September 19, 2016 10:31 AM UTC

Donald Trump Jr. To Talk "Sportmen's Issues" In Junction

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• by: Colorado Pols

Donald Trump, Jr. kills big stuff.

As the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Amy Hamilton reports, it’s almost too audacious to be believed:

Donald Trump Jr., son of Republican candidate for president Donald J. Trump, will be drumming up support for policies that benefit sportsmen in the West’s public lands during a talk Thursday night at the Mesa County Fairgrounds.

The event, called “Autumn Fever — A Campfire with Donald Trump, Jr.,” is expected to attract about 4,000 people, said Marjorie Haun, who is helping to spread the word about the event. The effort is hosted through the Colorado Sportsmen “Make America Great” group.

Haun said the junior Trump is expected to talk about sportsmen issues and “issues specific to western Colorado” rather than directly campaigning for his father.

Hamilton didn’t see fit to mention it, but Donald Trump, Jr. is infamous as a big-game hunter, with photos of Junior and his brother with various dead animals having been made a regular issue both before and during his father’s presidential campaign. The Washington Post reported last month about Junior’s love of putting holes in large mammals:

Americans are nearly split when it comes to hunting animals for sport — 56 percent said they oppose it — and they are particularly against big-game hunting. Eighty-six percent of respondents said they disapprove of it, and six out of 10 said they believe it should be illegal. [Pols emphasis]

Donald Jr. spoke in exhaustive detail about his love of hunting for the enthusiast site Bowsite earlier in the year. He explained that he learned to hunt as a boy from his maternal grandfather during summers spent in Czechoslovakia. He said he has been an active hunter throughout his life, that his preferred form is bowhunting, and that he frequently employs it during the weekends to hunt whitetail deer in New York…

He talked of hunting not just as a pastime, but as an important influence on his character. “I owe the outdoors way too much to try to do the usual apologize and hide thing,” Trump Jr. said. “It’s kept me out of a lot of other trouble I probably would’ve gotten into.”

To be sure, neither we nor we would say most Coloradans are opposed to hunting properly managed by wildlife authorities: especially when the hunt is actually for consumption in addition to sport. Hunting plays a role in regulating animal populations in the West, and the Colorado Parks and Wildlife does a good science-based job administering hunting in our state.

What Donald Trump Jr. does in Africa, killing threatened animals to take crass trophies like an elephant’s tail, bears no resemblance to any kind of hunting that most Coloradans would find acceptable. And that makes Junior’s trip to Junction to discuss “sportsmen issues” more than a little questionable in our minds.

We wouldn’t be surprised to see protesters outside Junior’s event Thursday who agree.