Donald Trump Jr., President Donald Trump’s eldest son, told Breitbart News this weekend that the president’s decision to forgo continued White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings is because the establishment media will never give his father a fair shake.
Appearing on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, Trump Jr. first said he’s waiting out the lockdown at his cabin with his girlfriend, the Trump campaign’s national finance chair, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
“I’m up at my cabin and getting away from the crowds anyway, which is always nice, and having a little space, so not being able to do the rallies and be around all sorts of other people, which I’m so used to doing, especially as of late, has been interesting, to say the least,” Trump Jr. said when asked how he is handling the coronavirus lockdowns. “But I’m quarantined up here with Kimberly, so it certainly could be a lot worse. Many people, definitely, have much tougher situations. It’s been interesting, and it’s been a challenge.”
After the media berated Trump for comments he made at Thursday’s press briefing about injections, sunlight, and disinfectants, Trump made a brief appearance before the media on Friday—at which he made a statement and for the first time in over a month took no questions. Then on Saturday, he ceased the White House Coronavirus Task Force daily press briefings, and they appeared to be canceled this week or at least scaled back—all while Trump berates the media for their unfairness and has gone back to referring to the press as the “enemy of the people” in tweets. Trump Jr., in his appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, said the media are never fair to his dad despite the unprecedented level of transparency coming from the White House.
“That’s the reality. That’s the world we live in today. The media is going to take whatever generosity he bestows upon them, being out there sometimes for two hours—any question they could possibly have, however ridiculous and however skewed,” Trump Jr. said. “Then they take a partial part of the response and then turn it into something else. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anyone who’s given them as much time in the history of the presidency whether in a crisis or otherwise. He’s tried to do that for transparency and that’s a consistent theme for everything he’s done for the last few years. You’ve seen, whether it was the Russia hoax—well, here are the emails. Every time he’s gotten sort of ahead of it and tried to be transparent. So, again, anything they can and will do to hurt him, they will do. I hope the people see that because it’s getting ridiculous.”
When asked about the establishment media not even carrying the briefings live when he was doing them and CNN, MSNBC, and sometimes even Fox News cutting away from them, but the media again ripping him now that he has stopped them, Trump Jr. laughed and noted that there is no winning with the establishment media.
“You can’t win. You’re a hundred percent right,” Trump Jr. said. “I think he should do the briefings, but if he does questions 10 or 15 minutes—don’t give them time to get into the obscure stuff where they’re going to try to find something weird they can manipulate or ask a sort of leading or let’s call it a ‘do you beat your wife?’ question where there’s no good answer. Like, what do you mean? They do that so often, so I think you got to cut it pretty short, let them ask the relevant questions, and don’t give them the extra time to get into the obscurities, and that’s got to be the way they handle it. You’re never going to get a fair shot. They’re never going to ask Joe Biden a tough question, they’re never going to criticize some of the pure idiocy that comes out of the guy’s mouth, and they’re never going to question that the guy can’t remember where he is 50 percent of the time. They’re certainly not going to ask him about what now seems like more credible allegations regarding Tara Reade and sexual assault, literally by a Senate staffer—not some obscure person who’s not even there, but by a Senate staffer. That’s the battlefield. That’s the battlefield we’re on. It’s never going to be fair. It’s never going to be a level playing field. We’ve got to remember that and not give them the ammunition.”
Another big part of Saturday’s interview focused on Tara Reade, the former U.S. Senate staffer for former Vice President Joe Biden—the presumptive 2020 Democrat presidential nominee—who has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her. Before Trump Jr. appeared on the show this weekend, a phone call Reade’s now-deceased mother made in 1993 to Larry King’s CNN program—a call she made anonymously referencing the allegations—resurfaced. Since this interview, even more corroborating evidence, including multiple people whom Reade told contemporaneously about it, such as a neighbor and a coworker in a future job.
