Eric Trump proved the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree this week – when a rambling rant on Newsmax saw him widely mocked on social media.
The son of former president Donald Trump lashed out at the Democratic Party in a fiery monologue where he claimed the party would raid his teenage half-brother Barron’s underwear drawer.
“If you get in the way of the Democratic Party, if you question their power, if you interfere with their little fiefdom, they will target you, they will come after you and they will try and destroy your life,” he said in an interview with Newsmax following his father’s latest arrest.
“It is rape and pillage – they will burn down the street. It doesn’t matter for these people.
“They will take out innocent people, they will go after your family, they will go after your kids.”
Eric then made the bizarre claim that Democrats would rifle through his younger brother’s underwear drawer – while also getting his sibling’s age wrong, not once but twice.
“They will raid Barron’s room, who’s a 16-year-old kid, 15-year-old kid, they’ll go through his underwear drawer. They’ll send the FBI, they’ll spy on your campaign - we’ve seen it all,” he claimed.
Barron Trump is 17 years old.
Eric’s rant, which came on the heels of the former president’s indictment, appeared to fall in with Mr Trump’s own baseless claims that the legal case over his alleged retention of classified documents after leaving the White House is a “set up” by his political opponents.
But his message was widely panned on social media.
“I often wonder if Republicans will figure out in my lifetime that the ‘democrats are destroying our country’ messaging doesn’t get them new voters,” wrote one Twitter user in response to Eric’s rant.
Another added: “If your father had turned over the classified documents (as is legally required) instead of lying about them and hiding them, no search would have been needed.”
Other tweets in the topic pulled a weightier punch, accusing Mr Trump of spreading propaganda on behalf of his father and questioning why he had brought up the topic of a teen’s underwear drawer.
On Tuesday afternoon, Mr Trump appeared for his arraignment in a Miami federal courthouse, becoming the first current or former US president ever charged with a federal crime.
He pleaded not guilty to all 37 federal charges over his handling of classified documents, including national defence information, after leaving the White House.
The indictment, which was unsealed on Friday (9 June), alleges that Mr Trump deliberately lied to and misled authorities so that he could hold onto documents that he knew were classified.
On at least two separate occasions, Mr Trump then showed some of the classified documents to people not authorised to see them, the indictment alleges.
Stunning photos revealed that many of the documents were stored around a toilet, shower and ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
The charges include 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information and single counts of false statements and representations, and counts of conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document, concealing a document in a federal investigation and a scheme to conceal.
Mr Trump’s longtime aide Walt Nauta was also charged with six obstruction- and concealment-related charges after he allegedly helped move boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago to Mr Trump’s residence and then lied to investigators about having any knowledge of the handling of the papers.
The two men appeared in court together but Mr Nauta did not enter a plea as he did not have legal counsel in Florida.
