump.

  “No,” he said, with a sly smile. “It’s a hundred percent of them.”

  The local parish priest, Father Joe Haugh, told a reporter, “There’s a special place in heaven for the Trumps.”

  There’s nothing like Irish hospitality.

  We thought it only right to buy a round of drinks in each of the pubs. Caroline Kennedy (no, not that one!), the owner of the Igoe Inn pub, asked if we’d go behind the bar and “pull the pints,” as they say. It brought me back to my days in Colorado.

  The next day, The Daily Beast, or the “the Daily Least” as I like to call them, and the British press, which always looks for the negative angle, posted stories that we’d run out on our tab and stuck poor Caroline Kennedy with the bill. We hadn’t. If the reporter who wrote the story had bothered to check, they would have known that we had prearranged to have the bill sent to us. But why do your job when you can make up a story that’s going to get a lot more attention than the truth? So that’s what they did. They imagined Eric and me as part of the entitled rich who couldn’t care less about the livelihoods of the working class.

  Out of all the lies the press has written about me, you would think that running out on a bar tab wouldn’t even make the list. But since I was a bartender in Aspen who worked for tips, I know that not paying your bar tab is just about the lowest thing a patron can do. I say just about the lowest, because the lowest thing you can do is accuse someone of running out on a tab who hasn’t.

  In my lifetime, the press has gone from Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” to Jim Acosta and Fake News. It’s a shame. Soon, social media will be the main deliverer of news, and that’s only going to make it worse for people looking for the truth.

  13.

  SHADOW BANNED

  HOW THE LIBERALS’ GRIP ON SOCIAL MEDIA CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE

  FROM THE MINUTE he won the election, there were people wondering whether my father would give up the social media platform that had helped him sail to victory. “You won,” one headline on the site Mashable read. “You can stop tweeting now!” Even some people on the right questioned whether he would keep sending out 140- or 280-character barbs from the Oval Office. They believed it would be somehow trivial or beneath the dignity of the office. My father had even hinted at it himself at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, just a few days before the election.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll give it up after I’m president.”

  I don’t know whether he was kidding about it then, but I do know—as all of you probably do, too—that he did no such thing. Why would he? I just spent an entire chapter going over the massive mainstream media machine that wakes up every morning with the intent of destroying my father. They use every last drop of their resources to spread lies about him, embarrass him in public, and impede his agenda with Democrat propaganda and talking points. Is my father just supposed to sit back and take that? Of course not. Twitter is the only way he has of reaching out to the American people, and he’d be a fool not to do it at every opportunity. Next to traveling around the country to talk to real working-class people and listen to their concerns, interacting with them on Twitter is the best way for my father to stay in touch with voters.

  Sure, the platform can be an absolute dumpster fire. Most of the time, for me at least, scrolling through my feed involves sorting through death threats, a whole encyclopedia of swear words, and comparisons of me to everything from excrement to an extraterrestrial before I can get to my news stories. But it wasn’t always that way.

  Believe it or not, there was a time when social media was fun. I think it was probably around the tail end of the second (and final, I hope) Bush presidency, when the flip phone was the coolest thing around and my friend Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” played all summer long. My father was still the host of a little show called The Appre
ntice, and I would sit to his right in the boardroom every week. It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. Don’t get me wrong, without the television show my father might have never gone into politics.

  Every once in a while, when I knew there was something engaging or funny coming on an episode of the show, I would send out something called a “tweet” about it. Those “tweets,” people told me, would go out into the world via the internet, and hundreds—maybe even thousands!—of people might see them. They were like newspaper ads you didn’t have to pay for. I figured it was a great deal, at least on my end, and I started sending out a few of those “tweet” things every week. My father, never one to turn down free press, also started messing around with the platform. He used it to promote his buildings, announce his cable news appearances, even to rag on the haters and losers who went up against him in public. Inevitably, it led to politics, the subject that dominates so much of social—or not-so-social—media today.

  Take interactions like this one, for example. On February 7, 2013, my father tweeted a criticism of President Obama:

  @DonaldJTrump

  Obama can kill Americans at will with drones but waterboarding is not allowed—only in America!

  Then one of the many liberals on the internet who was attacking him in the comments section wrote, “If you hate America so much, you should run for president and fix things.”

  My father sent back: “Be careful!”

  Obviously, they weren’t careful. They kept hitting him and hitting him, making him more and more fed up, until eventually he would have no choice but to run. See, liberals? You should have stayed quiet!

  Soon his Twitter account became like an extension of our dinner table, only with the whole world was invited. I watched my father’s follower count rise slowly, while mine did, too. He built up his online following as he did one of his skyscrapers: one brick—or shiny glass panel—at a time. By the time he got into politics seriously around 2012, @realDonaldTrump had an audience of about 4 million, nearly double the size of the New York Times’ readership. By 2016, he had 6 million followers, and I had just over a million. My father and I had never seen anything like it. Long before Twitter existed, DJT had been a master of brand and promotion, but this was different. He could speak to the world immediately. And the world took notice. If you don’t believe me, just look at the explosion of populist candidates around the world after he was elected. You think he had something to do with that?

  Fast-forward to today, and I can’t go a couple of hours without taking a peek at my Twitter timeline. As vile as the comments can get (and believe me, they can get pretty vile), I can’t help it. Every morning when I’m in the car on the way to work, I take the pulse of the world via my social media feeds, just so I know what’s coming and how I can prepare for it. I’m sure that most people who are on Twitter do exactly the same thing. For the heads of companies such as Twitter and Facebook, this is probably a dream come true. They have made it so that millions of people all over the world cannot live without their products. In business terms, that’s like being the guy who owns the rights to water and oxygen or being a pantsuit salesman near Hillary Clinton’s house.

