How Don Jr. is making sure Trump picks 'absolute warriors for the movement' to his Cabinet
Although Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner served as White House senior advisors during Donald Trump's first term as president, neither of them have expressed interest in playing a major role in his second administration. The couple, now based in Miami, has been focusing on business rather than politics.
Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump's brother Eric Trump has been speaking out on politics but spends most of his time operating the Trump Organization.
But Donald Trump Jr. — President-elect Trump's 46-year-old son, Mary Trump's cousin and and Ivanka and Eric Trump's brother — has become a prominent figure in the MAGA movement and his father's political operation.
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The New York Times' Katie Rogers, in an article published on Thanksgiving 2024, emphasizes that one of Don Jr.'s top priorities is encouraging his father to make the nominees for his second administration as MAGA as possible.
"In recent weeks, as the president-elect builds out his administration, his son has served as something of a loyalty scanner," Rogers reports. "As they review candidates at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, the president-elect is concerned with who looks good and who can deliver a message, people around them say. His son is focused on whether they mean what they are saying, and if they present a threat to the MAGA order."
Don Jr. not only spends a lot of time attacking Democrats — he is equally contemptuous of Republicans he considers RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Many of the Republicans Don Jr. attacks in his social media posts are quite conservative, but the president-elect's son equates being a traditional non-MAGA conservative with being a "RINO."
"Donald Trump Jr. has championed appointees and nominees who not only share the president- elect's views on policy, but have also passed the most important purity test: They support the falsehood that he won the 2020 election, and downplay his decision to encourage a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol two months later," Rogers explains. "In recent appearances, Donald Trump Jr. has made it clear that he believes that everything that has happened since early 2021 happened because true loyalists dug in and kept on believing, watching in the wings as Democrats made a series of strategically fatal decisions on economic and social policy."
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Don Jr.'s "loyalty-first approach," according to Rogers, "explains how and why Matt Gaetz, a fierce Trump defender, was selected as the nominee for attorney general."
During a recent appearance on far-right MAGA activist Charlie Kirk's podcast, Don Jr. argued, "Now, you got four years where we know what we're doing, where we have a chance to start from scratch with people who we know are absolute warriors for the movement. Now, you're stuck with that for four years."
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Read Katie Rogers' full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).
