Replace toppled confederate statues with ones of my father, says Trump Jr
Donald J. Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted on Tuesday that the current push to dismantle and remove statues of confederate leaders could be stopped by an initiative to replace them with effigies of his father.
“Want to save our monuments?” he wrote. “Let’s get a movement going to replace any statue torn down during these riots with a new and more sturdy statue of @realDonaldTrump. The nonsense would stop instantly.”
The tweet seems to imply that left-wing and social justice-minded Americans so loathe Donald Trump that they would in fact rather protect statues of slaveholders than erect new ones of the 45th president.
He is not the only member of the Trump family to defend the statues now being taken down. Since at least 2017, the president himself has defended monuments to various confederate figures as well as a Washington, DC statue of president Andrew Jackson, whose Indian Removal Act saw hundreds of thousands of indigenous Americans forcibly removed from the South via what is now known as the Trail of Tears.
Mr Trump Jr. has carved something of a side career out of railing against what he sees as the activist left, calling its members disingenuous, hypocritical and thin-skinned.
The D.C. Police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country! @MayorBowser
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
.....This action is taken effective immediately, but may also be used retroactively for destruction or vandalism already caused. There will be no exceptions!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Trump on people who tried to take down monument of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Park: “We’re looking at long-term jail sentences for these vandals & these hoodlums & these anarchists & agitators & call them whatever you want ... they’re bad people.” pic.twitter.com/Zak8XEOb9L
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar)
His Twitter feed is dominated by criticisms of everyone from Democratic Party leaders to young anti-racist activists, and in 2019, he wrote a book on the subject, Triggered: how the left thrives on hate and wants to silence us.
The president’s son now hosts a streaming newscast of sorts for the Trump campaign, broadcast on YouTube under the Triggered banner, on which he recently hosted his own father for a widely-ridiculed Father’s Day interview.
He has also challenged Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, to an election campaign debate to discuss which of the two of them has benefited the more from their father’s help.
