RUSH: It’s really great to have Donald Trump Jr. with us. His new book is out. Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. Welcome to the program, Don. As I say, it’s really great to have you here.
TRUMP JR.: It’s great to be with you, Rush. Thanks for having me.
RUSH: Now, I want to first… Before we get into the nuts and bullets of what’s happening now, I want to go back to 2015 and even prior. I want to ask you about your family and how all this has affected you. I ran into your sister, Ivanka, at the Cape Girardeau rally, and I said to her, “Y’all must be so proud.” Now, you’re right in the middle of the Russia thing. We’re coming up on election night. It’s the night before the 2018 midterms, and your father and everybody in your family are the targets of vile, vicious attacks.
But I said to her, “You must be so proud.” What I meant was that your father had been elected president. What was that like? I mean, I’m sure your father has been a dynamic figure your whole life like he is for everybody else. But he decides to run for president. I’m sure it was a family decision. What was that like, the campaign? ‘Cause I imagine… I know your dad. Your dad… I even talked to him a month after the election. He expected a month into it, that all the partisanship would die, and people would fall in line and really admire/respect what he wanted to do for the country. I told him I didn’t think that was gonna happen. But what was it like for all of you when this viciousness started and the attacks? I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes, and I’ve tried my best to understand it, but I wanted to hear from you.
TRUMP JR.: Well, listen. It was pretty brutal. I mean, I think that’s part of why I decided to write a book, right? I mean, we went through this thing — and, you know, he knew what he was gonna get into. Maybe we didn’t realize it would be as bad as it is because I can’t imagine it getting much worse especially over the last three years. I tell the story about going down in the elevator with him on June 16, 2015, and he just looked me in the eyes and the last thing he said before he then walked off to go down the escalator was, “Now we find out who our real friends are.”
So, it was a great statement for me because it was so telling, Rush, in that he knew it would be vicious. He knew it would be rough. He knew people who had known him for years — and you’ve seen it all. All these people now, “Trump’s terrible!” That’s weird. We’ve had dinner 15 times. All of a sudden, he’s terrible. But, more importantly, he knew all those things, and he did it anyway? And so it has been rough. I mean, listen. I’m a guy. I live in New York City. I have young kids. They go to school in New York City.
We’ve gotten exploding envelopes of white-powder substance to our house. I’m the number 2 most threatened protectee of the United States Secret Service after my father because I’m willing to be vocal and speak for him and do so without just giving up and folding. And, so, you know, it really does depend. I mean, it’s amazing to go around the country and see people who have benefited so much, and they tell me the stories about their jobs and businesses expanding and wages going up, and that’s awesome.
But, you know, then you put on the sort of I’m a father of young kids who get to watch this stuff on TV and the viciousness and the brutality and the reporters and the screaming, and it’s so one sided. You know, I just did The View with Kimberly — it was sort of interesting — and they talk about the whistleblower. “You outed him!” I go, “What? I outed him? I heard about it on Rush,” I think you mentioned it last week, “and I saw it on Drudge Report a few weeks ago, and I literally quote tweeted an article.” I think it was a Breitbart article with the guy’s name in it. But I “outed” him.
I wish I would have seen the same outrage when people were doxing our family, when those exploding envelopes are showing up to our apartment. You know, they don’t care if that happened to my family and my kids. They don’t mind attacking Barron’s Trump who’s 13 years old. Hunter Biden’s off-limits — and, obviously, a CIA operative who’s worked for Joe Biden who’s a friend of Brennan and the coup clown guys. It’s pretty sick, and that’s the environment in which we live. So it’s been both amazing and incredibly rough.
RUSH: Well, for us looking at it from our standpoint, it’s all surreal. Because, Don, none of this is real. There wasn’t any meddling with Russia, collusion. That was all done on the Democrat side. This phone call to the Ukrainian president is a nothing burger. They don’t have, they’ve never had any evidence about anything. They’re having to make it up. I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes day in and day out, and tried to imagine the frustration. It’s driving me crazy, and I’m not a Trump!
TRUMP JR.: Yeah. (chuckles) Well, it’s pretty bad, and it took me 41 years to realize it, but I’m probably a lot more like my father than I would have otherwise thought. I’m pretty vocal, I get pretty aggressive — and, you know, unlike many conservatives, if I get called out, I’m gonna push back. I’m gonna fight. So when backed in the corner like we have been… Don’t forget, I mean, a big part of the story of the book is, “Hey, I was the number 2 target of the Mueller hoax.” You know, this thing’s been going for a while.
