Donald Trump Jr. is still a thing. He uncomfortably sells Trump steaks and stuff. He also has a podcast or something resembling a digital interview show called Triggered. The title is a reference to how he triggers people. It is also the name of his sad attempt at being noticed by his narcissistic father. In a video uploaded two days before publishing this piece, and then pulled down while in the middle of writing this piece, Junior held an interview with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
From what was available to watch online, the video is a wide-ranging interview where Junior does most of the fast talking. McCarthy does a lot of vacuously agreeing with whatever points Junior has to make about how great his dad was as president. It isn’t worth watching for the most part, even if you are feeling particularly masochistic. But after long stretches of Junior telling McCarthy how dad Trump is really a “compassionate” guy who hides it so well no one in the world would ever think otherwise, Junior gives Kevin a chance to say something about Kevin.
McCarthy decides to quickly interject with information about his working- and middle-class upbringing. McCarthy brags about illegally flipping cars for profit, not having “the education” (which I guess is supposed to mean he didn’t go to an Ivy League school), winning a $5,000 lottery and buying single stock that did well when he was 20. Then Junior decides it’s time to launch into his own personal mythology that he worked hard-scrabble jobs and learned all about work ethics too.
It’s like watching the Mad Hatter Tea Party scene embodied in one man rambling for 35 seconds.
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He begins by connecting with McCarthy on how this rough-scrabble upbringing is unique in the privileged world of politics: “And I feel like that's also something that's missing in so much of Congress where people are just—they've just been—they've never actually had that hustle.” You might be wondering how Trump Jr., a man who grew up in an unbelievably wealthy family and whose career seems to be entirely based on his father’s wealth and businesses, knows anything about “that hustle.” Gentleman Junior would like you to know that he gets it: “Now we get it. I understand where I come from in my background. I get it.”
See? He gets it. “But like my father made sure I worked minimum wage jobs and the like.” Excuse me? “And I could drive a caterpillar and like, you know, I also worked for tips, which is something I think that's really important that it s understand that aspect of things.” Are you getting any of this stolen working class valor? ”But, you know, in D.C., I feel like so much of that is lacking and no one's ever had to make payroll. No one's, you know, signed the front of a check as opposed to back.”
Someone’s mixing up fake working class versus capitalist class metaphors!
The rich frequently like to try and explain away their privilege by pretending that doing a job you don’t have to think about or use for money in your 20s is the same as growing up working for a living. The rich like Trump and his family like to pretend that being attacked by the media as a wildly corrupt organized crime family is the same as being a war veteran.
Junior’s intense working days seem to come from a period he spent in Aspen, Colorado, right after graduating University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “To be fairly candid, I used to drink a lot and party pretty hard, and it wasn’t something that I was particularly good at.” He became a bartender. It seems that his hardcore bartending days came to an end after a few months, because according to accounts he ended up being arrested in New Orleans for public drunkenness during Mardi Gras and then he entered into the family business.
So, he maybe worked for tips?
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