Donald Trump Jr. is at it again, folks.
Hats off to whoever managed to sandblast the flop sweat and happy powder from Patrick Bateman Trump
Jr.’s face before he hit “record” on his latest video. Otherwise, this
whole spectacle could have been borderline embarrassing.
I sense that Junior would prefer to spend his days launching drone strikes at herds of sanctuary elephants from atop the world’s largest berm of cocaine, but his dad wasn’t in office quite long enough to make that legal, so he has to resort to gormless jibber-jabber, which he happily did in a five-minute video posted to Facebook Watch on Thursday morning.
This is equal parts sad, funny, and grotesque—so buckle in!
This 40-second clip comes about three minutes into Junior’s rambling rant. (If you really want to watch the whole thing—which I did, so you don’t have to—you can click here.)
Transcript!
TRUMP JR.: “’I can’t believe Trump said something nice about Putin, Kim, Xi! Anyone! He must love them! He’s folding to them!’ You know, ‘If it was me in charge, I’d tell them to go screw themselves!’ Right? This is some nerd in his mom’s basement who’s never dealt with anything, never actually had any power, never understood those people because he’s never been in the same room as them, in academia. They’re writing this stuff like it’s real, like they actually have a say, like they actually know what the hell they’re talking about. You ever think that, like all other things, maybe Trump understood that. He knew exactly how to play these guys, and he played it like a fiddle.”
Okay, lots of awful to unpack here. No, seriously. It’s like I went on vacation with a duffel bag full of plain blue T-shirts and returned through customs with the reptilian invasive species starter pack.
1) It’s one thing to say something “nice” about your geopolitical foe to further your country’s diplomatic efforts. It’s quite another to do so because a) you want to erect a big ugly phallus in Moscow and b) you wish you could kill journalists, too.
2) I may be a nerd, but I moved out of my mom’s basement months ago. Also, how many published Russian studies professors still live in their parents’ basements? I get the feeling Junior didn’t thoroughly fact-check this rant before he started. His ombudsman must be in the corner of the room trying to burn the imaginary spiders off his arm with a Sterno can.
3) What kind of psychopath refers to his dad by his last name?
4) Trump played Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping “like a fiddle.” Sure. Okay.
Let’s review:
Trump’s big trade war with China and Xi did what exactly? Oh, yeah. Nothing. Nothing at all:
Opinion: Confirmed: Trump’s big U.S.-China trade deal was a flop
The results are in: China didn’t buy anything extra from the United States.
The purchases of U.S. exports that China did make in the past two years barely got back to the amount China was purchasing in 2017—before Mr. Trump started his trade war, according to calculations by Chad P. Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. U.S. exporters will never get back the sales they lost, and few have seen any meaningful growth in their sales to China under the “deal.” “The only undisputed ‘historical’ aspect of that agreement is its failure,” said Mr. Bown.
Ah, but what about his historic meeting with Kim? You know, the one where Trump saluted a North Korean general.
Opinion: Trump got played by Kim Jong Un—again
Trump administration officials constantly say the foreign policy establishment’s decades-long failure with North Korea meant there was no choice but to give Trump’s fresh, personal, top-down method a fair trial. Today the verdict is in. Trump’s approach has failed, and Pyongyang is happily reaping the rewards.
Make no mistake, the collapse of this week’s U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi is a win for Kim Jong Un. Trump and his officials are already spinning this as a draw, stating that North Korea has promised to continue its testing moratorium, claiming unspecified progress was made inside the talks and promising the negotiations will continue.
Finally, do we even need to include the complete shameful chronicle of Trump’s perduring Putin-fiddlin’?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This one is worth two words and a thousand dry-heaves:
Good God, Trump is the worst fiddler since Rudy Giuliani.
Of course, Don Jr. also wants us to believe that his dad—whom Putin worked to get elected (and reelected), and who kept threatening to pull the U.S. out of NATO—was actually playing his authoritarian patron for a fool. Oh, yeah, he really burned Putin when he tried to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and contradicted our own intelligence experts so he could take Putin’s side in Helsinki.
So there you have it. But we can’t stop there! Republicans are now trying to pretend they’re tough on Russia, but the truth is buried in shallow graves all across the internet. Folks, let’s dig those bodies up and deliver them to voters’ doorsteps.
If Democrats can’t make hay out of the GOP’s years-long Putin fetish, then I don’t know what kind of deus ex machina gift we couldn’t squander. It’s pretty obvious now that one U.S. political party is loyal to America and the other supports whatever country pays them the most. Defining these traitors should be as easy as falling off a log.
In the meantime, let’s support Ukraine by putting our money where our mouth is. It’s really the least we can do for those brave men and women who are putting their necks on the line every day for democracy.
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