I think the big outrage about me apparently dropping the name — even though it was out there in publications for days — of this supposed whistleblower is that now that the name’s out there, people are realizing, “Oh, he worked for Brennan?” You know, they had no problem with Brennan lying to Congress. They had no problem with any of this. But it was so convenient. (impression) “He’s a good… He’s a great public servant. Obviously, there’s no bias here. This is all about his disgust for what’s going on.” Oh, wait, so he’s tied to those guys? Shocking!
RUSH: This whole thing’s a setup. The guy’s the Pajama Boy. The guy… He could be the model for Obama’s Pajama Boy health care commercials.
TRUMP JR.: It was him in the picture.
RUSH: We know the guy’s tied to Biden. We know that he’s tied to Brennan. But I want to go back to something you just said. You said you were the number two target of the Russia hoax thing, that honeypot, that lawyer, Veselnitskaya, that they tried to arrange.
TRUMP JR.: Yeah.
RUSH: That was Fusion GPS!
TRUMP JR.: Yep.
RUSH: They set you up in that Trump Tower meeting, and they were trying to arrange for you to say or do something that they could then point to. They were trying to create the crime. They were spying on your campaign.
TRUMP JR.: A hundred percent.
RUSH: When did you first get a whiff that something about that wasn’t right?
RUSH: I’ve got a better one than that.
TRUMP JR.: It’s two sided. If I did that, it would be over.
RUSH: What if your dad had set you up with both the Chinese and the Ukrainians to earn $2 billion a year and you didn’t know diddly-squat about what you were doing and the press found out about it?
TRUMP JR.: Oh, well, this is the one I laugh about. I say… They go, “Well, Donald Trump Jr., he’s also the son of a guy with a famous last name and he capitalized on it,” and I go, “Yeah, I know. A hundred percent.” I don’t even hide from that. But we did it at private citizens, as capitalists. We didn’t utilize… We were international businesspeople, Rush, for two decades. This is what I did. When my father won, he said, “We will not do any new international deals going forward.” Hunter Biden — who’d never done any deals in his life — magically becomes this international businessman.
You know Burisma. He knows nothing about oil and gas. He doesn’t speak Ukrainian. Minor details. But he’s willing to take $83,000 a month. You know, he had six weeks to prep for that ABC interview and he still didn’t know why the heck he got the job. I say, “What if Donald Trump Jr. did that? Would you guys have the same ‘children are off-limits’?” If I went to China on Air Force One with my father and came back with $1.5 billion from the Chinese government to invest in my fund, they would lose… We’d actually solve the fake news media problem, Rush, because their heads would explode and there would be none of them left.
RUSH: Okay. But, now, this is a reality, nevertheless, that you have to deal with. You know the game is rigged, and you know that the opposition is making it up as they go. You know that they’re trying to ruin you —
TRUMP JR.: Yeah.
RUSH: — and your father and your whole family. And you also know that they’re not going to stop.
TRUMP JR.: Right.
RUSH: They’re not gonna stop even after you win reelection. They’re gonna keep coming after you because they can’t allow outsiders like you to come in and gain control of the levers of power in government. So… I know you can’t give away specifics. How often do you meet to strategize how to deal with this? Because you know every day if they’ve got something new to make up or drop, they’re going to do it. I imagine you’d love a day or two of peace, but you know you’re not gonna get it. So how do you deal with it?
TRUMP JR.: No, we’re at war, and we’re at war for our freedoms. We’re at war for our culture. You know, this is the largest divide between the two political parties in the history of the country. You know, I write a lot in the book about socialism and communism, ’cause my mother escaped from it. You know, I grew up with grandparents that lived through that stuff. You know, I spent summers in what was then communist Czechoslovakia.
I can tell you those bread lines that Bernie talks about are not nearly so wonderful. So, I get it. I tried… Actually, I don’t communicate with them. I do these things on my own. But that was blue checkmark Twitter yesterday. “Oh, my God! Donald Trump Jr. must have coordinated with the White House!” All right. The tweet? Like, apparently they haven’t been watching my feed. One of the interesting stories in the book is my father actually calling me, and I get the call from the White House. (impression) “This is White House operator. The president would like to speak to you.”
