Donald Trump Jr. is the second most-wanted man in America, and he takes it in stride.
“It’s not surprising,” the president’s first son told The Post of learning, from “people on my [Secret Service] detail,” that he received the highest number of death threats in the country — right after his dad.
For the 41-year-old, being a national target is almost a point of pride.
“I assume [the hate is] because I’m willing to be vocal. I’m not too shy to say Donald Trump has shown conservatives that it’s OK to fight.
“I have the gall to call out the bulls–t and stand up to the establishment,” he said. That’s the idea behind his book, (Center Street), out Tuesday.
In it, he says he is also a victim of “shadow banning” — in other words, having his content blocked for other users on social media.
“With every day that goes by, Twitter and Instagram are removing more and more of my posts from people’s timeline,” Trump Jr. writes. “People who have liked or shared my posts have been reporting sudden problems with their accounts or temporary lockouts from their devices.”
He alleges Instagram pulled a post he wrote poking holes in actor Jussie Smollett’s — later proven false — on the grounds that Trump’s comments were hate speech.
“We enforce our rules dispassionately and do not engage in so-called shadow banning. We are constantly working to improve our systems and will continue to be transparent in our efforts,” a Twitter spokesperson said. Instagram did not return messages.
One confused follower, Trump Jr. said, messaged him: “I had to follow you three times this week, and I didn’t unfollow you.”
“How much can we suppress someone’s voice and prevent their message from taking hold?” he told The Post. “If they do it to me — someone who’s pretty vocal, with millions of followers — who [else are] they doing it to?”
He also, in the book, calls out the media for its “unconscionable” treatment of his “wonderful, funny, intelligent” half-sister, Tiffany, 26, who’s been publicly dragged over her weight and looks, and for deliberately mischaracterizing Tiffany’s relationship with her older siblings as “estranged.”
“We are Trumps, we don’t play the victim card, and we will succeed here as well,” he writes. “We are in this together.
But more than anyone else, he worries about his five kids with his ex-wife Vanessa: daughters Kai, 12, and Chloe, 5, and sons Donald III, 10, Tristan, 8, and Spencer, 7.
He recalls walking through Manhattan on Election Day 2016 while passerby hurled epithets at him in front of his kids. “You know, tolerant liberals screaming and cursing at me while I had four of my children in tow,” Trump Jr. writes.
And then there was the time Vanessa and a Secret Service agent were sent to the hospital after an envelope containing a white powder was sent to their New York City home in February 2018.
The letter inside read, “You are getting what you deserve. So shut the f–k up.” The mysterious powder turned out to be cornstarch. Daniel Frisiello, a reportedly developmentally disabled Massachusetts man, was to five years of probation.
But not every New York scene has been ugly.
Last Valentine’s Day, Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, dined at Nello — and he braced himself for liberal backlash. An older woman started screaming, but not what the diatribe he expected. Instead, he writes, she yelled out: “You have the biggest balls in the world, and you don’t take crap from anyone. Keep it up!”
“The whole restaurant erupted in applause,” he told The Post. “They shook my hand and took selfies.”
Despite a lifetime of privilege and wealth, the executive vice president in the Trump organization thanks in the book his “hunting, fishing, and shooting buddies” for keeping him grounded — “at least a little.”
As Trump Jr. points out, after college, he did live in the back of his truck for a few weeks while camping out in the Rockies. “I have a pretty good understanding of the ‘forgotten man’ in America.”