Дональд Трамп - Triggered

Why a politician, whose job is to serve the people he represents, would spend so much of his time and energy fighting a developer who wanted to improve that politician’s district is a mystery. Except, that is, when you learn that the politician’s name is Jerrold Nadler.

Since his first day as an assemblyman, for whatever reason—jealousy, probably—Nadler has hated my father. While my father was trying to rebuild the broken parts of New York in the same way he’s rebuilding the broken parts of the country right now, Nadler stood in his way. To this day, the man will go to any lengths to stop anything that Donald J. Trump does.

In 1998, Nadler was a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the committee he now chairs. Kenneth Starr was the special counsel for the investigation into President Clinton, which led to impeachment proceedings. Nadler was perhaps the most vocal opponent of the release of the Starr Report. He called his opposition “a matter of decency.”

“It’s grand jury material. It represents statements which may or may not be true by various witnesses,” he said. “Salacious material. All kinds of material that it would be unfair to release.”

That quote comes from the same man who, at this writing, is still fighting for the release of grand jury testimony in the Mueller Report: Jerry Nadler, the Babe Ruth of hypocrisy.

Luckily for Trump Org, the mayors of New York City for most of the 1990s and through the 2000s were business friendly. In 1993, Rudy Giuliani held the top city post. He inherited a New York from Democrat David Dinkins that was like a war zone. In 1990, New York City had over twenty-two hundred murders. To give you some idea of just how bad it was, the city with the highest murder rate in the country today, Chicago, only sees around 700 homicides per year. Times Square was one big X-rated pit. The brave few who would come into the city to see legitimate theater would fear for their lives. Business and construction barely had a pulse. The Crown Heights race riots in 1991 threatened to tear New York apart. A New York Post headline at the time read “DAVE, DO SOMETHING!” Then Rudy rode to the rescue. He cleaned up Times Square, oversaw a remarkable decrease in crime, and became a friend to builders. His leadership during and after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was nothing short of heroic. During his mayoralty, people started moving into the city instead of out of it for the first time in years. Companies such as The Trump Organization put up buildings that soared to the sky.

In 2002, Michael Bloomberg carried on what Rudy had started. Bloomberg is a businessman, and his relationship with builders was good. He once called us “the great Trump Org.” It was only when my dad ran for president that Bloomberg’s attitude toward him changed. Again, jealousy is probably the reason. My father got the job that Bloomberg desperately wants but will never have. It takes guts to do it as a conservative, and most people—even accomplished people—can’t or won’t take the heat required, so they just sit and throw stones from the sidelines.

It was around 2008, after the Chicago tower and hotel were completed, that we started our branding business, offering our name, expertise, and value engineering and marketing ability to developers around the world. One of the first deals we made was in Sunny Isles, Florida, which turned out to be very successful. It was around then that we saw the promise in a much wider market. Though our brand was very New York–centric, after a couple of successful ventures in Florida with our friends, Michael and Gil Dezer, we began to believe we had something that would sell all over the world. It was also an opportunity, first for me, but for Ivanka and Eric, too, to start doing deals internationally on our own. Over the course of the next ten years, I made deals all over the world and built a major book of business.

Throughout that time, national politics existed somewhere in the background for me. Had I been watching Washington more closely, I would have seen what government looked like with the Republican establishment running things. You might have noticed that I’ve been beating up on the Democrats pretty good, and they deserve every punch. But they weren’t the only political party screwing up Washington. The establishment Republicans had a big hand in populating the swamp, and when DJT became the party’s nominee, they wanted him to lose to Hillary just as badly as the Democrats did.

One of the ways they tried to sabotage my father’s candidacy was by using the conservative press. Though later in this book I dedicate a chapter to the biased liberal media and fake news, the Republican establishment had its own propaganda machine. One of it most notable propagandists is Bill Kristol, the editor of the failed Weekly Standard . Once thought of as a lion of conservative politics, Kristol was one of the first rats to attack my father. It’s hard to believe he was ever relevant, but then again, maybe that’s why we always lost.

Along with Kristol, establishment columnists such as the Washington Post ’s Jennifer Rubin, the New York Times ’ Bret Stephens, and Jonah Goldberg from National Review , just to name a few, furiously wrote columns trying to derail the Trump train.

It was Sarah Palin, perhaps, talking about the Tea Party, who first talked about the relationship between the establishment and the press it controlled. “The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent,” she wrote on Facebook.

She was right.

Just like the mainstream media, however, the establishment press seriously underestimated DJT’s ability to punch back. My father called them out for what they are: irrelevant. Existing in a bubble floating high above what was happening on the ground, they championed policies that kept the status quo or tried to talk us into another unpopular war. Meanwhile, down here on the ground, real people watched the middle class dwindle, the borders get thrown wide open, and the United States get clobbered in trade while our factories turned to rust.

When it comes to handling the press, my father is the undisputed heavyweight champ. It really wasn’t a fair fight.

There’s no better example than Bill Kristol to show you how badly the establishment press lost to DJT. His high-profile career has hit the canvas with a thud. Today, you might catch him doing a Sunday-afternoon hit on MSNBC. The only thing lower than that is maybe an infomercial for wrinkle cream on Sunday morning. Keep an eye out for Bill holding up a jar to the camera.

Still, getting rid of the entire Republican establishment political-media-industrial complex is like trying to pull an oak tree out of the ground by its roots. Back in the early 2010s, the Tea Party gave the Republican establishment a pretty good shake. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin led the revolution. But it was DJT who took a buzzsaw to it.

If you remember back to the beginning of the campaign, the Republican establishment called themselves “Never Trumpers.” Made up of RINOs (Republicans in name only), huge money donors, and a variety of interest groups, the list of them is as long as John Kerry’s face. In March 2016, 122 “Members of the Republican national security community” signed a letter denouncing my father’s candidacy. The following August, 50 “Republican national security officials” signed a second letter announcing that they would not vote for Trump under any circumstances. According to a Washington Post article from last July, many of those same people are now looking for jobs in the Trump administration. Magically, DJT’s foreign policy has started to look pretty good to them.