“Hey, Dad. What’s going on?”
“Don, you’re getting a little aggressive on social media these days.”
I go, “Wait a minute, Dad. (laughing) Dad, I love you. I love you very much. I respect you dearly. I will listen to you on just about anything. This may be the one place, the one place where we may cede a little bit of the high ground here.” So I’ve had some fun with that. But, yeah, I try not to coordinate with them. But the reality is, yes, we are under the gun. They will continue to do that. We are a threat to the deep state. And, by the way, if you didn’t believe in the deep state before 2016, I can actually understand that. If you don’t believe in them wholeheartedly now, you’re a fool, and their actions have shown us that.
TRUMP JR.: He has.
RUSH: — with these discovered tweets. You guys were the target of an impeachment that began one week after your father was sworn in as president. Actually, it began before that.
TRUMP JR.: Well, it began on November 9th when he did the unthinkable, which was to beat the establishment. The Washington Post dropped their first headline about it 19 minutes after the inauguration, “The Case for Impeaching Trump.” Nineteen minutes, Rush, you know, that was about the amount of time that it took Obama to get nominated for the peace prize.
RUSH: (laughing).
TRUMP JR.: That’s the difference between, you know, what we think. On The View today it was funny when they said, “Your father doesn’t take that much heat from the press.” I go, “Please name someone who’s taken more.” They go, “Obama.” I go, “Give me a break.” The press took an eight year vacation. It’s why they’re so energized now. Under the Obama administration there was nothing he could do wrong, regardless of the idiocy of the some of the policies, regardless of sending $150 billion to Iran —
RUSH: They all wanted to be —
TRUMP JR.: — a state sponsor of terror. It’s insanity.
RUSH: They all wanted to be Obama’s best friend. They still do. Look. You said something, you’re cramming a lot in here. You just said something that’s kind of profound. I want to go back to it, and it’s a huge difference. When Biden got elected VP, his son started working for foreign companies, traveling with his dad —
TRUMP JR.: Yeah.
RUSH: — to arrange these deals. When your father got elected, you and the rest of his children stopped working on international deals. Correct?
TRUMP JR.: Correct. We stopped doing new deals. Now, we had deals that we started in 2010. You can’t walk away from a building halfway through, but we stopped doing new deals. In our hotels, if someone from a foreign government comes in, we literally write a check back to the U.S. Treasury for the profits associated therewith. And that’s the nuance. That’s the false equivalency that the media refuses to acknowledge, refuses to run, and they still get there and they’re still trying to make sure they got the audit and they just pretend like it’s not actually happening.
And that’s the difference. You know, we were international businesspeople for decades. We gave it up. It’s a big part of why I’m so into politics ’cause frankly I did most of our international business. I did our deals abroad, and now that I can’t find or hunt for new deals, I got another thing.
The only thing I’m not gonna be is bored, Rush. So it’s allowed me to create a platform to go help those who are willing to fight for my father in the House, in the Senate, in governors’ races and to ultimately help my father. Because for me as an American, as a patriot, as a father of five young kids, there is nothing more important than fighting for this country and making sure that we save this republic from these crazy people.
RUSH: We’re talking with Donald Trump Jr., new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. You have a couple more minutes? I gotta take a spot break here. Can you hang on for a few?
TRUMP JR.: Of course. Of course.
RUSH: All right. We’ll be right back with Donald Trump Jr., folks, so hang on. Don’t go away.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: And we’re back with Donald Trump Jr. New book hot off the press destined for the top of the New York Times best-seller list, which is gonna irritate the New York Times. Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.
I’m looking at the blurbs on the back. Ted Cruz says: “For far too long the left hammered away at our values. We did nothing. Donald Trump Jr.’s new book is a road map on how we fight back.”
What are we gonna do? I mean, you know who your enemies are. It’s the American left. They seem to be expanding in certain demographic ways. What is the best way, do you think, to beat these people back?
TRUMP JR.: Again, you know, I think it took a personality like Trump to be able to do that. We do have to fight. We have to be vocal. We’ve had this sort of mentality, Rush, of turn the other cheek and we have our principles and, you know, everybody’s so loud about their principles on the stump speech but when they’re worried about getting a negative article written about them in a liberal publication they fold like a cheap rug.
