Hillary Should Not Respect Donald Trump Jr., Who Is a White Nationalist Stooge

The last questioner called on during Sunday’s town-hall presidential debate asked if the candidates could say something nice about each other. Hillary Clinton obliged by complimenting Donald Trump’s kids:

I respect his children. His children are incredibly able and devoted, and I think that says a lot about Donald. I don’t agree with nearly anything else he says or does, but I respect that and think that is something that as a mother and a grandmother is very important to me.

That’s a safe political answer not meant to be analyzed too seriously, and yet: No one should compliment Donald Trump Jr., who is a key liaison between his father’s campaign and the far-right white-supremacist internet dumpster community. Here, expanded from a post that I wrote last month, is a list of the contributions Trump Jr. has made to America’s public discourse:

• In March Trump Jr. retweeted a message by a writer who has complained about interracial dating and said that being gay is a birth defect. In the same month he sat for an interview with a radio host who has said that slavery was the best thing that ever happened to black Americans.
• In July he “liked” a tweet by an account that often posts pictures of Jews with exaggeratedly large noses, cartoons in which Judaism is an octopus strangling the Earth, etc.
• In August he retweeted an anti-Semitic “scholar” whose “work” on such subjects as the “the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth” has been praised by David Duke.
• In September he posted a white-supremacist “deplorables” meme and wrote that he was proud to be depicted in it alongside such individuals as far-right hate-speech hero Milo Yiannopoulos. Then he made a casual reference to gas chambers while complaining about the media. And then he tweeted a story about “Europe’s Rape Epidemic” which included the insane claim that “tens of thousands of young British girls” have been “brutalised, tortured, beaten and raped by organised gangs comprised almost exclusively of Muslims.”

We should not be surprised that Donald Trump raised Donald Trump Jr., and we certainly shouldn’t admire him for it.