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Its not news that our degraded politics has made truth elusive. Yet even seasoned Trump haters may be surprised at how elusive it has become for Don Jr. He recounts a well-worn story about the night of his birth.

When my mother first approached him with the idea of naming me Don Jr., he writes, my father is rumored to have said, We cant do that! What if hes a loser? Again, no idea whether my father ever really said this. Ive provided the italics for Don Jr., because the source of this often-repeated anecdote is a book called Raising Trump, which was written by his mom.

The alienation Don Jr. and his troops feel from the liberal culture that surrounds them forces them to a poignant furtiveness. They want us to know that while they live in the world that liberalism has made, they are not of it. Or so they believe. In reality they dart in and out, as convenience allows.

The liberal press is thoroughly corrupt, Don Jr. tells us, irredeemable, essentially useless except as a contrary indicator of actual fact. Meanwhile, he is careful to support a large number of his anecdotes and assertions with footnotesfootnotes that cite The Washington Post, Time magazine, USA Today, and other enemies of the people. (We modestly note that The Atlantic alone earns five footnotes.) So, too, Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation, which was a Democratic sham from first day to last. Yet Don Jr. is adamant that any suggestions that he was involved in Russian collusion have been definitely disproved. Dont take his word for it, he says. Read the Mueller report.

Mueller, in Don Jr.s estimation, is a feeble old fool. He makes this pronouncement several sentences before he writes: I would actually like to think of this book as offering a reasoned antidote to all the hysterical bullshit thats flying around right now. That used to be called discourse.

Precisely when those good old days of discourse began, and when they came to an end, Don Jr. leaves unspecified, but a revealing, and by now legendary, moment in this regard came early on in his promotional tour for Triggered. He and his girlfriend, a former mid-list Fox News personality named Kimberly Guilfoyle, submitted to an interrogation with the hosts of ABCs The View. Trump held his own and managed to rassle the contest to a draw.

Conor Friedersdorf: Why the trolls booed at Don Jr.s event

We should stipulate that as an intellectual exercise, a guest turn on The View, confronting the combined exertions of Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Meghan McCain, is not exactly a dissertation defense at the Sorbonne. We are not talking about a graduate seminar with Stephen Hawking. What young Trump proved was that he could easily meet the hosts on their own level, bearing the same contempt for them that they held for him. When they brought up unflattering episodes from his fathers life, he brought up unflattering episodes from theirs. When they interrupted him, he interrupted their interruptions. When they got loud, he got louder.

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Triggered by Donald Trump Jr. - The Atlantic