Poor narrative. No one leaves it alone.
Trump’s counternarrative is that the Trump family has long lived under siege from government, media and law (though his preferred word is “lawfare”). He cites as evidence the two impeachments in the House of Representatives and the many indictments and investigations of his father and the Trump Organization, concerning business records, election interference and classified documents. Put together, he writes with typical Trumpian hyperbole, it is a siege “reminiscent of Stalin’s reign of terror in the former U.S.S.R.”
Trump has a point to make, especially about the New York case involving $130,000 in hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels — perhaps the weakest of the lot yet the only one to result in a conviction — but he undercuts it by avoiding the vital arguments and details behind them.
In 2020, President Trump wasn’t merely “questioning a sketchy, pandemic-weakened election” in Georgia, as Eric Trump asserts; he was demanding that state officials find 11,780 more votes for him, and it’s on tape. Eric Trump dismisses the case regarding his father’s “supposed” mishandling of classified documents, accusing the F.B.I. of “almost certainly” planting evidence at Mar-a-Lago. (Adding “supposed” to things you don’t like and “almost certainly” to things you do like doesn’t prove the point.) And though he never stops declaring that the 2020 election was fraudulent — “We were robbed,” he writes — he refers only glancingly to the “manufactured storm of Jan. 6,” dismissing the protesters as innocents who were just “taking pictures in the Capitol” that day. Fortunately, others took pictures, too.
Eric Trump almost seems to relish the siege, in part because, by his account, it thrust him into the arena. He brags about how many subpoenas he has received as a Trump Organization executive (“I am likely the most subpoenaed man in American history”) and emphasizes the leadership role he took in fighting back. “I would lead the company, lead my family, lead our defense against the lawfare,” he writes. He even says he became “a patriarch of sorts” in the Trump family. That is part of his own narrative — how much he resembles his father, who, according to Eric Trump, calls him the “sleeper” among his children, the one who is always “quietly exceeding expectations.”
Donald Trump loves to tell his followers to “fight,” and his son echoes the call. “This country needs fighters,” Eric Trump writes, and he hails his family’s supporters as “warriors.” But the enemy he fights in “Under Siege” is ill defined; sometimes it is a particular prosecutor or politician, sometimes it is “the left,” and sometimes just a hazy plural pronoun. “They smeared him, they impeached him twice, they weaponized law enforcement against him, they tried to bankrupt him, they removed his right of free speech, they took his name off ballots, and they charged him 91 times, threatening jail time for bogus crimes. Then they tried to kill him.”