Before the dust had even settled in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump Jr. was already leveraging the assassination attempt on his father, Donald Trump, for political gain. His initial reaction wasn’t a heartfelt acknowledgment of the Secret Service or a thank-you to those who prayed for his father. Instead, he took aim at the media. “CNN is a disgrace,” he wrote alongside a video of the network’s coverage of the event. It didn’t end there. “Someone attempted to assassinate my father tonight and this is what @CNN is focused on. These people are vile,” he followed up an hour later.
In a subsequent post, Donald Jr. pointed fingers at his father’s political adversaries for inciting the attack. “Dems and their friends in the media knew exactly what they were doing with the ‘literally Hitler’ bulls**t!” he wrote, later asserting, “If @BennieGThompson and the Democrats got their way, my dad would be dead right now. Don’t let them memory hole it.”
Donald Jr. doubled down during a discussion with Fox News. “I just spoke to my father on the phone, and he is in great spirits,” he said. “He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him.”
