Triggered

  But every once in a while, I do look back at what my father—and the rest of my family and friends—have managed to accomplish these past few years, and even I am taken slightly aback. Together, we took on the most corrupt political machine in the history of the United States and won. It was the greatest upset in the history of American politics, and I got to be the tip of the spear, or at least the tip of one of the spears. Then we weathered a political storm unlike anything this country has ever seen before, from the fake collusion allegations to biased reporters combing through every moment of our lives, to an investigation that seemed to go on longer than Game of Thrones, and we came out the other side leaner, meaner, and stronger than ever. Even for a not-so-sentimental guy like me, that’s pretty impressive. It’s definitely something I’ll be telling the grandkids about (if they’re not taken away from me by the gender-neutral AOC administration because I believe in binary genders).

  Then again, my grandkids might find it all hard to believe. I know I do sometimes. For instance, if you had come and told me, say, during my gap year, when I was camping in the woods by day and pouring pints of Coors Light by night, that my father and I would someday become the target of our nation’s top intelligence agencies, I would probably have told you to take it easy on the mushrooms.

  But you’re not tripping; it is all too real.

  Even now, there are forces deep inside our government trying to bury evidence of wrongdoing against my father. They’re sweeping the phony Steele dossier and the illegal FISA warrants under the rug and trying to pretend that none of it ever happened. If those people have a hand in writing the history of the Russia hoax—and believe me, they will try—they will say that the Mueller investigation was based on real evidence and that Donald Trump and his administration really did commit obstruction of justice. They’ll forget names such as Christopher Steele, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page—as Mr. Mueller of the eponymous report seems to have done during his very own congressional testimony—and they’ll remember made-up Russian oligarchs and the people who supposedly turned us into spies.

  If you don’t think something like that could ever happen, consider this: it’s happened before—to, of all people, Martin Luther King Jr.

  J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI kept a file on Dr. King for years. They cooked up a story that he was—get this—an agent of Russia, sympathetic to Communists, and out to destroy the United States with his speeches and boycotts. (Go ahead and stop me if any of this sounds familiar.) They tapped his phones. They planted evidence in his hotel rooms. They made his life a living hell and then sent him letters saying the only way out of that living hell would be suicide. Then, in what is perhaps the worst part of it all, they covered the whole thing up. For fifty years, the records of the FBI’s many operations against Martin Luther King Jr. were sealed by federal order, accessible only to people at the highest levels of the intel community. Whenever anyone tried to have them unsealed, the request was denied by whatever establishment politician was in charge. Only in 2007, when most of the documents were released—I say “most” because many of them are believed to have been destroyed—did we discover the extent to which our law enforcement institutions had targeted one of our greatest citizens. No one was punished. Many of those responsible are dead, never having been held accountable for the crimes they committed. After living through the past three years, can you honestly say that anything has really changed? Or is it just more of the same?

  I don’t know if the FBI has records of the secret operations it conducted against the Trump campaign and administration. But I wouldn’t trust the top brass at the FBI to unseal them if they did. Remember, this is the organization that was led by James Comey, a man who elevated leaking and lying to an art form. As I write this, the DOJ’s inspector general has just released a blistering report saying that Comey leaked to the press official documents describing interactions between the US president and the FBI director, a crime that, according to our friend Rudy Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, should have landed Comey in jail. I have no doubt that if he were a Trump supporter, or at least not a member of the permanent political class, he would be in a jail cell right now. But just like Hillary Clinton, just like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe, Comey is given every benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether or not he broke the law. He, like the others who orchestrated the attempted coup, won’t ever be punished. Instead, he’ll probably end up on CNN as a paid contributor! People like him are given hours and hours to prepare for interviews, and then, at the end of it all, when we’re deciding how to punish (or not punish) them, we think about their families, their years of service, and how much it would hurt their feelings to be prosecuted. If you believe that any member of the Trump administration would ever get that kind of leniency, you haven’t been paying attention.