I mean, think of another Republican who in the same situation as my father was with Kavanaugh when all of the craziness was going on, even though everyone knew it was nonsense, how many would have actually stuck with him through that, would have taken the heat and said, “No, no, no, we’re not gonna let these guys ruin that guy’s life. We’re gonna stand by him.”
RUSH: That’s an excellent point, and we made note of that at that time. A lot of people would have folded, a lot of presidents, a lot of previous one. “Don’t even get any of that stuff near me,” they would have said.
TRUMP JR.: Correct.
RUSH: Now, Don, your life before all of this was whatever it was, but your life did not feature the kind of media mockery and hatred and disrespect. I mean, the Trump family in New York, and The Apprentice show, you guys were doing great things for the city, the city loved you. You saved the roller rink, you did a number of great things. How surprising was this total turn to outright hatred for you and your family once your father’s political career got in gear?
TRUMP JR.: Again, not entirely surprising. You know, but that’s sort of the evolution of the Democrat Party. And I say that because, again, I’m from New York City, I get it. I have plenty of friends that were Democrats. But even they and many of them today have a hard time arguing the Democrat platform and I think that’s the point I make throughout the country and in the book, which is today’s Democrat Party is not your grandfather’s Democrat Party.
You know, JFK would be like an Alt-Right neo-Nazi fascist according to them today. And I think there’s such a great tradition of, you know, some of these people in working class America, “Don, if my grandfather knew I was voting for a Republican he’d be rolling over in his grave.” I go, “How many genders would your grandfather think there are? Talk to me about what he would think about today’s Democrat Party platform,” and that’s sort of when the light goes off.
So I literally go out and speak to people. I speak to college campuses. Like I said, I just did The View with Kimberly. We will put ourselves in there to be heard. And not everyone’s gonna listen. And I can assure you there’s no one less tolerant than a leftist preaching tolerance so it wasn’t entirely surprising, Rush, but there’s also sort of a hidden — there’s a hidden vote that still exists. The example I use is Kimberly convinced me to take her to this restaurant on Valentine’s Day on the Upper East Side of New York, and this is not exactly a conservative stronghold, as you’re aware.
RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah, been there numerous times when they wouldn’t let me in.
TRUMP JR.: Yes, exactly. And so I’m sitting there and I’m going, “Oh, no.” Everyone’s giving me side eye and I’m looking, “Who am I gonna have to take a swing at to defend my girlfriend here?” And we have this dinner and I’m sort of annoyed about the whole thing throughout the thing. And we pay our check, we get out, we leave, and this old lady comes up and she says, “You!” out loud, I mean, it’s small restaurant. I’m like, “Oh, boy, here we go.” It’s a little harder to punch an old lady, right? I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding, Rush.
I’m saying, “Oh, no here we go. This is why I didn’t even want to go out.” And she just goes, “You guys have the biggest –” you know, there’s a word, maybe not for radio, but it starts with a B and ends in an S. “And I love it. You guys fight, you don’t give in,” and she’s screaming this at this restaurant. And so everyone all of the sudden is looking, and I thought everyone was giving me side eye, and literally Rush, everyone stood up and started clapping.
They came over and started shaking hands and giving me selfies. So in this bastion of liberalism, this place where, you know, 2% of the people are conservatives and I thought everyone was hating on me, there was actually a lot of love. But they just didn’t know how to react. They were so —
RUSH: Well, everybody thought – (crosstalk)
RUSH: No, everybody thought they were the only ones in the room that did and didn’t want to —
TRUMP JR.: Correct. (crosstalk)
RUSH: — so once that old lady got the gonads up and went up and do it, that cleared the way for everybody else to tell you how much they love you.
TRUMP JR.: One hundred percent.
RUSH: Look, I appreciate your time. I wish we had more but we’re down to the end, 30 seconds, and I just didn’t want to end this thing rudely. I wanted to wish you the best. Something my wife says to me, she reminds me all the time about your dad and you, is that none of you had to do this. Run for president and deal with all that, you didn’t have to do it, and yet you do. And you are. And you’re not quitting or giving it up.
And she has tremendous appreciation. A lot of people do. And I’m glad that happened to you at La Grenouille because the more that happens the more it can inspire you. I know you don’t need it but it’s great to see it nevertheless. Good luck with the book and thanks so much for your time here today.
TRUMP JR.: Thank you, sir.
RUSH: Donald Trump Jr. and Triggered is the book.
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