Deconstructing Donald Trump Jr.
With Senior’s Twitter account forever silenced, it is left to Donald Trump Junior to carry on the dispiriting tradition of Trump hate-tweeting. Like his father, Junior’s tweets are predictably autobiographical. Each tweet inadvertently (and embarrassingly) reveals what he truly is. And what is he? Like his father, Junior is a small man who thinks he’s a big man, a stupid man who thinks he’s clever man. He’s everything Drs. Dunning and Kruger warned us about.
Nothing good ever comes from giving little people like Don Junior power. They inevitably abuse it, lacking both humility and common sense. The end result is predictable. Nothing remarkable or worthwhile ever comes from such people, either. They remain mediocrities in perpetuity. In their little zero sum world, achievements are always comparative, as in the “Oh, yeah? So are you!” school of sophomoric one-upmanship.
So when President Biden stumbled ascending the stairs of Air Force One, Junior retweeted a ridiculous bit of video fakery showing Donald Trump launching golf balls at the President’s head and making him stumble. Apart from the disturbing undertone of violence that is endemic to the Trump family, it was a disgracefully lowbrow tweet. The son of an ex-president has no business making such a violent gesture toward the President of the United States.
Like all bullies, Trump Junior found it funny, and scorned and gaslighted anyone who didn’t. But pantomiming violence against the President of the United States is emphatically not funny, not despite but because Donald Trump Junior says that it is. It’s emblematic of the family sickness, an ethic that delights in harming other human beings. Junior belongs to a family indifferent to human suffering. It explains how they can bear to lose half a million Americans to coronavirus under their watch without shedding a single tear.
Like all bullies of the low variety, the alleged adult Don Junior literally spends his waking hours mocking people. Every tweet is dripping with hatred, sarcasm, cynicism and lies. He mocks people for being “woke,” that is, people who practice sensitivity to the cultural boundaries of others. He sees no hypocrisy when he attacks Democrats for doing things once that his father did multiple times. And of course he laughs at and takes delight in an elderly man tripping on the stairs. What a guy!
Above all, Junior has absolutely no class. He’s not just a little man. He’s a peevish man too, whiny, petulant and impotent. In the words of Zaphod Beeblebrox, he’s so unhip it’s amazing his bums don’t fall off.
Junior is that odd thing, the anomaly of someone who was raised by a violent abuser who has himself become a violent abuser. I’ve always found it difficult to understand why someone who endured abuse, had it inflicted on him as a child, grows up to embrace such behavior and not loathe it. It’s never made any sense to me. You’d think such people would understand more intimately than anyone else how unjust such treatment is. Perhaps that’s what we really mean when we use words like “evil.” The evil person is someone who relishes what evil really is before inflicting it. The evil person understands evil.
But the idea that Junior is actually attractive to some of his followers is amazing to me as well. It’s 2021, and yet some people still confuse cruelty with strength and compassion with weakness. How much longer can the human race tolerate such stupidity? Why isn’t it clearly and unequivocally taught in schools, that the loftiest objective of the human spirit is compassion, and the lowest objective is cruelty? Clearly, the opposite is taught in the Trump household. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.