Donald Trump Jr.'s Pivot to Video Is Going Great!!!
Trainwreck. Car crash. Masterpiece???
If there's one thing you can say about Donald Trump Jr., it's that he's a perspiring chunk of a man, born with a silver spoon up his ass, and another one (ALLEGEDLY!) up his nose. But if there's a second thing you can say about Donald Trump Jr., it's that he sure loves to hear the sound of his own voice.
To be perfectly honest, I've been a little concerned about ol' Donj these days. His dear sweet papa's out of a job; the family business is circling the drain; he may have been cucked by the Secret Service. But I shouldn't have worried. When the going gets tough, there's one tried and true path for puffy white guys with terminal brain worms. Folks, Donj is a full-blown, like-and-subscribe vlogger now!
His platform of choice: Rumble, the wackadoo conservative YouTube clone, based in Canada (tsk tsk Donj), that sprinkles feel-good videos of horses grooming each other on top of lunatic screeds by convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza. It's perfect for Donj, whose videos largely fall into one of four categories:
My daddy is great, and I hope he sees this and tells me he loves me.
X is being mean to me, but I'm laffing, actually
FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: You've Gotta See This!! 🇺🇸
That's it. That's the alpha and omega of his creative output. Everything else, as a wise man once said, is just details. And really, even among those four different genres of Donj videos, there's more similarities than differences: It's always the same sweaty shouting, as he struggles to calibrate his voice between an "aw shucks, I'm just a normal guy" affectation, and the pathological need to earn his father's love by emulating Trump senior's Mussolini-on-the-balcony bloviating. The tension between these two modes of speech is...well, it's uniquely Donj. It's also absolutely impossible to listen to for longer than a minute at a time without your eardrums voluntarily detonating in a desperate act of self-preservation.
And in many ways, Donj's pivot to video has been a long time coming. Consider his Instagram account which he used for the sort of pathetic self-promotion that comes naturally to a millionaire failson with nothing but time and money to burn. But if Instagram was the practice run, Rumble is the big show. Or at least, it's A show. More than anything else, Donj's newfound calling as a vlogger feels like a transparent attempt to follow in his father's footsteps. We've seen this before, with the shotgun blasts of inane ramblings that Trump senior was somehow able to parlay into a successful political career, But Donj isn't his father, and it seems unlikely that Junior is actually smart enough to leverage videos like "Now They're Canceling Looney Tunes? This One is Too Crazy Even For Me" into anything more than a cry for help from a middle-aged divorced dad with a new hobby. But hey, good for him.
