For Republicans, Hunter Biden is a convenient distraction from Trump’s alleged crimes
In the latest game of “squint hard enough and any two things will look the same”, House Republicans greeted the news of Hunter Biden’s plea deal with the Department of Justice by squeezing their eyes closed really hard and wishing they were in Kansas. Jim Jordan called it a “double standard of justice” whilst Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that Hunter Biden’s deal is a “stunt to make him look like he is just cooperating with the DOJ.”
One can understand if they sound disappointed. There is something anticlimactic about the Yellow Brick Road that brought us to yesterday’s news that Hunter Biden won’t (at least for the moment) be heading to prison. Turns out there wasn’t a big evil Wizard at the end of this journey after all, just a small, troubled man committing the usual misery crimes that are committed every day in America.
So much has been said and promised in the prosecution of Hunter that it’s often been difficult to know whether we should believe that there ever was a “there” there. We’ve seen the guy naked (far too often, to be fair), pixilated, blurred out, and variously compromised. We know what his tattoos look like and how he looks when high. We even know that his internet search history included “18-year-olds” (oh, the depravity of the man!) and porn involving “widows”. Written down like that, the whole episode sounds as abject and sordid as it probably was, being the story of a man in a very bad place and riding the vast superhighway of porn.
What the Department of Justice will have done, however, is set aside the things which might inflame Bible Belt America and focus on the things that are actual crimes. When they did that, they concluded that charges could be brought on tax violations, alongside a charge for possessing a gun whilst being a drug user in 2018. Biden will plead guilty to two misdemeanours for not filing his tax returns on time in 2017 and 2018 and for the handgun charge. The former will earn him probation, the latter regular drug tests.
Experts who routinely work these cases suggest that the deal is typical for this kind of crime but that is not enough for many Republicans in Congress who either genuinely consider Hunter Biden a criminal mastermind or (more likely) a convenient distraction from the cases being brought against the former president. This is why the game of whataboutism is particularly strong around Hunter, who has always been a weak spot for his father as well as a point of weakness.
For all the political mileage Joe won by discussing the loss of his son Beau, he has worked the Hunter problem with minimal engagement and lots of broad statements of support for his troubled son. America’s news media (well, those that retain some understanding of journalistic integrity) have also approached the story with some caution. It’s one of those liminal cases, which involve a balance between the public interest and things the public will find interesting. The two are rarely the same.
You could argue that this is a feature of America’s political system, which is designed in such a way that it’s not just one person elected to the White House. America does have a First Family and many of those families have their unique challenges. Unique challenges for the media, too. The most famous example is probably Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy, who became the stuff of late-night talk show jokes throughout Carter’s years in office. Billy came to be defined by his tragic decline into alcoholism as much as his apparent delight in causing trouble. He once urinated on Atlanta’s airport runway, in full sight of the press and public, whilst waiting for the arrival of a Libyan delegation. We then also had Roger Clinton, brother to Bill, whose nickname to the Secret Service was “Headache”. He was notoriously granted a pardon for a federal drug-trafficking and possession charge from 1985.
Those were siblings rather than presidential children, which means Hunter should best be compared with the likes of Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, who posed for Playboy; Amy Carter who took part in political protests and, in 1986, was arrested at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and even George H. W. Bush’s son has multiple instances of alcohol abuse including one arrest and a charge of DUI (though later become President in his own right).
What makes Hunter Biden a little different is that he is the visible part of what Donald Trump keeps referring to as the “Biden Crime Family” and these admissions of wrongdoing give Republicans a chance to shout “See we were right all along!”
Except, they were not right all along and no matter how much they squint, they will continue to struggle making the case that Hunter Biden’s criminality eclipses that of the former president. Whilst there was a “there” there, that “there” now appears to have been very small. Even Republicans have admitted as much themselves in the past. Back at the height of Trumpist power, in 2020, the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees issued an 87-page report into the Bidens, which concluded that Hunter had used his father’s name to close business deals, but that Joe Biden had no case to answer. Another report in 2023, produced by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee failed to link the President with wrongdoing.
Hunter Biden might be many or even all the things Republicans claim he is but that still does very little to alter the reality that he’s still not his father and he’s still not Donald J. Trump, which is who this story is all about. People like Jordan and Taylor-Greene will continue to insist there’s another Oz just a little down the road, but this latest development moves the story towards something of a conclusion.
@DavidWaywell
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life