“It’s certainly more credible than anything they had on Brett Kavanaugh,” Trump Jr. said of Reade’s allegations against Biden. “Yet that didn’t stop them from doing a thousand different pieces, basically, accusing him of those things—not even questioning him, but accusing him and trying to destroy his life and ruin his family. Before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, the only thing I’d ever seen of Brett Kavanaugh was pictures of the guy in like a soup kitchen on a Sunday serving food. They would do whatever they could to destroy him. The fact they would literally, totally ignore—I mean, CNN hasn’t even touched this thing, and the corroborating evidence was on their network, as you said. It was probably one of the biggest stories Larry King didn’t know he had at the time. I don’t imagine they’ll do anything with it. I literally think they will just put their heads in the sand and make sure that no one possibly hears about these things because that’s the feeling and sentiment I get from today’s media. They have no interest in the truth. They have interest in their narrative. That narrative is aligned basically 100 percent with the DNC talking points, and they don’t ‘believe all women.’ They only believe women if they’re accusing conservatives. It’s the greatest form of hypocrisy. You saw that from Alyssa Milano as well: ‘Well, Joe Biden, this is a little different.’ We should re-up the question now that there’s more corroborating evidence. What really is going on? That double standard really seems to reek of hypocrisy.”
Trump Jr. also said it is shocking and hypocritical that top Democrat women like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Kamala Harris (D-CA), as well as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, have all said nothing about Reade’s increasingly credible allegations against Biden. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who on Monday endorsed Biden’s candidacy, has also been silent on whether Reade deserves to be heard. The only Democrat woman to stand up for Reade’s voice being heard is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), whom Trump Jr. praised for doing so.
“I agree: all of those people that you mentioned, other than AOC—I’m impressed that she actually had the guts to say that and do that and break rank that way,” Trump Jr. said. “The problem with the other females that you mentioned there is they are all running for VP. If it was Gov. Whitmer in Michigan, she’s been running for VP. If she wasn’t running for VP and focused a little more on Michigan, you’d probably have a little bit better of a situation there than you do. But that’s the reality of what’s going on. When the media is complicit in taking care of these people and they’re on the same team and they’re all trying to push the same narratives, you’re not going to hear about these things, and you’re not going to get those questions. So they’re able to get away with it, and so, I imagine this will be a story that just dies because they will force it to, and not enough people will hear about it. Not enough people will force the question to be asked, and it will go away like all things that are troubling or bad for Democrats.”
Trump Jr. also said that if the allegations were the other way around—instead of against a Democrat and against Biden—the story would be the biggest story in the world right now.
“If the shoe was on the other foot, it would be a bigger story than coronavirus,” Trump Jr. said. “That’s just almost guaranteed. That’s what they would do, and they would run with it. You’d probably hear a little bit about corona, but this would be the dominant story. But it’s just not the way it works. Everyone has to keep that in mind when they are looking at the media, when they are looking at the lens through which they are getting their news for the most part. It’s so skewed to the point of sickness that they got to remember that because the average guy that’s not living this stuff like you or I do, they’re consuming five to ten minutes of news a day—they put on the local network or cable or whatever it may be. It’s so heavily biased that it’s going to influence people. They don’t have the time—understandably, they’ve got better things to do—they don’t have the time to figure out what’s real and what’s not and to sort of put your decoder ring on to see what these things really mean once it’s been through the filter of the modern day media, which is just a talking head of the DNC.”
As America begins the reopening process state-by-state, with the worst of the coronavirus pandemic in the rearview mirror, Trump Jr. also said his dad is the right man for the job. Reopening the economy is in his father’s “wheelhouse,” he said.
“I think so, and I do think it’s time, and every state has to handle things differently,” Trump Jr. said. “There’s not one sort of solution for everyone. The timing is going to have to change, even within the states. Big cities are going to be different than small towns. We got to do it safely, but I think this is going to be right in my father’s wheelhouse. He’s the guy who built the greatest economy America has ever known, and he’s the guy who can do it again. This is where you want that kind of guy, where you want a businessman and you want a builder. It’s not going to happen overnight. What’s gone on over the last few months has been truly devastating. It’s not the kind of thing where you can flip right back on and everything will go back to normal. That’s going to take time. But I think, I want the guy who did it once to be the guy to get a chance to do it again. It only makes November so much more important.”
