Дональд Трамп - Triggered

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 got 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.