Republicans have spent President Biden’s first term pushing a ridiculous false narrative about how he actively profited from his time as vice president while the entire so-called “Biden crime family” benefitted from his “influence peddling.”
It’s a classic swiftboat move — turn a political opponent’s strength into a weakness. Biden has served in the public eye for decades without any major scandal, while their guy’s lifetime of corruption has been obvious to anyone paying attention.
The way Trump and his political and media enablers are trying to gaslight people was demonstrated last week when Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump went on Sean Hannity’s show and made a case that her father-in-law is a model of ethics in comparison with Biden.
”It’s not just criminality we’re worried about with the Biden family. It’s national security,” Lara said, despite the fact that her father in law is a convicted felon who’s charged with stealing classified documents in a separate case.
“We need to know as American citizens, that when Joe Biden, as president of the United States, is making decisions for this country, he’s made decisions based on what’s best for the American people and not what’s best for the bank account of the Biden family,” she added.
That’s when Lara absurdly presented her father-in-law, who installed her in a leadership role at the RNC, as a paragon of virtue who nobly sacrificed his personal interests to serve the nation.
“If you think back to when Donald Trump won the election in 2016, think about what our family business was: We were a private company that had real estate and golf courses around the world,” she said. “We were in international business originally. Yet, what did we do? We said, you know what, when he won, we’re not going to do any new international business deals — the opposite of that happened when Joe Biden became vice president of the United States. That’s when the Biden family got into international business.” (Watch below.)
With Election Day just over four months away, it’s important to get ahead of these shameless lies and detail all the ways that Trump’s corruption is completely unprecedented and unparalleled.
Binders full of blank papers
Before 2016, it was standard procedure for presidents to divest from their business interests before taking office. Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust for goodness’ sake!
Shortly after his stunning upset victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump made mouth noises about following precedent, pledging he would leave “my great business” during his time in the White House.
“While I am not mandated to do this under the law, I feel it is visually important, as President, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses,” Trump tweeted on November 30, 2016.
It quickly became clear, however, that Trump’s divestment plan was a joke: He merely turned over active control to his two sons, Don Jr. and Eric, which hardly satisfied ethics experts. For instance, Richard Painter, former ethics counsel to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, argued that Trump should “put all his conflict-generating assets in a true blind trust run by an independent trustee.”
Trump held a press conference a week before his inauguration that was supposed to clarify how he planned to hand the family business over to his sons. However, the documents placed next to him as evidence of his complex financial preparations were just props, binders filled with blank paper.
Trump’s whole family got in on the act. Lara Trump claimed her family was “not going to do any more international business deals,” but that was a lie. The nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington concluded based on an analysis of tax returns made available only after Trump left office that he made up to $160 million from international business dealings during his presidency.
The then-president grossed $58 million from his Aberdeen and Turnberry golf courses in Scotland — properties that previously had been money losers. He pulled in $36.5 million from his now-defunct hotel and tower in Vancouver, and he earned more than $24.4 million from his oft-visited golf course in Doonberg, Ireland. Adding to this pile was $9.6 million from India and almost $9.7 million from Indonesia.
When Trump announced he wouldn’t divest from his business, he tried to throw people off the scent by vowing he wouldn’t take actions as president that would benefit him personally. That claim was almost immediately proven false. As president-elect, he met at Trump Tower with Indian business partners who were constructing a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai. Don Jr. furthered the family’s interests in India and he had no problem leveraging his father’s “brand” during negotiations, a brand significantly more valuable now that his dad was president.
Trump relentlessly promoted his properties and charged the Secret Service exorbitant rates to stay at them when he traveled. From his inauguration to September 15, 2021, Trump billed the Secret Service — and thus the US taxpayer — as much as $1,185 per night at least 40 times. That was more than five times the recommended government rate.
Meanwhile, Trump’s DC hotel, located just blocks from the White House, became a corruption center. Republican political organizations spent more than $3 million there — money from donors that went straight into Trump’s pockets. They claimed they did so because of the hotel’s convenient location, but that was shown to be BS when the spending didn’t continue after the property became a Waldorf Astoria in 2022.
