[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by Orema

"I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign... I have not. I said the President of the United States ..." Pres. Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani to Chris Cuomo in televised interview.

Of course this is a lie, but I also thinks it’s the first step in Trump throwing his family, particularly Don Jr., under the bus. I don’t think it will be an effective tactic, but it will help Trump deflect for awhile.

I’m looking forward to seeing Trump’s downfall, but not this. Regardless of how complicit a child may be, I don’t like watching a parent throw their children to the “wolves” especially when it’s to deflect a spotlight, but I guess it’s unavoidable with this family.

There was a long Julia Ioffe article about Don, Jr. in GQ last year. I am sure it was slanted to make him appear sympathetic, but if it is all true, i feel kinda bad for him:

[The] evening he was born, little Don was left by his parents to the care of the hospital's nursery. His father headed home to celebrate New Year's Eve, while Ivana put a boa and a mink over her hospital gown and went to visit a girlfriend recovering from back surgery on another floor of the hospital.

Don had little luck with the first of his nannies, under whose watch he both broke his leg and nearly drowned. From there, a succession of caregivers followed, though Ivana was also active in her three children's upbringing.

Largely absent from childhood tales is the father. “He would love them, but he did not know how to speak to them in the children's way of thinking,” Ivana said of her ex-husband on The Wendy Williams Show last year. “He was able to speak to them only when they came from university, when eventually he was able to speak business to them.

When divorce proceedings began and the paparazzi set up camp outside Trump Tower and Don's school, Ivana decided to explain the situation to her children. Ivanka, 8, and Eric, 6, got the sanitized version. Twelve-year-old Don, Ivana concluded, “could handle hearing the truth.” After being told about his father's mistress and the fact that his parents would never live together again, Don stopped speaking to his father.

Soon after that, as Trump engaged Ivana in an epic public feud, he dispatched a bodyguard to his triplex apartment with instructions to bring his elder boy down to his office. Don, still not talking to his father, descended with the bodyguard to the 28th floor, and a few minutes later, Ivana, who described all this in her book, got a phone call. It was Trump, looking for some leverage by announcing that he was going to keep Don and raise him alone.

“Okay, keep him,” Ivana said she told him. “I have two other kids to raise.”

A few minutes later—his bluff out-bluffed—Trump ordered his boy to be taken back upstairs.

According to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody. It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald junior. “You can't do that!” Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana's memoir, Raising Trump. “What if he's a loser?”

Don tells his own story about coming into the world on December 31, 1977. “I like to joke that my dad wanted to be able to claim me as a dependent on his taxes for 1977,” he once told Forbes, “so he told my mom she had to have me before midnight and, if she didn't, he'd make her take a cab home.” (Ivana wrote about her labor being induced by doctors.)

So began the difficult, defining struggle of Donald Trump Jr.'s life—to make himself useful while carrying a name so beloved by the man who bestowed it that he put it in gold letters on buildings all over the world. When he was growing up, his dad called him Donny—a moniker the elder Trump would never go by. “[It's] a name I hate,” he explained in The Art of the Deal.

Don has lately found improbable purpose and renown as a savage defender of his father. His once private desires to win his father's approval now come packaged as angry tweets and memes tearing down his dad's opponents as illogical, histrionic socialists.

To the president's most ardent supporters, Don is venerated as a natural incarnation of everything the MAGA brand stands for: transgressive and defiant white, rural masculinity. “He's a fighter,” says one Breitbart editor. “The stuff he's focused on is the stuff the conservative movement is focused on. It's not an act. With him, I think it's genuine.”

To people who have known Don for decades, this identity is jarring. He had always loved the outdoors. But the use of the Pepe the Frog meme and tweeting about taking away half his daughter's Halloween candy “because it's never too early to teach her about socialism”—that isn't the Don they recognize. “I don't remember him having political views,” says a friend of Don's from college. “You've been hearing his dad for a long time,” but as for Don's views, “I didn't see anything emerge until the campaign.”

For years, Don seemed contentedly inattentive to politics. “He probably had the opinion that most New Yorkers have of politicians—they're full of shit,” says sometime Trump business partner Felix Sater, who worked with Don on the ill-fated Trump SoHo project in Manhattan. “He wasn't political. He didn't like politics.”

So old friends were shocked by the demagogic fury he unleashed. “What's surprising is that the tone and the rhetoric are so”—the college friend grasped for a term—“so Fox News-ish. The anger is surprising. None of us would've guessed that he would've been so outspoken in either direction. It hit me strange to see this guy that was a friend in college all over the news in this way.”

Those who have seen the political transformation from hunting-businessman father to the most prominent MAGA troll explain it as a simple, sporting calculation. The snarling political persona, the friend contends, is a show for an audience of one.

He's going to jail for trying to make his dad happy, and his Dad is putting him there.