Race and immigration During his father's presidential campaign, Trump Jr. caused controversy in 2016 when he posted an image that compared Syrian refugees to
Skittles, saying "If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem." The makers of Skittles condemned the tweet, saying "Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy." On March 1, 2016, an interview with
white supremacist James Edwards and Trump Jr. was aired. The campaign initially denied the interview had taken place; later Trump Jr. claimed it was unintentional. As a consequence of the interview, mainstream media outlets have accused Trump Jr. of being either a believer in the
white genocide conspiracy theory, or pretending to be an advocate for political gain. In September 2016, Trump Jr. cited
Holocaust imagery to criticize what he perceived as the mainstream media's uncritical coverage of Hillary Clinton during her campaign, by "letting her slide on every discrepancy", while also accusing Democrats involved in the 2016 campaign of lying. Trump Jr. said if the Republicans were committing the same offences mainstream outlets would be "warming up the gas chamber right now". Also that month, Trump Jr. shared an image on
Instagram depicting a cross between his father and
Pepe the Frog. When asked on
Good Morning America about Pepe the Frog and its associations with
white supremacy, Trump Jr. said he had never heard of Pepe the Frog and thought it was just a "frog with a wig". In April 2017, Trump Jr. lauded conspiracy theorist
Mike Cernovich, who has promoted the debunked
white genocide and
Pizzagate conspiracy theories, saying, "In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he'd win the
Pulitzer". In August 2020, the
Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Trump Jr. appeared at a far-right "We Build the Wall" event with
Jack Posobiec in July 2019.
Promotion of conspiracy theories Trump Jr.
retweeted conspiratorial remarks by white supremacist
Kevin B. MacDonald about alleged
favors exchanged by Hillary Clinton and Switzerland's largest bank. and that official unemployment rates were manipulated for political purposes. In May 2017, Trump Jr. promoted what
CNN called the "long-debunked, far-right conspiracy theory" that
Bill Clinton was linked to
Vince Foster's death. In November, Trump Jr. again promoted the conspiracy theory that
the Clintons had murdered people. In February 2018, Trump Jr. liked two
tweets promoting a
conspiracy theory that survivors of the
Stoneman Douglas High School shooting were coached into propagating anti-Trump rhetoric. In May 2018, Trump Jr. retweeted a false and
antisemitic conspiracy theory that
George Soros, the Jewish Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist, was a "nazi
[sic] who turned in his fellow Jews to be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth". The tweets originated from
Roseanne Barr, whose TV show
Roseanne was canceled the same day after she had posted a series of racist and antisemitic tweets. In September 2018, when
Hurricane Florence was affecting the United States, Trump Jr. tweeted a picture of CNN journalist
Anderson Cooper waist-deep in floodwaters when another man in the same picture was standing knee-deep a distance away. In the same tweet, Trump Jr. included a link to a
Breitbart News article claiming that CNN's ratings had dropped by 41%, and proposed a conspiracy theory that CNN was "lying to try to make [his father, President Trump] look bad". In actuality, the picture of Cooper was about 10 years old, taken during 2008's
Hurricane Ike before Trump became president, and Cooper was videoed talking about how the floodwaters were receding. In May 2020, Trump Jr. falsely accused
Joe Biden of being a
pedophile. After Biden was diagnosed with prostate cancer in May 2025, Trump Jr. launched a conspiracy theory questioning how
Jill Biden, who received a doctoral degree, missed the signs and whether it was
covered up. Trump Jr.'s response was seen as an outlier compared to other politicians including his father's, and was a subject of criticism. However, he had also
liked a post wishing Biden a speedy recovery, "politics aside." In August 2020, Trump Jr. shared a
Breitbart News article about more than 800 dead people voting in Michigan which was framed to suggest that the ballots were not legitimately cast and thus showed evidence of extensive voter fraud; however, the voters in question died after submitting the ballots, and the ballots were rejected by Michigan authorities who knew the voters had died before the election date. In September 2020, he again pushed false claims about voter fraud by asserting, "The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father". He added: "Their plan is to add millions of fraudulent ballots that can cancel your vote and overturn the election" and asked "able-bodied" people to join an election security "army" for his father. Facebook and Twitter affixed labels to the video which pointed to accurate information about voting. In November 2020, after
Pfizer announced that it had developed a
COVID-19 vaccine with 90% effectiveness, Trump Jr. suggested that the vaccine had been held back in order to hurt his father's chances of winning the election. Pfizer CEO
Albert Bourla dismissed the suggestion, saying that the company had always planned to rely on the "speed of science". After
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Trump Jr. amplified baseless Russian state propaganda which claimed that
the US and Ukraine were developing biological weapons.
COVID-19 misinformation Trump Jr. was given a 12-hour restriction by Twitter in July 2020 after he promoted misinformation about
COVID-19 by retweeting a video showing
Houston doctor
Stella Immanuel promoting
hydroxychloroquine as a cure, despite conflicting studies, and by claiming that masks were unnecessary. Twitter later said that it restricted his ability to tweet or retweet for 12 hours for violating its
COVID-19 misinformation policy. On October 29, 2020, Trump Jr. criticized the media's focus on new infections rather than on deaths, saying on Fox News, "why aren't they talking about deaths? Oh, oh, because the number is almost nothing. Because we've gotten control of this, and we understand how it works." On the day Trump Jr. made that comment,
the United States registered roughly 1,000 COVID-19 deaths.
Other 2025 In November 2019, Trump Jr. tweeted the name of the alleged whistleblower who brought to light the
Trump-Ukraine scandal. Whistleblower conventions are intended to protect the identity of individuals who expose wrongdoing in government.
Agence France-Presse attempted to independently verify the identity that Trump Jr. tweeted but was unable to do so. In June 2020, during the
COVID-19 pandemic, Trump Jr. accused liberals of hypocrisy, for imposing restrictive measures and social distancing guidelines on businesses while holding the "Action for Black Trans Lives" protest for the rights of African American
transgender people. Trump Jr. has accused
big tech companies of being biased against conservatives and has claimed that a
deep state sought to undermine Trump during his presidency. ==Attempts to overturn the 2020 election==