CLEVELAND _ The government needs to do more for the "hardworking men and women who built the great nation we live in," not members of minority groups who have status as a "protected class," Donald Trump Jr. said Wednesday.
The Republican presidential nominee's eldest son, whose speech at the GOP convention Tuesday drew praise, also criticized his father's detractors within the party. Some delegates who opposed Trump during Tuesday's roll call "look like idiots," Trump Jr. said.
"I don't think anyone would ever accuse us of being appeasers" of the opposition, Trump said of his family. Still, he agreed that his father's decision to pick Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate was, to some extent, an effort to placate restive conservatives within the party.
Describing a vice presidential selection process in which he and his siblings Eric and Ivanka served as chief advisers to his father, Trump said that they had chosen Pence over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie mostly because "it made sense to have someone to counterbalance my father."
"We don't need two Donald Trumps up there," he said, referring to the outsize personalities that his father, Gingrich and Christie share.
Speaking to a large crowd at a breakfast sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, the younger Trump said he has thought about following his father's path into politics, although not until his five children are older.
"I'd love to be able to do it," he said.
He described himself, jokingly, as a "Fifth Avenue redneck," referring to his love of guns and the outdoors, and he made clear that he shares some of the views and blunt expressions that have distanced his father from minority voters.
Responding to a question about the rise of "identity politics" on the political left, Trump said that the "hardworking men and women who built the great nation we live in, they're the only people who aren't protected anymore; they're the middle class."
Currently, he said, the government benefits people who can show "they're one-sixty-fourth of some protected class."
That has to stop, he said, adding that members of the middle class "are the people we actually have to start catering to. Those are the people that are forgotten."
"We have to take care of the problems we have, but we also can't forget the people who built this nation. The hardworking middle, who pay taxes, the middle class."
