Don Jr. is, unlike his brother Eric, a political animal who really wants to be a kingmaker.
As Noah observes, Donald Trump Jr. is acting as if there could be no consequences for behavior that just reeks of the same sort of ethical morass that made the Biden family notorious. That attitude has been a major theme of the second Trump term, which has produced scandals that would have landed like the Hiroshima bomb on past presidential administrations.
How is the Trump circle so tone-deaf? Partly, this is the impunity produced by proving repeatedly that the Republican voting base these days will punish apostasy from Trump far more harshly than corruption, with the result that the current Republican-run Congress is even less inclined than the usual Congress to investigate a president of its own party.
Partly it’s that the press, having destroyed its own credibility with years of partisanship and shoddy hit jobs, simply doesn’t have the juice it had in the past, and has ceded the field to a new media environment of podcasters and video influencers who have neither the inclination nor the skillset to dive into this sort of thing.
And in good part it is the feeling of immortality produced by having been shot at and missed: Trump Sr. and his whole circle survived some seriously abusive lawfare, and at the same time saw the Bidens walk away scot-free under the protective cover of blanket pardons. They’ve just concluded that there can’t be any real consequences.
But politics still exists, and the bubble of impunity is likely to pop once Democrats get some gavels in January. And then what? Don Jr. is, unlike his brother Eric, a political animal who really wants to be kingmaker, if not king himself. Maybe he’ll never run for office — he doesn’t have his father’s panache — but he played a pivotal role in getting JD Vance on the 2024 ticket, and fairly clearly aims to throw his political influence behind getting Vance the top spot in 2028 (as well as backing other Republican candidates with similar ideas).
But like Tucker Carlson, if Don Jr. intends to use the capital of his reputation and influence to help his friend, he ought to be tending those assets more carefully. If you want to help your friends, you first have to stay in the game yourself. Don Jr. doesn’t have to be sent to jail for scandals to make him less effective as a surrogate, fundraiser, and arm-twister in 2027–28. And the Democrats are quite aware of that, which will only make him a bigger target.