Trump Jr. also said that the coronavirus crisis has demonstrated why Americans cannot trust Biden in the White House and need to reelect his father.
“Candidly, this is all the more reason, what we’ve learned the last couple of weeks with COVID-19 only proves Donald Trump’s thesis from 2016 was all the more right,” Trump Jr. said. “We need to be able to have American manufacturing. We need to be able to control our supply chains. We need to be able to push back on China. The guy that negotiated a trade deal that everyone said could never happen, I want him to be leading that charge, not ‘Joe China’ or ‘Beijing Biden,’ as we like to call him. The guy whose son has taken $1.5 billion from China—what does that equate? About $30 million a year in fees to Hunter Biden’s slush fund? It’s a scary proposition. I don’t want the guy who doesn’t know where he is negotiating with the Chinese about all of this nonsense that they caused, that they started with their lies, their deceit with their attempts to save face in the eyes of the rest of the world. I want the guy who actually stood up to them in the first place. Trump was right. He was the guy to actually do these things and be leading that charge and bringing manufacturing back to America and controlling our supply chain—not letting China manufacture all of our antibiotics so that when something like this happens, which they did; they actually threatened to withhold all of the antibiotics we created and invented that are manufactured there—to withhold them from us because we didn’t go along with the Chinese Communist propaganda talking points. That’s what we’re up against, and we got to recognize that coming into November as well.”
Trump Jr. also praised his father’s ban on travel from China and eventually from Europe and his latest ban on new immigration until further notice to protect Americans’ health and security and their job and economic prospects.
“I want relief dollars. I want Americans to get those jobs first,” Trump Jr. said. “Guess what? The benefit of the American taxpayer dollar has been going to people other than Americans for far too long. You’re right: it’s another big thesis of 2016. Also, guess what? You saw how quickly Mexico shut down its border to the U.S. when it looked like we had more cases than them. But guess what, guys? It can actually be done, and I think that’s important as we get people back to work. They sure as hell better be Americans first.”
When it comes to, at the end of this crisis, holding China accountable, Trump Jr. said the nation needs to secure its own destiny and not be dependent on foreign powers like China for critical matters.
“Well, I’m going to leave that to the lawmakers who understand that better than I do, but I think there’s obviously a lot of things that we can do to hold them accountable,” Trump Jr. said. “That said, I think the number one thing is making sure we control our own destiny by bringing American manufacturing back and by going to the stores and seeing what is made in America and making sure those companies are getting the business first and foremost. I think Americans can have a big part in this. They just got to be a little disciplined, and they got to understand; let’s look at those things. If the rest of the world started looking at things that way as well, you’d put a big dent in their power. Make no mistake: for decades, the Chinese have been all about the Chinese. They don’t want to, on the world stage, do what’s right for the world. They’re going to do what’s right for China first and foremost. By the way, we should be doing that for America. The fact that we don’t is almost asinine. I think people get now this misconception. They just want the power. If they spent a little more time feeding their people instead of spending billions trying to steal our military technology and our IP and trying to knock it off, if they spent a little more time and money trying to feed their people and people didn’t have to eat bat, maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation as a world and as a civilization. I think people have to start thinking about it that way and understand the way people are and start playing the game. This communist regime is not looking out for anyone other than themselves. They treat their people horribly, and they’re running concentration camps, yet you have CNN and half of the lamestream media running constantly with the talking points because they want some of that China money, I guess, and/or they see it as being adversarial to Donald Trump, but it’s disgusting, and you saw that with the NBA, the way they folded. You saw that with Hollywood. They want that China money. Because of that, China plays by different rules. Donald Trump is the guy that’s pushed back for the first time in decades as it relates to trade and got something done [and] is going to be the guy to lead that going forward.”
LISTEN TO DONALD TrumpJR., ON BREITBART NEWS SATURDAY: