President Trump and his inner circle are being indecent and stupid to attack Joe Biden for Hunter Biden’s personal failures.
Most of the major media is being self-destructive and irresponsible by ignoring Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
Hunter’s personal mistakes, failings, and difficulties are not good grounds on which to criticize Joe Biden. On the other hand, Hunter’s use of his connections to his father to profit himself, his clients, and his father is very relevant as his father is on the verge of the presidency.
In the first debate, President Trump knocked Joe Biden for his son’s drug addiction. Then Donald Trump Jr. went on Glenn Beck’s show and called Hunter a “crackhead.” Check MAGA Twitter, and you’ll find tons of folks attacking Hunter with that word and using it to demean Hunter and his father. This is cruel, and it’s the sort of cruelty that embodies Donald Trump and his inner circle.
Trump’s strategy in the 2016 Republican debates was counterpunching. It wasn’t that Trump had retorts for attacks on him, either in the form of legitimate defenses or a relevant counterattack. Instead, he responded to all criticism, fair or unfair, with hyper-personal non-sequiturs. He would literally choose the opponent’s most sensitive point and strike for it, and often, that meant a personal insult that had nothing to do with the matter at hand.
Half of Trump’s media criticism has taken this form too. Rather than say “this criticism is ill-founded because…” he attacks the looks, the family, or some personally embarrassing detail of the journalist involved — or the owner of the outlet.
It’s juvenile, and coming from the president of the United States, it’s embarrassing. To the great discredit of Republican primary voters in 2016, the nasty counterpunching worked back then. I don’t think it will work in this case (I hope it won’t) because I think Trump is actually exposing something human and admirable about Biden: his unconditional love for his son. Pointing out that his son has struggled with addiction and has had his marriage and military career fall apart isn’t pointing out some flaw in Joe Biden, it’s just trying to make Joe and Hunter feel like crap.
And if you’re tempted to say Biden was obviously a bad dad because his son screwed up, don’t say it. Every son and daughter screws up. As parents, we can hope that their screw-ups aren’t that bad, and when they do screw up, we can hope that they will feel loved enough to turn to us as part of a process of setting things right.
But none of the above means that Hunter’s bad behavior is off-limits. Specifically, if Joe Biden was in any way complicit with Hunter’s selling access, that’s corruption. It may or may not be everyday Washington corruption, but it’s corruption that is directly relevant to Biden’s candidacy.
This is where our media’s embarrassing behavior comes in. Many major outlets have decided that they simply will not cover the emails that seem to show Hunter peddling influence and possibly even using his connections to enrich his father.
For starters, it is sketchy that Hunter landed a job with Burisma, a Kremlin-connected energy company, while his father was vice president. It was embarrassing when many in the media, particularly at CNN, spent their breath insisting, as a fact, that there was nothing improper with Hunter taking that Burisma job. It’s obvious that Burisma hired Hunter with the hope of gaining access to his father, the sitting vice president.
Whether or not Burisma did gain access, as I have written repeatedly with regard to Trump’s conflicts of interest, it’s bad to have foreign companies and foreign governments even believing they have some sway over you. It’s also bad, even if Joe Biden did nothing, because it’s possible someone else in the U.S. government might be pressured by the vice president’s son to take improper action to benefit Burisma.
Hunter taking that job was corrupt. That Joe Biden and some of his allies in the media won’t admit that reflects very poorly on them. Joe Biden could easily say, “My son should not have taken that job. That was a mistake.” Biden hasn’t said that.
And maybe there’s more to it. One email made public by the New York Post suggests that Hunter did introduce Burisma official Vadym Pozharskyi to Joe Biden. The Biden campaign hasn’t denied the authenticity of the email or that Hunter introduced the two. We know that the night before the email was sent, Biden attended a large dinner in Washington, D.C., the annual dinner for a firefighter organization, where it is very possible his son made the introduction that Burisma presumably found so valuable.
Did this introduction happen? Biden should be forced to answer. He hasn’t. His denials to date amount to denying something never alleged: that Hunter arranged a formal, scheduled Biden-Burisma meeting.
A second email suggests that Hunter was securing payment for his father from a Communist-connected energy conglomerate in China. One of Hunter’s business partners has stated that this email is authentic, and it does, in fact, refer to a large planned payout to Joe Biden from a Chinese company.
Did Joe ever get the cash? Did he know anything about this all? Again, Biden won’t say, and he’s counting on the media’s continued assertion that these stories of corruption don’t matter.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” NPR’s managing editor said of these potential corruption stories.
The other excuse given for ignoring these stories, and one of Twitter’s many excuses for cutting off access to these stories, is the unsupported claim that this story is Russian disinformation. The claims that these emails are Russian disinformation have a lot less corroboration than does the original reporting on these emails from the New York Post.
These stories of Hunter’s business dealings do matter. Let’s hope Thursday debate moderator Kristen Welker makes these her first questions for Joe Biden. And let’s hope Trump can spend a couple hours putting his petty cruelty in check.
