Trump Organization trustee, professional inheritor, and pensive stump-sitter Donald Trump Jr. is carving out quite a niche for himself these days, offering himself up as an unsolicited comedy critic to the nation’s needy humorists. Earlier this month, Trump broke family policy by attempting to play along with an SNL sketch making fun of him, instead of just shouting “SAD” at his TV and then compulsively continuing to watch.
Now, Donald Jr. is playing comedy compare and contrast, holding up family friend Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show as the good kind of making fun, and professional mean woman Chelsea Handler as the bad. Trump’s impromptu comp-comedy class kicked off when Handler responded to the news that his brother Eric was expecting his first child, with a comment that was only vaguely a joke:
As you—a person on the internet—have already noticed with uncanny, laser-like focus, Handler’s tweet contains a mistake, confusing the words “jeans” and “genes.” Donald Jr., realizing this, responded to her comment with a long, hashtag-heavy post that was heralded as “turning the joke on her” by outlets like Fox News:
Proving himself his father’s son, Donald Jr. took the time to label Handler’s tweet as “fake news,” even though she’s a talk show host, and nobody was writing any news. (Also, while we’re all having fun analyzing the structures of jokes, we’d point out that you’d probably spell that particular bit of typo-mocking as #JEANius, not “JEANous”.) Trump also called out Handler’s comment as “real hatred,” contrasting it with the gentle hair tousling he got from Fallon about a recent New York Times photo shoot.
Exhibiting the same air of “We’re all having fun, huh?” that’s kept him (almost) at the top of the late night heap for so long, Fallon’s comments were restricted solely to Donald Jr.’s looks, and not questions about whether the Trump family tree is a withered husk of compassionless moral decay. That’s the good kind of comedy, Donald Jr. was quick to let us know.