Given how bothered the media were by President Trump’s adult children, I wonder how they feel about his successor’s absolute embarrassment of a son.
It’s not the fairest of comparisons because Ivanka and Jared Kushner, the current president’s daughter and son-in-law, held official positions in the Trump administration. And Trump’s son, Don Jr., has been a major public defender of his father through and through. It doesn’t look like Joe Biden’s son Hunter will serve in his White House, and he’s rarely seen in the media attesting to his father’s strength or brilliance.
On the other hand, there’s an awful lot of evidence that Hunter has used his father’s stature in political Washington for lucrative, shady business dealings abroad and that Joe Biden himself knew about it. In that regard, there’s no reason Hunter doesn’t deserve the same amount of scrutiny, even if it’s not exactly the same kind.
But the way that the media characterized Trump’s children, as though they were cynical bottom feeders who deserved to be shunned by polite society, was personal. Like, personal to an uncomfortable, creepy degree.
To take just one example, Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote last month that “just five short years ago Jared and Ivanka were dinner-party royalty here in Manhattan. … They had money, they had youth, they had celebrity. They were thin.” Following their stints in the White House, though, Bruni said that Jared and Ivanka “are about to be held accountable.”
It’s almost perverse. (“They were thin“?!)
The Trump children never ignited any feelings in me one way or the other, though I always thought it would be fun to talk smack with Tiffany Trump at a White House party. I can’t say Joe Biden’s son Hunter stirs any of my feelings either. But if I had to spend time at all thinking about any of them, I’d be most scandalized by Hunter and how humiliating he is to his own family.
News broke this week that Hunter, 50, is the subject of a federal investigation related to his taxes. And by “news broke,” I mean that Biden’s transition team preemptively released a statement from Hunter in an apparent attempt to control the first cycle of the story before any journalist could do it first. It’s apparently about more than taxes, though. The New York Times subsequently reported that the investigation began in 2018 and “has included inquiries into potential criminal violations of tax and money laundering laws.”
It’s not the most explosive story of the year, at least not now. Anyone might have guessed this would come up if they happened to read the reporting from before the election about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the strange emails on it that quite clearly showed him engaged in curious dealings with foreign entities.
And about that laptop — it also contained a photograph of Hunter apparently passed out with what looked like a crack pipe and a video of him perhaps doing drugs while a woman performed oral sex on him.
None of it has been proven 100% authentic, but Hunter has never denied its legitimacy. Moreover, he was, in fact, thrown out of the U.S. Navy after failing a drug test that found cocaine in his system.
I don’t know if Hunter was ever “dinner-party royalty” in Manhattan. But between Trump and Biden, I do know which president’s child I find more cringeworthy.