  But for us, the people who actually use the platforms, it’s not such good news. For us, Twitter and Facebook have become addictions that are almost as bad as any of the other ones you hear about—things like alcohol, drugs, or food. They hit the same receptors in the brain and drive us crazy in exactly the same ways. Only instead of being addicted to molecules such as alcohol or nicotine, we’re addicted to being outraged. One thing Twitter can do better than any other platform that’s ever existed is create outrage, most of which is faux outrage or, as I like to call it, fauxtrage. It can learn what makes you angrier than anything, find a million things like that every day, and then show them all to you nonstop. As a guy who has as large a segment of haters as I have, I know this better than anyone.

  Even if I tweet something that’s relatively benign—say, a Merry Christmas message, the Twitter mob will find a way to attack me for it. I swear, these people are better than any intelligence agency in the world at bringing up old tweets and twisting them around to ruin somebody’s life. Just look at what happened recently to the conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson, who years ago used to call in to a shock jock radio show. Liberals took his words out of context and applied them to today’s norms and frame of reference. The same thing has happened to me on the Opie and Anthony radio show. One minute we’re talking about men-only golf clubs, and the next I’m one of the biggest male chauvinists around. It was the OPIE AND ANTHONY show! We were all joking! However, joking is no longer allowed—at least not if you’re a conservative. Only liberals get to turn around and say they were joking when they get called out.

  Look, I’ve been chastised online by conservatives too. I once defended Chelsea Clinton after she was attacked on Twitter for speaking out about anti-Semitism following the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings. But not all craziness is created equal. Conservatives may be stuffy sometimes, and they’re as quick to become outraged as anyone else (especially on social media), but they’re nothing compared to the fit-throwing freaks on the American left.

  These are usually young people, so they’ve been living with social media practically since they were in the womb, and they usually use Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat as their main point of contact with the world around them. Even Facebook, which was brand new just a few years ago, is too old for them. Trust me: do that for long enough, and you’ll end up a psychopath. It’s no wonder that the incoming class of freshman Democrats was able to whip up such strong support among millennials. People such as Ilhan Omar and AOC have been speaking the strange insider language of Twitter and Instagram practically as long as they’ve been alive, which is like about twelve years. When they send out tweets attacking me or any other conservative using words such as “canceled” or “hella problematic” or “microaggression,” they know exactly what messages they’re sending to the online mob. Like cyberterrorists, they are well schooled in the arts of igniting mass anger and gaslighting, and they know how to weaponize Twitter.

  These people have a playbook, and it works like this: When someone you don’t like does a thing that you think is evil—let’s say, for example, that John Smith, the director of a major motion picture, has failed to cast enough trans people of color in his movie—you come up with a “hashtag” about him. For instance: #JohnSmithSexistPig. Or #WhitePrivilegeJohnSmithDie.

  The next step is to send out a few thousand tweets about John Smith with the hashtag you created. The volume of tweets makes Twitter think that lots of people, not just you, care about the issue. You’re hacking the algorithm to create outrage. Then, once the tweets are all out there, your crazy SJW buddies can search your hashtag and send out their own tweets about John Smith. Before long, you’ll have John Smith “trending.” That means that all those who open Twitter will see that this poor guy’s name has popped up. And when they click on his name, they’ll get a list of about ten thousand tweets saying what a horrible person he is.

  By that point, someone will have probably combed through every tweet John Smith has sent since 2008 and found a sexist joke or two, maybe a few off-color comments from when he was thirteen. They will get thrown into the mix. By noon that day, the New York Times will have written a story about the incident as if the world actually cares, and then CNN and MSNBC will take it from there. The op-ed page at HuffPost will call for John Smith to be fired and replaced with a nonbinary trans person (or something), and then whatever film studio was funding the movie will be forced to cave under the pressure and fire the guy. After being fired for something so controversial, he’ll never get another job as a director again. That’s called being “canceled.” If you’re a social justice warrior online, getting someone “canceled” is just about the best thing you can do. It’s like hitting a home run, but for people who don’t know the difference between a baseball bat and a bowlin
g pin.

  If you think I’m exaggerating, consider Roseanne Barr. If you remember, she sent out a tweet that the mob found offensive and because of the SJW backlash has now lost her hugely successful television show, had her name dragged through the mud, and will probably never appear on television again—all because of a late-night nonsense tweet that barely anyone could understand. And, yes, it was a stupid tweet. (I have to say “stupid” because if someone doesn’t immediately and repeatedly disavow, he can be dragged in as complicit, even if he had no idea.) If it hadn’t been for the coordinated efforts of a crazed online mob, that tweet would have stayed buried in the twenty-tweet-long thread it had come in and we all could have forgotten about it. But she’s conservative and was on television being pro-Trump. In Hollywood, that’s a capital crime.

  The same goes for Kevin Hart, who made a few allegedly homophobic jokes during a stand-up comedy special that came out just under a decade ago. For years, no one had cared about those jokes. Comedy used to be funny because we were able to poke fun at things we held dear. Then, once it was announced that Hart was going to host the Oscars, the Hollywood SJW mob started cranking out the outrage tweets like crazy. They followed the playbook that I’ve described above to a T. Within days, Hart had succumbed to the online mob and agreed to step away from the gig. Every day brings a new list of people who’ve been shut down by the online outrage mob, and every day the mob has to stretch itself further and further to get people worked up. It has to create new rules for what’s considered offensive, new ways for people to break those rules, and even stranger punishments for when they do. It must be exhausting. But if they’re going to survive, it’s necessary. You just can’t sustain that level of outrage without expending an enormous amount of energy to come up with things to be outraged about.