Donald Trump Jr. said the hosts of ABC’s The View were in “attack mode” while he and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, were interviewed Thursday on the show’s 5,000th episode. He discussed the appearance and his latest book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, with host Alex Marlow on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.
Trump Jr. contrasted hostility from news media towards his family before and after his father’s political ascendance to the presidency.
“The hatred today is so different than it was then,” said Trump Jr. “Then, it was gossip. Then, it was this attention. Today, it’s just vicious. You saw that yesterday, obviously on The View. I’m not naive. I’m not a baby, right? I understand they’re going to come in, and they’re going to come in pretty hot, but you do get invited to come on these shows to discuss your book.”
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Trump Jr. continued, “If you’re on for three segments — what, one, two — I’m not expecting all three segments to be about the book. I know what they’re going to do … and they didn’t ask questions.” He went on to note the hosts did not “ask a single question about the book that I’m there [to promote].”
“I didn’t go on here to be a punching bag for them,” added Trump Jr. “I went on there to promote a book [and] to try to get to a little bit of a different audience than I probably reach on my social feeds or on Hannity or … [on Breitbart News Daily]. I want to bring that message to all people and have everyone have a good understanding of that.”
Trump Jr. remarked, “I would have loved to have it be civil. I would have loved to be able to discuss aspects of that book, but they went into attack mode, and that’s fine. I can play that game as well as anyone.”
Following Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle’s departure from The View‘s set, an audience member commented on Whoopi Goldberg’s defense of Roman Polanski’s 1979 sexual predation on then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer.
Trump Jr. stated, “I had a friend in the audience, and she told me that there was someone else in the audience that started calling out [Whoopi Goldberg] on the Roman Polanski thing, like, ‘How can you try to justify it? It was like a 14-year-old kid!’ You know what I mean? Going back and forth, and [Whoopi Goldberg] was screaming at an audience member after we had left. I had gotten a couple of tickets, and one of my friends in the audience was like, ‘It was sort of epic to watch this thing unfold. They even lost on their own ground.'”
“I just really took their tactics against them,” concluded Trump Jr. “These aren’t my rules. These are their rules.”
Marlow asked Trump Jr. about President Donald Trump’s appeal to and resonance with blue-collar Americans.
“The nature of the way [my father] made his fortune is in construction and building as a developer, so he was a veteran developer by spending time on the ground with guys,” replied Trump Jr. “He spent time with construction workers his whole life, whether they’re building golf courses or buildings. He would go and talk to them, like, ‘How can we do this more effectively? How can we create more efficiency? What do you think about the way things are run?'”
Trump Jr. went on, saying, “He’d go to the lowest rung on the ladder in many cases and value their opinion … just as much as some executive in an office. It wasn’t [as if] he read a book and figured out how to speak to someone. He’s been doing it for 40 years [with] regular hard-working people.”
“If you look at a lot of the high-level executives in our company, they literally started out at those lower levels,” continued Trump Jr. “They didn’t necessarily have the academic credentials, but they had a work ethic and a street smartness … and [my father] is like, ‘Hey, I’m giving you the chance.’ It’s those guys that know they got a chance of a lifetime that some other executive probably usually wouldn’t give them if they didn’t have an MBA, PhD., all that nonsense behind their name. He’d give them a chance, and if these guys rose to the occasion, he’d keep giving it to them.”
Trump Jr. concluded, “It’s that connection that was so apparent to everyone, but everyone’s confused: ‘How did he do it?’ It’s just, he’s sort of a regular guy. I’ve been calling him a blue-collar billionaire for 20 years. I used to get a lot of hell for it. Now, I think they get it.”
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