Will Peji Ⓥ

Sleepy who?

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July. I know @realDonaldTrump and family did. 250 years ago we declared independence from a king who ran the colonies as a family business. In just 18 months the Trumps have made King George look like an amateur. A $620 million Pentagon loan, the largest in the program’s history, to a company Don Jr.’s firm bought into three months before. An Air Force drone contract to a startup the princelings took public through a golf course company they own a piece of. The Army’s largest drone motor order ever, to a company where Don Jr. sits on the board and holds millions in stock. A $24 million Pentagon robotics contract to the company that employs Eric as Chief Strategy Advisor. A stake in the largest undeveloped tungsten deposit on earth, in Kazakhstan, backed by $1.6 billion in US government support. Jared’s fund seeded with $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince, now $6.2 billion, 99% of it foreign money from Gulf governments. Over $110 million in fees collected from the Saudis alone. He negotiates American foreign policy with the governments that pay him. $2.3 billion from crypto ventures their father regulates. More than a million people bought in and lost $2.3 billion. The money didn’t grow. It simply moved from the subjects pockets to the crown’s coffers. And the next one is already drafted. A proposed ATF rule that will allow guns to be shipped straight to your front door. The government’s own estimate is 3.3 million home gun deliveries a year. Don Jr. sits on the board of the online gun megastore built to cash in. He holds 300,000 shares. And that’s only the fraction they’ve allowed us to see. Not one subpoena served. Not one search executed. Why hide anything when you own the investigators? Me? They searched a laptop for six years. Federal prosecutors. Grand juries. Subpoena power. Congressional hearings. They found nothing. I made about $200k a year selling paintings when my Dad was President, and they made my paintings part of an impeachment inquiry. For six years they’ve asked Where’s Hunter? What about the laptop? Wrong questions. The right one is 250 years old. Does America belong to a family? They’ve given their answer. Long live the King.

The Lessons I Learned from My Dad I am not the man my father is. I am trying. Some days closer. Some days farther. He never sat me down and explained these lessons. He lived them. I’m still learning them. Show up. The kitchen table. The hospital room. The funeral. The picket line. The call from the son who won’t answer. Show up. Most days that’s the whole job. My whole life I watched him do it. Not for cameras. Not for headlines. Not because there was something in it for him. He showed up because someone needed him. I learned that grief doesn’t make you special. My father buried a wife and daughter. He buried a son. Yet he never treated grief as a claim on other people’s sympathy. Instead, it made him notice theirs. A mother who lost a child. A father sitting beside a hospital bed. A kid scared about what comes next. A son who lost his mother, his sister, his brother. He always noticed. I learned that power is not the point. The people who chase power eventually confuse the office with themselves. My father never did. Whether he was a county councilman, a senator, vice president, or president, he was the same man. The title changed. He didn’t. I learned that family comes first. The train from Wilmington wasn’t symbolism. It was every night. He read to us. Showed up to games. Sat through hospital rooms. Waited up for children who were lost. And when the day came that the country and the family could not both have him at full strength, he chose family. He relinquished the last chapter of how he wanted to be remembered. And he never complained about it. Most of all, I learned that love is not soft. Love is discipline. Love is showing up at one in the morning when nobody is watching. Love is answering the phone. Love is staying. Love is getting back up after life knocks you down and doing it all again tomorrow. That love saved my life. I’ve failed at many of these lessons, sometimes in very public ways. He loved me anyway. That’s the last lesson. I am not trying to become my father. I am trying to carry what he gave me. And if I can do that, even imperfectly, that will be enough. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.

So let me get this straight. Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom. Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land. Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted. And I know: “But what about your paintings, Hunter?” Please.