  Now, before someone at HuffPost starts typing up a “Don Jr. Hates the FBI” headline (which, no doubt, they’re already doing), I want to make it clear that I’m not talking about the rank-and-file people who work at our intelligence organizations—people who handle the real work and make sure we’re kept safe from domestic and international threats. They are decent, hardworking people, and I would trust most of them with my life. In fact, I do just that. I have no problem with the door kickers, the men and women of our law enforcement agencies whose boots are on the ground. Those amazing men and women do a great job, and many I’ve talked with are disgusted by the Clappers and Comeys of the world—people who would “tarnish their badge.” In my experience, they are overwhelmingly MAGA. But I do have a huge problem with the lawyers and political hacks who make up agencies’ top ranks. They’re just career bureaucrats who’ve been given too much power by the system for too long. Their motives are self-serving. They care little about America and everything about their own interests.

  In fact, if you’re reading these words between the hours of about seven and ten in the evening, there’s a pretty good chance you can turn on your television right now and see John Brennan, a former director of the CIA; James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence; or Andrew McCabe, James Comey’s former deputy at the FBI, continuing to spew lies about my father, trying to bury the truth of their crimes in real time in front of a network news audience. Oh, and by the way, they’ve all written books. (Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “Well, so did you, Don.” Apples and oranges. They wrote books about the lies they told, and I wrote one because they told them about me.) Obviously, the fake-news media weren’t content to sit back and cover the criminals who were trying to take down my father, so they gave them parking spaces, press passes, and book contracts instead. If you’re on their side, you’re not punished for wrongdoing. In fact, you’re rewarded with lucrative commentator roles on CNN and MSNBC.

  That’s why I have absolutely no faith that the real story of what the FBI (in conjunction with the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign) did to my father will ever see the light of day. I’ve simply been through too much to believe it will. I mean, sure, there have been some good reporters and private citizens who’ve uncovered parts of it. We now know that the FISA warrants used to spy on our campaign in Trump Tower were not obtained legally and that several agents at the highest levels of the FBI breached protocol when going after targets in the Trump administration. We know that just about every one of Robert Mueller’s Nineteen Angry Democrats was a Trump-hating hack looking for any reason they could find to nail him and me, and we also know that Mueller himself—a sorry old man well past his prime, who was used like a rented mule by Democrats in Congress—was the author of his report in name only. But is anything going to come of it? Are we ever going to get an apology or see any of the people who pushed the fake conspiracy theory for years punished for the fraud they perpetrated on the American people? Will anyone be held accountable? Ever?

  I’m not holding my breath.

  Today, as we gear up for the 2020 election, the fake-news media are bigger and more invasive, an
d their audiences more brainwashed, than ever. Have you ever seen a story—just one story—that broke in favor of Trump instead of the other way around? Of course not. Back when my father first announced he was running for president, the lies the media told about him usually pertained only to the small stuff: our family business, his financial history, his personal life. Few in the media accused him of being a Russian spy or colluding with foreign oligarchs. Today, those unsubstantiated rumors have become the gospel truth of the left and things are only getting worse. The media continue to lie despite definitive proof to the contrary, and they’re not going to stop.

  If you don’t believe me, pick up a liberal newspaper or tune your television to one of those failing three-letter liberal news stations. CNN, NBC, ABC—doesn’t matter, just as long as you rinse your eyes thoroughly with clean water after you’re done. I’m sure you won’t enjoy what you see, but it’s good to get a sense of the nonsense the other side continues to push.

  If you’d been watching NBC News, for example, on the evening of Tuesday, August 28, 2019, you would have seen Lawrence O’Donnell, a man who’s been telling blatant lies about my father since long before he announced he was running for president, talking in a split screen with Rachel Maddow. With obvious glee, O’Donnell told Maddow and all her ultrawoke viewers about documents that had been reviewed by “a single source close to Deutsche Bank” that would prove once and for all that yes, it was true, all of it—Donald Trump really had colluded with Russia! “This single source close to Deutsche Bank,” O’Donnell said, “has told me that Donald Trump’s loan documents there show he has cosigners. That’s how he was able to obtain those loans and that the cosigners are Russian oligarchs.”

