A New York real estate executive whose company is facing criminal tax fraud charges told a group of conservative activists that crack cocaine “is not [his] thing” and accused the press of covering for the Biden administration’s alleged “failures” during a rambling speech at the end of the four-day American Conservative Union confab.

       “Crack’s not really my thing, but it would be fine if I was on that [Democratic] side,” Donald Trump Jr said on Sunday during a rambling speech delivered from the stage his father, former president Donald Trump, had spoken from the night before.

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       Mr Trump, who currently serves as an executive vice president at his father’s eponymous real estate company, told the crowd about his drug preferences while referencing a false talking point circulated in right-wing media earlier this month regarding a Biden administration programme which provides federal grants to groups that distribute “harm reduction kits” to drug users in hopes of stemming the record number of overdose deaths in the United States.

       According to a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson, the Biden administration “has never authorized the use of federal funding for smoke pipes and will not in the future," but Mr Trump riffed on the idea nonetheless.

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       Mr Trump, the eldest son of the former president, also claimed his father’s successor, President Joe Biden, could have somehow imposed the sanctions the European Union has levied on Russia in recent days “a year ago” despite the American president lacking any authority over the EU’s sanctions regiment.

       “You can see that you're putting sanctions that Joe Biden could have easily done a year ago … could have done the right thing and actually led,” he said before accusing Mr Biden — who has spent recent weeks bringing the US, Nato and the EU together to impose unprecedented sanctions on Russian institutions and on Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin — of “sleeping” through the crisis precipitated by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

       “While Europe was leading Joe Biden was sleeping and we say that without certainty, but we all know,” he said before accusing the media of covering for the president.

       “You can see the White House's in this '— I’m like, really? I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like they did anything. But that's what we're up against folks … every day they change the tune, every day, the narrative changes to soothe failure after failure,” he said.

       “But you know, what's nice about the fake news is that the American people are now on to them,” he continued before repeating yet another unfounded conspiracy theory which posits that Hillary Clinton, his father’s 2016 opponent, used government contractors to spy on his father.

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       The ex-president’s son was a key player in setting up a meeting between members of his father’s 2016 campaign team and an attorney with links to Russian intelligence in hopes of being provided with “dirt” on Ms Clinton, but on Saturday he claimed it was Ms Clinton who had “colluded” with Russia.

       Mr Trump also called the Biden administration and “the people in charge” in Nato countries “idiots” and accused the press of “trying to get us in another war” by reporting on the Ukraine crisis.