Eric Trump looks & sounds like Draco Malfoy. Does it run in the blood?

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL June 7, 2016

Here’s a half-serious question: Doesn’t Eric Trump, The Donald’s third child with Ivana, remind you of Draco Malfoy? I’m not talking the middle-aged Draco (as London will see Alex Price play in the new stage production ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’). I mean Draco, as portrayed by Tom Felton for the big screen – the deathly white son of a Death Eater; raised to believe in purity of the blood; prone to remarks such as, “Father says it’s a crime if I’m not picked to play for my house and I must say, I agree.”

I ask because Eric Trump appears to be prone to particularly asinine, father-fixated and cruel statements.

Such as Trump University was like Harvard. Trump U students, it may be noted, complained that they were ripped off. One of its own functionaries has described it s a “scam”. And yet, Eric said Trump U’s disaffected students  were probably like those who went to Harvard “and say, I got a great education and I can’t find a job or I didn’t become the success that I could have been…Sure, I mean, you probably have that at every major university.”

If you think it’s awful cheek comparing The Donald’s dubious educational business with one of the world’s most prestigious universities, founded in 1636, there’s more.

Eric Trump has argued that the execrable anti-Hillary hatchet job ’13 Hours’ should be mandatory viewing for every American before he or she votes in the November 8 general election.

I wrote about ’13 Hours’ for The National the week it was released, just before the Iowa caucus, when the first votes of the 2016 presidential election were cast. It will hit DVD in time for the November general election. (Click here for the full piece.)

The film supposedly tells the story of the September 11, 2012 attack on a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. That night, an armed mob overran the compound and set it on fire. US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died. At the time, Hillary Clinton was minding the shop at the State Department and every Republican worth their salt will tell you that she was responsible. (How? I ask you. US ambassadors don’t ask the Secretary of State for permission to visit a part of the country to which they’re assigned!)

Anyway, cue director Michael Bay’s guns-and-ammo portrayal of the tragic events. It has a complement of cartoon cut-out “bad guys” – speaking Arabic, wearing the kaffiyeh, answering the muezzin’s call to prayer – and muscle-bound all-American heroes fighting to survive a world that’s bad, mad and dangerous. At a certain point in the film, one of the Americans delivers his 30-second take on life in a foreign locale: “They’re all bad guys until they’re not … you can’t tell the good guys from the bad.”

The movie, which lacks nuance, context, explanation and examination of the world outside America and anything to do with Islam and Muslims, is the latest offering in the “paranoia genre”.

That one of Donald Trump’s sons thinks it’s wonderful just underlines the Malfoy tendency – it runs in the blood.