For instance, in the chapter on immigration (titled NOT EXACTLY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY), Don Jr. cites a dubious statistic that he attributes to a recent report by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a supposed media watchdog that is actually fair only to the left. It seemed odd that FAIR, a left-leaning group, would have released anything that Don Jr. found value in, much less a report about immigration. Fortunately, Triggered includes an index of sources, and while the decisions about which pieces of data do or dont get cited seem erratic at best, this one is explained: According to Don Jr.s own index, the number did not come from FAIR, the media watchdog. It came from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a right-wing anti-immigration group.
About 20 pages later, in the course of decrying hysterical and brain-dead college leftists, Don Jr. recounts how countless times on college campuses Ive had scared conservative students come up to me to say thank you for making them feel normal and welcome in their school. It is that bad and worse. He then goes on to quote the first paragraph of an op-ed piece written last year by a student on the staff of the Yale Daily News as evidence. ... Shockingly intolerant stuff! Comically shocking, even: If you read more of the piece, youll find lines like this: How dare Yale Admissions have the audacity to accept students with opinions that exist in the real world! A ham-handed effort at satire, but obviously satire nonetheless. The author has even written about being a conservative on Yales campus before.
While these are objectively embarrassing to the point of seeming truly accidental, most of the errors that litter the book feel a bit more insidious.
In the chapter on shadow banning (titled SHADOW BANNED: HOW THE LIBERALS GRIP ON SOCIAL MEDIA CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE), Don Jr. writes that, while testifying in front of congress, Jack Dorsey admitted that Twitter had blocked its users from accessing about 600,000 accounts. An extremely disproportionate number of these accounts, he said, belonged to conservatives.
As it turns out, Jack Dorsey did not even remotely say that an extremely disproportionate number of the deindexed accounts belonged to conservatives. Heres the actual exchange between Dorsey and Texas Rep. Joe Barton that Jr. seems to be referencing:
Dorsey: We agree that the result was not impartial, and that is why we corrected it. And we fixed it.
Barton: So you do agree that there were more Republicans than Democrats?
Dorsey: I didnt say that.
Whats more, nothing in the link provided in the index comes anywhere close to saying what Jr. claims it does. ...
In recounting a story about his Valentines Day dinner on the Upper East Side with his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr writes:
As we paid our tab, and made our way for the exit, a woman got up, pointed at me, and yelled, You! I thought, Here we go, here comes a fight with grandma on Valentines Day. And then it happened; she said to us and the entire restaurant, You have the biggest balls in the world and you dont take crap from anyone. Keep it up! She broke the ice, as the entire place erupted in applause. In a room that I thought would be hostile and nasty, we found friendly supporters.
Some might say it seems highly unlikely that an entire Manhattan restaurant would burst into applause upon seeing a woman salute Don Jr. for his bravery. But most of those people would not be reading Donald Trump Jr.s bestselling book.