Publishers Weekly
11/11/2019
Trump Jr. debuts with a vitriolic screed against "liberal losers" and "Starbucks-chugging socialists in Brooklyn," combining a full-throated defense of his father's presidency with autobiographical snapshots likely to fuel speculation that he has political ambitions of his own. Sarcastically stating that he's "not mad" about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Trump Jr. derides the inquiry for "taking nearly two years" when "anyone with half a brain could have done in five minutes." He snipes at many of the right wing's favorite targets, including the Green New Deal ("freaking stupid"), undocumented immigrants ("comparing today's illegal immigrants to the ones who built this country is ridiculous"), and safe spaces on college campuses ("don't get me started"). Trump Jr.'s memories of visiting his maternal grandparents in Czechoslovakia, learning to hunt and fish, and working manual labor jobs during summer breaks are meant to burnish his common-man bona fides, despite the fact that he grew up rich. Aiming exclusively at "Trump-supporting Americans," Trump Jr. delivers the snarky yet polished self-portrait he's been honing at his father's rallies and on Twitter for years. Loyalists will nod their heads in agreement; skeptics need not apply. (Nov.)
Kirkus Reviews
2019-11-18
The president's son writes indignantly of "sleepy liberal losers, socialist crybabies, and hypocritical politicians and media."
The nut doesn't fall far from the tree. Trump Jr. shares with his father highly specific complaints about the polity as it is, projecting madly as he goes along: Activists use Twitter in place of "our most important media institutions." The left is a fantastically well-funded machine. "My father says a place is infested with rats, the mob cries racism." The Mueller Report, written by "an old, over-the-hill puppet," exonerates father and son. (It does no such thing.) More broadly on the spectrum of paranoia, Trump Jr. is sure that "as the son of a rich white guy living in 2019, I'm essentially not allowed to have an opinion anymore, let alone express that opinion in public," a curious thing to say in a book of scattershot opinions expressed in public, presumably for a nice chunk of change. He protests that he's a funny guy, but there's not much humor in the book—unless you laugh at lines like, "Al Franken was a creepy pervert" (paging Stormy Daniels), and "I may even have pulled some pie charts out of my shorts," or unless you agree that border crossers are animals and think it's a fine jape to separate children from their families and lock them up in detention centers. Overall, Trump Jr. is not funny but rather bitterly angry, spitting invective at the likes of Pelosi and Comey, excoriating "Crooked Hillary" and insisting that, next to her, "Biden is the most corrupt establishment politician ever to take a lobbyist's checks," and reviling the media as "fake news" (unless it delivers news he agrees with, in which case it's all right). Like his father, think of a petulant toddler who has a fondness for straw men and an inability to add -ic to "Democrat" and who thinks of himself as "snarky and handsome," and you need read no more.
Trump Jr. importunes liberals to buy his book "and throw it away." Do him one better: Don't buy it at all.
