Continuing to support fat former President Trump is, at this point after all these years and all the havoc he’s wrought, an unambiguous moral failing. It shows a disrespect for common decency, for democracy, for the rule of law, for even the most basic personal virtues people rightly expect of one another. Wearing a MAGA hat really isn’t that far off from wearing one with a Nazi swastika on it. True, there are plenty of people who really don’t know and better because they’re simply unintelligent and/or lack a proper education but so did the horses in Confederate cavalries.
They’re still people and sometimes it’s hard to tell if a Trump fan is an evil fucking degenerate scumbag or if they’re a rube who might’ve turned out to be a decent-enough human being capable of critical thinking if not for getting their young brain poisoned by a strict conservative upbringing, going to a megachurch, Fox News on their parents’ TV around the clock, so on and so forth. Which means our derision for the Trump fans who do or at least should know better and the Trump fans who don’t is a blunt instrument that does not distinguish foe from would-be friend.
As is our sympathy, whatever little we can muster up, for Trump fans. Maybe “sympathy” isn’t the right word for what’s at least a recognition of their frustrations over Hunter Biden.
It must be really hard for them to hear from their media constantly about allegations of just a shit ton of cash being funneled into a presidential family from foreign autocrats and criminals while half of Congress turns a completely blind eye toward it and the other half can’t seem to make any progress whatsoever in investigating if the president himself benefitted. We’ve been there too.
Many times between 2017 and 2021 did MSNBC and Palmer Report make it seem like the smoking gun was just around the corner and that shady deal to get the mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan refinanced with the help of some really greasy Arab royals would spell doom for Jared.
Maybe Jared Kushner isn’t the perfect analogue for Hunter Biden. For one, he actually worked in the White House for some fucking reason that has never to this day been sufficiently explained. He also hasn’t to our knowledge been subjected to any real federal law enforcement scrutiny for his at the very least improper dealings with foreign nationals while allegedly serving the country.
Related, and perhaps most importantly, he seems to have been successful at leveraging his position with the Trump family and in the White House. The Saudis sure as shit would not have given him $2 billion after Donald already lost if he hadn’t delivered for them beforehand.
It would seem really hard to believe at this point that the same could be said of Hunter Biden.
Harder still is parsing out what’s factually based and what’s complete bullshit from House Republicans as they try to build a case against Hunter and Joe Biden. They can’t simply fucking say what it is they have and what it actually means, they have to scream “BIDEN CRIME FAMILY” and we’re stuck trying to parse it out. But if you listen to them enough you might start to perceive that a lot of the stuff they say that a lot of what they say about Hunter Biden is actually true.
It’s true that Hunter was paid a shit ton of money to sit on the board of a sketchy Ukrainian energy company. It’s true that he also sat on the board of a dicey Chinese investment fund. It’s almost certainly true that Hunter was involved in these and plenty of other dubious overseas business deals, all of which would probably have never happened if his last name was not Biden and were not sold with the at least implicit assurance that they would come with access to a powerful US Senator and then the second-in-command in the Obama Administration for eight years.
And Joe knew about much, if not most, of it, because Hunter brought these schemes to him. That “10 percent for the Big Guy” meme the fanboys love probably really does refer to Joe Biden.
The problem for House Republicans is that there’s no evidence the “Big Guy” was ever interested. In fact, it’s actually very hard to imagine that these exchanges between Hunter and Joe ended with anything other than “You’re my son, I love you, and you’re a grown man who can make your own decisions, but get that shit away from me. I want nothing to do with it, ever. Please stop.”
Can we prove this? No. Call it an intuition based on countless hours of hearings and Fox News programming on Hunter. The simple reality is that there’s no law against Hunter leveraging his name to get foreign scumbags to pay him for vague promises of access that he never ended up delivering on. Jared Kushner was able to land a $2 billion paycheck from the Saudis because he’s a closer.
What was Hunter’s biggest payday? A few million here or there? Is he even still working with any of these corrupt foreign entities or is he experimenting with watercolors now in his (legitimately impressive) new gig as a paint artist? Why was the best evidence of Hunter channeling funds to his dad the fanboys could find on his laptop an erroneous reading of a convoluted and incompetently filled out rental application, which almost immediately turned out to be bullshit anyway?
James Comer, a guy who shouldn’t qualify to manage a Dairy Queen much less one of the most important committees in the House of Representatives, accidentally summed it up himself last month when a reporter asked him how he could “discount that Hunter Biden maybe just used his father’s name to get this money without any direct involvement from President Biden himself.”
“It would be hard for me to believe that Hunter Biden is so charismatic that he could convince foreign nationals to wire him millions,” was his answer. He agrees Hunter ripped these people off. The only crimes were the tax and pistol permit application perjury ones he’s currently under investigation for, ones that have no connection to his father, widely seen as a paragon of integrity after four years of just utterly debased thievery from the prior administration.
And that’s it. We certainly understand why the fanboys are upset. But they should man the fuck up and deal with it because there’s virtually zero chance Joe Biden is going to be implicated in anything even remotely as bad as what their Orange Messiah is facing in two criminal cases and counting.