West Wing globalists and Democrats are apparently worried that Don Jr., arguably President Donald Trump’s most conservative and populist child, will pass along news from conservative media outlets like Breitbart News to his father.
Numerous outlets reported this week that new Chief of Staff John Kelly is trying to control the paper flow and, according to BuzzFeed, block “articles from far right and anti-establishment sources” from getting on Trump’s Oval Office desk.
But pro-Trump forces on the right told the outlet that they would trust Don Jr. to pass along articles from conservative media outlets to his dad.
One “source close to the administration” seemed more than concerned that Don Jr. would help ensure that his father remains in touch with what concerns his “movement.”
“Don Jr. is a huge problem,” Buzzfeed’s “source close to the administration” reportedly said. “He needs to be a galaxy away from that place.”
As Joshua Green pointed out in his book Devil’s Bargain, reading Breitbart News articles helped Trump understand what concerned working-class voters and never lose touch with them during the primary season and general election campaign. In fact, as Green noted, “an analysis of ‘Trump’s campaign tweets showed that Breitbart was far and away his primary source of news’”:
Years before Trump took on all of the same forces that tried to ram through the Gang of Eight’s amnesty legislation, Trump, according to Green, “was reading Breitbart articles flagged by Bannon and then printed out on paper (Trump’s preferred medium for reading) and delivered to him in manila folders by his staff.”
Green notes that “by the time Trump entered the presidential race in June 2015,” Breitbart News’ reporting on illegal immigration’s impact on American workers, corporations gaming the guest-worker visa system to displace American workers with foreigners who are not more qualified, the existential threat of radical Islam, and the “excesses of political correctness” had done “much to shape Trump’s populist inclinations and inform his political vocabulary.” Green writes that the site’s “unapologetic and take-no-prisoners style of reporting” appealed to Trump.