Trump’s hotels and resorts paid off in other ways. Foreign governments and special interests hosted and sponsored about 150 events at Trump properties. The Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI) paid $700,650 to hold its Annual Meeting event at Trump’s Trump National Doral resort near Miami in 2017. A line item on the AHRI’s lobbying disclosure report from that year included “lobbying President of the United States” on environmental issues, which was money well spent. Two weeks after the November meeting, the Trump administration announced its support for a policy the AHRI favored. Such “gifts” or “donations” were simply chalked up as “business,” so there was literally no limit to what Trump could personally receive.
Perhaps most egregiously, in 2019, Trump selected his Doral resort as the site where world leaders would gather for the G7 summit.
That proved too much even for some Republicans to swallow, and Trump ultimately backed down. It was one of the few times his self-dealing knew any limits.
Compare all this to the $40,000 Republican Rep. James Comer baselessly claims Biden received in “laundered Chinese money” from his brother, James Biden, and his sister-in-law, Sara Biden. Comer’s idea of a “smoking gun” was, according to the White House, a check showing repayment of a personal loan in 2017, when Joe Biden wasn’t in office or running for one.
The first couple of corruption
Republicans have presented circuitous theories regarding how Hunter Biden personally exploited his father’s political position, but Biden never put his child in a high-profile White House role where he could influence policy. Trump, however, quickly made his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, senior advisers in his administration. Neither of them had any actual qualifications, and despite claims they worked for free, they profited immensely from their proximity to power.
Ivanka made more than $13 million from her ownership stake in the Trump International Hotel while also profiting from her namesake brand. The Chinese government seemed to give her preferential treatment in granting trademarks. And it’s worth noting that while her high-dollar payouts were grudgingly disclosed with little fanfare, she made a big fuss about donating to a charitable trust the $289,000 advance from her 2017 book Women Who Work.
Ivanka and Jared engaged in some tag team corruption too. Jared initially didn’t disclose his major ownership stake in a real estate investment startup called Cadre, which benefitted from the “opportunity zones” that Ivanka championed in her government role. Ethics officials who apparently enjoyed beating their heads against brick walls told Kushner that he should sell his share in Cadre, but he never did. When he left the White House, his personal stake in the company was valued somewhere between $25 to $50 billion.
Kushner’s fledgling private equity firm also received a $2 billion investment in 2021 from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — despite serious reservations from the fund’s advisers. It didn’t require seasoned ethics experts to point out that the deal looked like Saudi Arabia generously rewarding Kushner for his actions in the White House.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly zeroed in on Kushner, a political novice, as someone he could easily manipulate, and soon the two were on a first-name basis. Kushner proved to be a reliable tool for Saudi interests. When Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was gruesomely murdered by Saudi agents in 2018, Kushner stood by MBS. President Trump even sided with the Saudi government over US intelligence agencies, repeating baseless claims about Khashoggi having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Trump family’s relationship with Saudi Arabia was one of less-than-subtle quid pro quo. The general manager of the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan, Prince A. Sanders, boasted to investors in 2018 that after two years of decline, revenue had increased 13 percent during the first quarter. He directly attributed this to a “a last-minute visit to New York by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.” Trump’s hotel didn’t actually have suites grand enough for the crown prince and the royal family, but Sanders wrote that “due to our close industry relationships, we were able to accommodate many of the accompanying travelers.” This was a very lucrative favor and obviously only occurred because Trump was president. Just months after Sanders’s investor report, MBS approved the operation that killed Khashoggi.
“Whatabout Hunter” is not a defense
All of the above makes clear why the Republican freakout over Hunter Biden is so disingenuous and shamelessly hypocritical.
Saudi Arabia wrote Kushner a $2 billion check, but House Republicans cried foul when Hunter Biden — a private citizen who never served in the White House — sold his paintings for $1.5 million. And while Ivanka Trump and Kushner have been mostly MIA during Trump’s current presidential campaign, there’s no reason to think that they won’t return to cash in from a second Trump administration.
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden have an estimated net worth of $10 million. Contrast that with the fact Trump-owned hotels on their own brought in $7.8 million in payments from foreign governments and their representatives during the four years of Trump’s presidency. Ivanka Trump and Kushner personally reported between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while they worked at the White House. They probably consider Biden’s net worth cigar-lighting money.
Republicans can smear Hunter Biden as a screwup who traded on his father’s name and condemn the president as too loving and indulgent, but these talking points should be seen for what they are: a distraction from Donald Trump’s egregious, unprecedented corruption. It may not seem like a big deal in comparison with his brutal second term agenda and failures in office, but on its own it should disqualify him from ever again holding public office.
