Donald Trump Jr has bizarre meltdown after Paul Manafort cuts plea deal
If Donald Trump was the biggest loser in today’s Paul Manafort plea deal, Donald Trump Jr may have been the second biggest loser. Manafort agreed to cooperate with federal investigators on everything, which is a big deal, because Manafort attended the meeting that Junior set up with the Russians in an illegal attempt at obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton. So how did Trump Jr handle the news?
Donald Trump Jr decided to spend the day escalating his ongoing feud with Vanity Fair. No, really. It began a day ago when Vanity Fair reported that Ivanka Trump was worried about impeachment, and Trump Jr was worried that his dad isn’t sleeping. In response, Junior posted this utterly bizarre tweet: “What a joke, you think I worry my father isn’t sleeping? I have never and will never worry about that. Keep making crap up. Oh, VF with 4.8m “followers” how do you average less than 20 RTs for your last 20 or so posts? BUYING FOLLOWERS MUCH? SAD, PATHETIC, & IRRELEVANT!” Then today it got worse.
The Hill published an article with the title “Trump Jr. accuses Vanity Fair of buying Twitter followers, says mag made “crap up” about him.” This afternoon, shortly after the news broke that Paul Manafort had flipped, Junior ignored that topic and instead lashed out at Vanity Fair and The Hill: “Wrong. I asked a simple question as I can’t imagine that anyone with 4.8m “followers” could have engagement that bad. Don’t get me wrong the content sucks but seriously, less than 20 RTs per post average? They have +\- 2m more followers than me… watch what happens below!”
To be clear, there is no reason to suspect that Vanity Fair has “bought” Twitter followers. Donald Trump Jr is, either out of ignorance or dishonesty, misrepresenting the difference in engagement between a tweet which includes an article (which followers engage with by clicking through to read it) and a tweet which does not include an article link (which followers engage with by clicking “like” or “retweet”). But the real upshot here is that, with his future as a free man now very much in doubt, Trump Jr is focused on this horsecrap instead.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report