Washington, D.C. – Donald Trump Jr. has sort-of apologized for making a casual holocaust joke this week, but, it turns out, he was merely following the example his father, Donald Trump Sr., has set over the years. Barbara Res, a former close aide to the GOP presidential candidate at the Trump Organization, said Thursday that the brash businessman regularly “joked about gas chambers and ovens.” Trump Jr. recently complained to a local radio station that the media was giving Hillary Clinton soft treatment, despite a long list of alleged misdeeds. “If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now,” he quipped.
Asked to elaborate on his offensive joke following his “heartfelt” –ish apology, Trump Jr. told Fox News that he didn’t see “what the big deal was” in making a joke about “some European-local problem that took place a hundred years ago or something like that.” “I know that this whole political correctness issue is the talk of the town right now, but come on, it was a joke, I didn’t mean anything by it, it was just meant to be funny and that’s it. I certainly didn’t want to offend anyone, I mean, after all – I’m not my dad, that’s not my thing,” the Republican presidential candidate’s son said.
He added, “I really don’t understand why we can’t make jokes about things from the past. I know people get sensitive, but come on, we have to move on. Like, I was constantly made fun of in my private school about my grandfather being an illegal immigrant and a criminal, but you don’t see me pouting about it. In case you didn’t know – this is America and we take pride in being creative here.” And then came the cherry on top: “It happened like a hundred years ago or something, right? And it was in Europe or someplace? So, what’s the big deal? I don’t think Americans are supposed to get angry over that. We didn’t have Nazis over here or anything.”
“As a matter of fact, we have the right to joke about anything in this country, it’s called freedom of speech, in case you didn’t know,” Trump Jr. attempted to impress the host. “We can joke about race, about poverty, about politics, about sickness, about war, about ancestry, about religion, about anything we want and nobody can stop us. Or rather, nobody should be able to stop us, because that’s one of the rights of every American. And again – why should we not be able to joke about something that has nothing to do with our country and something that happened on another continent? It’s ridiculous.”
“I’d understand it if we were living in China, but not here,” he added. “How is joking about Jews any different than joking about Christian people? It’s not, it’s the same thing. So, even though I apologized for my questionably poor choice of words, I still don’t think I did anything wrong. We didn’t cause the holocaust, we didn’t support it, it wasn’t our problem and we had nothing to do with it. So, in my book, we have every right to have fun with it just like black people have the right to joke about being neutered by white people in slavery times. It’s all just good fun,” Trump Jr. concluded.
