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Guest Essay

By Jason Zengerle

Mr. Zengerle is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.

In 2022, shortly before the midterm elections and the unofficial start of the 2024 presidential campaign, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo traveled to Maine to appear on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation streaming talk show. For the previous two years, he was a frequent guest of Mr. Carlson’s. He usually did his hits — on the evils of critical race theory, or the plague of “trans indoctrination” — from his home outside Seattle. This time, he was excited to meet Mr. Carlson in person. When Mr. Rufo arrived at the Fox host’s rustic studio, after a cross-country flight and a 90-minute drive from the Portland airport, he discovered someone else in the Maine backwoods: Donald Trump Jr.

It was a perilous moment for the Trump family. After Jan. 6, Donald Trump had become persona non grata in elite Republican circles. (When he officially began his 2024 presidential campaign after the midterms, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post buried the news on page 26 under the headline “Been There, Don That.”) Many conservative leaders appeared ready to swing behind the presidential candidacy of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose promise of “competent Trumpism” — all the right-wing policies and red meat, none of the baggage — was striking a chord. That certainly seemed to be the case with Mr. Carlson, who hosted Mr. DeSantis on his show at least six times between September 2021 and the midterms; he didn’t have the former president on once. Mr. Rufo, meanwhile, was advising the governor on how to combat liberal teaching about race and gender in Florida’s schools.

At Mr. Carlson’s Maine redoubt, Mr. Trump Jr. never brought up his father or Mr. DeSantis or the presidential campaign. But Mr. Rufo assumed that was “the subtext of the visit” — that Mr. Trump Jr. was there to keep prominent conservative figures like him and Mr. Carlson in the former president’s camp. Mr. Trump Jr. greeted Mr. Rufo effusively and complimented him on his work. The three men talked about their political beliefs and the personal price they’d paid for them; Mr. Trump Jr. pointed out that he — like Mr. Carlson, who had left Washington for Maine, and Mr. Rufo, who had decamped from Seattle proper to the suburbs — had fled New York for a community more tolerant of his political views. By the end of the encounter, Mr. Rufo left convinced that the image of the Trumps as a family of New York liberals who had adopted populist politics only for cynical reasons was “totally off and that actually, Don Jr. had a personal commitment to the cause.”

The soft touch worked. Mr. Carlson remained firmly behind Mr. Trump and, while Mr. Rufo did endorse Mr. DeSantis, he was careful never to attack the former president; when Mr. Trump eventually romped through the Republican primaries, Mr. Rufo quickly fell in line.

The episode was one of many I heard from people around the Trump campaign, who, on and off the record, described an evolution in the role Mr. Trump Jr. has played in conservative politics over the past four years. Liberals have long loved to deride him as a sweaty failson. They’ve mocked his appearance (“that chin, it’s like Michelangelo himself carved him out of pudding,” Jimmy Kimmel recently joked) and have reviled him for his offensive social media posts (calling Mitt Romney “a pussy,” pretending to confuse Michelle Obama with a Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker). For a time, even his political allies, including members of his own family, held a dim view of him. As the former president’s onetime personal attorney Michael Cohen testified to the House Oversight Committee in 2019, “Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world.”

But in the 2020 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump Jr. proved himself to be both a top fund-raiser and a talented surrogate — a “downright rock star,” as Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s first White House press secretary, described him to me when I wrote about him for The New York Times Magazine that year. Since then, his political standing, in the eyes of his father and others, has only grown. Today, Mr. Trump Jr. has come to occupy a perch of........

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