Дональд Трамп - Triggered

Soon I learned that when it came to campaigning, the only place it made absolutely no sense for me to be was wherever my father was. We were only wasting our resources by going to the same cities. Plus, in case you haven’t noticed, wherever my father goes, all eyes are on him; when he’s talking, no one really cares who else is there. He’s a big personality, and only a certain kind of person can complement that. In some sense, this is the dilemma we faced when trying to decide on a running mate during the campaign. We’d had a lovely breakfast with Mike Pence and his family, during which we noticed that the Pences’ approach to life was a lot like ours—no cooks and maids doing everything for them, just dinner every night like a normal family. Bear in mind that this breakfast occurred in the Indiana governor’s mansion. The Pences could have had dozens of aides and staff members catering to their every need, but they chose not to.

But we had also been considering Newt Gingrich, who seemed like a viable choice. After all, Newt was a tremendous Speaker of the House and a great advocate for my father during the early days of the campaign. While we were in Indiana visiting the Pences, Newt Gingrich met us in a hotel room. A few minutes into the conversation, though, I noticed that Newt seemed hesitant about the whole thing. I finally decided to mention the elephant in the room.

“Mr. Speaker,” I said, feeling slightly awkward. “Forgive me for asking, but… do you really want this job?”

Newt was very gracious in his response, but the bottom line seemed to be that no, he really did not. Over the next few minutes, he explained that if he was asked, he would give the vice presidency 110 percent of his energy, and would be happy to do it. But he also said he could probably be of more help to us on the outside, where he could be as brash and abrasive as he wanted to be without worrying about the political ramifications. When it comes down to it, I’m happy he decided that. We already had one pirate on the ticket; we didn’t need two.

Still, I knew drawing crowds meant nothing if you didn’t have a message. I had one that was set in stone.

During my speech to the Republican National Convention, I brought that message to millions of people across the country. Even Politico, no fans of me or my father, said that a “political star may have been born” that night. I don’t know about that, but I do know something got started. That convention speech was the spark that lit the fire of my political life. But all I did was speak from the heart, saying what I knew to be true about my father that I didn’t think anyone else knew. I barely had to write it down.

Left-wing pundits and fake news told you that my father was making promises on the campaign trail just to be provocative, just for the attention. Those who said and wrote that, however, were about to experience a rude awakening.

6.

NOT EXACTLY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY GIVE US YOUR HUDDLED MASSES—OH, AND YOUR GANGS AND DRUGS, TOO.

IT WAS ON JUNE 16, 2015, two days after Flag Day and his birthday, when my father announced that he was running for president of the United States. Fifty years from now, they’ll be talking about the escalator ride he took with Melania. Among his many talents, DJT certainly knows how to make an entrance. What people don’t know, however, is what happened right before that entrance. It was then when my father said what might be the most prophetic statement he’s ever made.

Melania and Barron; Ivanka and her husband, Jared; Eric and his wife, Lara; my kids Kai and Donnie, my then wife, Vanessa, and I had gathered in his office. Together we rode the elevator down to the first-floor atrium with my father. People have asked me if we had a family sit-down like you hear about, where the candidate discusses the decision to run or not with his family. Doesn’t happen like that in the Trump family. DJT is his own man, and when he makes a decision, we all do whatever we can to help him. Just before the doors of the atrium opened, my father turned to me and said, “Now we find out who our real friends are.”

His announcement speech, one still played all the time as proof my father is racist, didn’t, at first, cause a blowback in the press. Almost all of his remarks that day, even the most controversial, came off the top of his head. He had a sheet of paper with a few notes scratched on it in his suit jacket pocket, but I don’t think he looked at it once. What caused the left to explode in outrage came a few days later. It was then that Hillary Clinton all but blamed my father for the actions of a maniac named Dylann Roof who had walked into an all-black church and shot nine people to death. This is a common theme for Democrats. Anytime anything horrible happens, such as a mass shooting, my father is to blame. It’s insane and insulting.

Two things happened at that moment. First, the presidential election essentially became a race between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump; and, second, the press began to invent a racist narrative about my father, one that would become an avalanche of lies.

A little more than a year after my father made his famous proclamation about the scourge of illegal immigration, I stopped in a hotel outside Denver, Colorado, to catch a few hours of sleep between campaign events. By then, the race truly was between Hillary and my father. It had been a brutal couple of weeks out on the trail, and both campaigns were feeling the heat. (By that point, DJT was doing multiple events each day, including major rallies, and shaking a few thousand hands at every stop; Hillary Clinton was collapsing into her SUV from sheer exhaustion after trying to keep up for a few hours.)

I’d realized how crazy our schedule was on a stop in Detroit (where, by the way, no one thought we should be). It was 9:30 p.m. I remember the time because I was doing a hit on Sean Hannity’s TV show later that night. We’d already done a couple of rallies and stopped at a Muslim-owned eatery and then a college campus. I looked over at Tommy Hicks, my friend since my early days in New York after college. Tommy had left a very lucrative job with his family’s business to join me on the campaign and had then stayed with us every step of the way. Tommy was a lifesaver. He helped us with everything from crowd control to fund-raising at a time when the Republican National Committee wasn’t exactly breaking its neck to support us.

“Man, I’m hungry,” I said.

He looked back at me as though I were nuts. “That’s because we haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday,” he said.

It had been almost forty hours since my last meal, and I hadn’t thought about eating once. It wasn’t just me. All of us—family members and a handful of surrogates—were stretched thin across the country and running on fumes. We spoke at rallies, sat in on meetings, took pictures, did radio and TV hits, county fairs, fund-raisers—you name it, anything that might enable us to scrape up a couple more votes, and having a meal stole valuable time. If we were going to lose—which, if you believed the mainstream media, was exactly what we were going to do—we wanted to go down fighting.

The hotel lobby in Colorado was starting to come to life. It must have been around six in the morning. There were newspapers stacked on the front desk, but they were all folded up and unread, meaning that the hit pieces and liberal tirades about my father hadn’t yet been disseminated. I was grateful for the quiet. Part of being on the 2016 Donald J. Trump for President campaign was keeping your guard up. For the tens and tens of thousands of supporters we saw every week, there were plenty of haters, people who bought what the fake news peddled hook, line, and sinker.