  Please. If you believe that, I have “a single source” close to Lawrence O’Donnell who tells me that he likes to dress up in women’s clothes and sing karaoke on weekends. See how easy it is to make this crap up? I could do it all day. (And they do!) Even Rachel Maddow, the liberal queen of the conspiracy theories, seemed a little hesitant to believe him. Take it from me: if you make an accusation against my father and Rachel Maddow isn’t buying it, whatever you’ve got is probably nonsense. It should have been a tip-off that O’Donnell’s staff didn’t even try to call Trump Org for comment or verify the story in any other way.

  Sure enough, O’Donnell was on television the very next night, crying and telling the world that nothing he had said was even remotely true. For some people, that little half-assed nonapology was enough. But for me, it wasn’t even close. When O’Donnell posted an initial tease of the story on Twitter, it was shared tens of thousands of times. When he later posted a tweet saying that the whole thing had been a lie and admitting that he hadn’t even run it by the fact-checking team at NBC News—which, I would imagine, is probably three chimpanzees sitting around a table with an encyclopedia—that message was retweeted a mere eight thousand times. And O’Donnell is only a tiny cog in the left’s propaganda machine.

  Though the onslaught of lies continues, it will not slow DJT down. From the moment he stepped onto the stage in the atrium of Trump Tower to announce his run for president, my father had his mind set on one thing and one thing only: the American people. And if you think for a second that he didn’t know when he descended the golden escalator exactly what lay ahead for him—the constant attacks by the left and right, the two-faced elites in the swamp who’d pretend to be his best friends—you don’t know my father. From the moment he decided to run, he knew exactly the hell he was about put himself through, and he did it anyway. Because it was the right thing to do.

  He’ll continue doing the right thing in 2020 and beyond. That fight isn’t over, and for the sake of the men and women who put my father into the White House in the first place, it has to continue.

  I know it will for me.

  When I hit the road with the Trump campaign in 2015, the first thing I noticed was that people were fed up with liberal censorship and political correctness. All over the country, folks were tired of being talked down to by the elite political class, told over and over again that their concerns didn’t matter and their voices weren’t going to be heard. I met proud factory workers who had watched as Democratic policies had torn their lives apart; I met conservative college kids who were terrified to identify themselves in class for fear that liberal professors would retaliate; I met women who were shunned by friends because of their political views. If this seems to you to be a theme that I’ve hit time and again in this book, you’re right. Those stories are seared into my memory. They were living in a country that was ruled by what the left did or did not find offensive, and they were sick of it. So was I.

  I don’t know if I can point to an exact date when it happened, when I realized what was at stake and started to view politics on a personal level. I’m sure it happened the way most things do—bit by bit and then all at once, like a nonreinforced chair giving out under Michael Moore. Over time, I began to realize that the Bush and Obama administrations had done damage to the things I believe in. President Obama, especially, had attacked free markets and free speech in ways I couldn’t stand for.

  Then, when my father announced, I realized that some of my liberal friends—or people I had thought were friends—began to retreat to the echo chamber of the left. They read only the New York Times and watched only MSNBC. They became like a cult. Suddenly, conservatives were their enemies. Compromise was impossible. The list of things they wouldn’t talk to me about got longer and longer. The jokes they told were no longer funny but mean-spirited. Their outrage was ridiculous and hollow. I had never had a deep emotional attachment to Manhattan, but now I felt like a stranger in a strange land.

  Out on the road, I had the opposite feeling. When my father’s campaign went into a city or town, I saw the first glimmer of hope in eyes that had for too long been without it. In my dad, not only did they see someone who understood their problems, they saw someone who was willing to fight for them, someone who would never give up fighting for them. His voice was like the first roll of thunder you hear before a storm begins. By the time he was finished on stage, lightning had struck. Look, I’m aware that there’s an unhealthy amount of division and divisiveness in this country right now, and I know many people blame my father for that. With so many media organizations trashing him day and night, I’m not surprised. But this kind of bitter division predates my father’s announcement speech by a long, long time. People all over the country had been feeling it for years; all he did was bring the fight from the small towns and diners of America into the halls of Congress and the White House.

