Дональд Трамп - Triggered

The left has become nothing more than a hypocritical caricature of itself—a Saturday Night Live clip gone horribly wrong.

And it’s not just politicians who are targets. It’s anyone the left doesn’t agree with. As I was working on this book, my brother Eric walked into a bar in Chicago and a waitress there spat in his face. The Secret Service had to lead her outside before the confrontation could get worse. People get triggered simply by seeing a Trump. Last year Sarah Huckabee Sanders, my father’s longtime press secretary, and her family were kicked out of a restaurant in Washington, DC, simply because she worked for the president. Her family was forced to leave another restaurant by an Antifa mob just minutes afterward. Democratic Socialists of America threatened former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in restaurants. Senator McConnell has been targeted multiple times, including by left-wing extremists who stormed his home screaming “Just stab the m—f—in the heart.” Then, when the senator posted a video of the incident, Twitter locked him out. They locked him out for showing an attack on his house directed by the left!

Even the vice president has been harassed. Instead of taking a curtain call, the entire cast of the musical Hamilton stood on stage and lectured Mike Pence, then the vice president–elect. Vice President Pence was at the show with his daughter and her cousins, who were upset at the public display of hostility.

As gracious as anyone you’ll ever meet, the vice president excused the rudeness of the cast by telling his daughter, “That’s what democracy sounds like.” Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, even if the left doesn’t think we are. There are, however, appropriate times and places to express them. I don’t know, but the cast of a show shouting at a man and his family who are sitting in a theater where tickets for the show cost hundreds of dollars doesn’t seem like one of those times to me. If anything it shows most of America how uncivilized and deranged most of these lefties are. (By the way, though I use the terms “lefty, leftist, and left” interchangeably with “Democrat” in these pages, not all Democrats are leftists. Many are good people, some even voted for my father. Unfortunately, the party has lost its way and is now run by the leftists and the socialists.)

Last year, with a few friends, we were celebrating my girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle’s, birthday at a restaurant when a man came up to our table and started screaming “Shame on you!” Our friend Sergio Gor, who was with us at the table, asked the man to name one policy of President Trump’s that he wasn’t happy with. Instead of giving an answer, the man continued his irrational rant but now targeted Sergio.

“Is it the environment?” Sergio asked.

More incoherent screaming.

“Civil rights?”

Loud nonsense.

“Taxes?” Sergio pressed.

“I don’t have to name one!” the man finally screamed and walked away.

It was a classic display of Trump Derangement Syndrome. He didn’t know why he was mad; he just knew he was mad.

The attacks against us aren’t random incidents. They’re part of a coordinated plot to intimidate anyone into silence who doesn’t agree with the radical left. Antifa is nothing less than a terrorist organization, and it’s about time we started treating it that way.

Its members are certainly radical enough. In their own minds, they are part of a long line of brave, tightly organized “antifascists.” They see themselves as being descended from those who took on the supporters of Benito Mussolini in Italy and opposed Adolf Hitler in Germany during World War II. In reality, they’re just idiots who’ve played too many video games. They are people who have never gotten the chance to confront anything real in their lives, so they turn the real world into a fantasy land where they are good people fighting evil fascists. Oh, and in this little fantasy world, anyone who says things they don’t agree with—or anyone who is white and male and happens to be within fifty feet of them when they hold their demonstrations—is a fascist.

I’m not sure if Antifa understands fascism all that well, because it sure as hell seems to be willing to employ fascist tactics on a daily basis. Maybe they should just call themselves “Fa,” because from what I’ve seen they’re far more fascist than anti-.

In April 2017, an Antifa mob wearing ninja black, ski masks, and sun goggles and carrying knives, clubs, and cans of Mace descended on the peaceful Patriots’ Day “free speech” rally in Berkeley, California. Of all places—the home of the ’60s hippies’ crusade for free speech. One of the Antifa thugs began hitting people in the head with a large bicycle U-lock. He sneaked up on them and hit them from behind—the worst kind of coward. As many as eleven people fell from the blows. One man was so badly injured that he needed multiple staples in his skull to close the wound.

The police would later arrest Eric Clanton for the crimes. By day, Clanton was an “ethics” professor at Diablo Valley College. By night, he was a leftist thug in the war against Trump. (Irony is lost on the left.) The ethics professor would receive just three years’ probation. If the sentence seems a little soft to you, you’re not crazy. Three years’ probation for what amounted to attempted murder? Perhaps the scales of justice were tipped in his favor? Well, the court was in California’s Alameda County, a place that had gone nearly 80 percent for Clinton. So you tell me.

At the end of June 2019, an Antifa mob attacked Andy Ngo, an editor for Quillette , on the streets of Portland, Oregon. Over the past few years, Andy had been doing some excellent reporting about a vast series of fake hate crimes that had been staged by various “oppressed people” in Oregon and elsewhere. His reporting, some of which had run in the New York Post , had exposed several people who had “Smolletted themselves,” as I like to say, painting racial slurs and obscene images on their own houses and then blaming Trump supporters for it. In one case, a woman who had fallen while drunk blamed her injuries on a white supremacist. Andy’s reporting had made him an enemy of Portland’s liberal gestapo, whose entire narrative hinged on those horrible attacks being true.

When they found out about Andy’s reporting, the leftist communities of Portland reacted violently, as they often do when you point out their blatant hypocrisy. On June 29, Andy tried to film a protest going on in downtown Portland, and the Antifa crowd turned on him. They allegedly dumped milkshakes on his head, punched him in the face, and beat him all over his body with whatever weapons they’d left the house with that day. Later, in the hospital’s emergency room, doctors told Andy that he had suffered brain injuries from the attack. The attack is being challenged, of course, but only by left-wing rags that likely only want to hurt Ngo because he doesn’t fit their desired mold.

If those had been isolated incidents, it’d be one thing. But they’re not. All over the country, leftists are organizing marches, shutting down speakers, and committing horrible acts of violence when they don’t get their way. And instead of calling out these atrocious acts for what they are, the media either ignore them or cheer them on. The New York Times referred to the widespread protests after my father’s election—many of which had turned violent—as “peaceful.” When Trump supporters gather anywhere, organizing in the same numbers for similar reasons, we’re called “white supremacists” and “hateful fearmongers.” This isn’t because we’re evil or even because we’ve upset the established political order. It’s because we say things that the left doesn’t like to hear—and in the era of Trump, there is no greater crime than to trigger someone.