Trump, Donald, Jr., Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us (Nashville, TN: Center Street Publishing, 2019), 304 p.
Triggered is a recent book by Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of the current US President and the Executive Vice President in the Trump Organization. It is partly an autobiography focusing on the inner workings of the Trump family and partly a critique of the policies and rhetoric of those who oppose President Trump and American conservatives, in general. According to the author, the book’s purpose is to give the audience “a tour of all the craziest, most destructive ideas” of contemporary American political life. The book’s thesis is, therefore, that anti-conservative forces in the USA employ hypocritical logic and ignore facts to pursue their political ends. The book is evidently aimed at conservative readers and will likely be successful among them due to its value statements and brisk, energetic language, but sometimes suffers from undefined concepts and questionable rhetorical choices.
The book’s style is pronouncedly informal, with Trump Jr. often addressing the audience directly. The author also does not shy away from empathic and offensive language, and words like “bullshit” or “morons” are a common sight on the book’s pages. However, Trump Jr. is quick to note that he wrote this book as a private person rather than an official spokesman for his father. This fact makes his use of the strong language a personal opinion rather than a political statement, and, as such, appropriate within a book. Generally speaking, the book’s style serves to build the author’s credibility in the intended audience’s eyes by showcasing him as a straight-to-business person who is not afraid to call things by their names.
Most other parts of the text that cover Trump Jr. personally of Trump family as a whole serve the same goal of building reliability among the book’s intended conservative readers. Whenever covering his actions or those of his father, both before, during, and after the election of 2016, the author uses any opportunity to mention the qualities that his audience supposedly values. When covering his attacks of Democrats during the investigation of his father’s supposed links with Russia, he notes that he did that despite his lawyers’ warnings because he always fights back. When noting that none of the crew Trumps assembled for their campaign in 2016 were career politicians, he puts it as “we were used to actually working for a living.” Apart from that, Trump Jr. regularly praises capitalism and democracy and criticizes socialism and collectivism. These rhetorical choices aim to portray himself and his father as an epitome of the qualities valued by conservatives: hard-working, decisive, and masculine men who value success and liberty.
As for the book’s declared purpose – that is, criticizing American “left” – the author does not fare as well in this respect. To begin with, Trump Jr. does not define what the titular “left” is – the closest he comes to a definition is “sleepy liberal losers, socialist crybabies, and hypocritical politicians and media.” Thus, one can only assume that by the “left,” the author means the broad array of anti-conservative forces in America, predominantly the Democratic Party. Admittedly, the author lists numerous instances of his father’s political opponents engaging in questionable behavior. He mentions the Democratic press comparing Candace Owens, the black female political commentator, to a household slave, or the Democrats refusing to accept the results of Mueller investigation despite the evidence. The author bases his claims by references to newspapers and other mass media, which are precisely the sources one would expect for a polemical book like that and are sufficiently reliable for its purpose. However, the author’s propensity to regularly relay personal experiences distracts him from the criticism that – according to the title – is supposed to be the main part of the book.
Another questionable rhetorical choice is how the author decides to begin the book. In the introductory part, Trump Jr. starts with several preemptive warnings. In particular, he states that the content of the book is his opinion, which he is entitled to, and that conservatives have just as much right to create a discourse as anyone else. It is unclear whom the author aims this passage at, since conservative audiences do not doubt these things to begin with. As for liberal or socialist readers, if they are as prejudiced as the author posits, such claims would not convince them anyway. As a result, Trump Jr.’s statements in the introduction seem unnecessary self-justifications that do not serve any particular purpose.
As once can see, Triggered should be a reasonably successful polemical book among the conservative audiences, but not without its flaws. The author successfully constructs the image of himself, his father, and his family as the model conservatives who value liberty, individuality, success, and the ability to call things by their own names. However, this preoccupation with lauding the Trump family prevents the author from dedicating more space to criticizing the “left” and their rhetoric, as the title would suggest. There are also questionable rhetorical choices that make no sense with regards to either conservative or leftist audiences. Consequently, the book does a good job of promoting a wholesome conservative image of Trumps but does not succeed much in dismantling the rhetoric of the elusive and ill-defined “left” mentioned in its title.