  Of course, I didn’t see my dad on the trail often, especially toward the end of the campaign. As you might have noticed, when DJT enters a room, his energy fills every square inch of it. I learned quickly that the best place for me to be during the final days of the 2016 campaign was wherever he wasn’t. Luckily, I had friends who were willing to leave their jobs and families for days at a time to travel with me. And the work wasn’t always glamorous. We took thousands of selfies a day, practically begged for money, and coordinated our own movements and the movements of thousands upon thousands of people who came to see us at campaign stops.

  But guess what? We crushed it.

  We pulled in over $100 million at a time when we didn’t have the relationship with the RNC that we do today. We did that without its Rolodex, using just our own relationships. We slept in motels around the country; we met real Americans who were fed up with Washington elites; we went days without food at times. Not that we minded. We had our fair share of testosterone, adrenaline, and Red Bull to keep the momentum going. But more importantly, we had loyalty, friendship, and will.

  Out on the campaign trail, I began to understand what politics really meant. At the very least, I saw why people who get a taste of the political life have a hard time giving it up. I watched it happen to many of my friends on the campaign trail—people who’d lived their entire adulthood in business and industry and then, once they go
t out on the road and started shaking hands with the voters of this country, found it impossible to go back and sit in their offices. It happened to Tommy Hicks, who’s now a cochair of the Republican National Committee. It happened to others, too, including myself. I knew that there would be a time to make money, but as a patriotic American, there was no way I could squander the opportunity to help push the MAGA movement forward.

  In a mostly false article by The Atlantic that focused on fictitious infighting between myself and Ivanka, various Republicans weighed in on my ability to connect with the base:

  By November 2018, Don had appeared at more than 70 campaign events across 17 states—and powerful Republicans were abuzz. “I could very easily see him entering politics,” Senator Kevin Cramer told me. “I think his future is bright,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Newsmax’s CEO, Chris Ruddy, told me he’d personally encouraged Don to run for office; Sean Hannity called him “a born natural leader.” Senator Rand Paul went so far as to say that Don was one of the best Republican campaigners in the country. “If you can’t get the president,” Paul told me, “he’s a close second.”

  Even if you leave aside all the good my father has done for the country in terms of policies since he’s been in the White House—and there is plenty, from the economy, to tax cuts, to our standing in the world, to appointing two great justices to the Supreme Court and countless lower court appointees, just to name just a few—there is one more lasting impression he’s left on our political system: he’s made people see that their principles are worth fighting for, that we don’t have to roll over and die anymore just because the left says so. Somehow, he understood intuitively that politics is a game but what’s at stake is anything but. For those of us on his campaign, and for the millions of people who followed him, he showed us by example that what we believe in matters. It might mean rough going, but if it’s right, you do it anyway. Prison reform? Not exactly a conservative thing. Opportunity zones? Not something that directly benefits his base. There is no base for him in inner cities. (Although based on the results he’s getting on the economy, there should be, and he’s working hard to change that.) He did those things not because it was the right thing to do politically. That’s the difference between this presidency and so many others. Donald Trump doesn’t sit there and make a decision based on polling numbers. He listens to the people. He didn’t run a campaign based on polling groups. He did it based on his gut, on decades of experience, and on the applause and cheers of the forgotten men and women of this country who were being heard for the first time in decades. When he talks of job growth, he does so with more experience than perhaps any other president. He has been signing the front of checks for forty years. What the hell would Hillary Clinton know about job growth? She hasn’t created a job in her life. Maybe a pollster job. Maybe a position for someone who bleaches her servers for her or hammers her iPhones to bits. But a real job? Not a chance. Neither has Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, or any other Democrat in Washington.