Why Trump's targeting of Hunter Biden matters

The media's willingness to play along with how Trump politicized the prosecution of his opponent's son shows us the danger of what's next.

In my last post, I posited the miserable theory that Trump is getting better at all the terrible things he’s good at. In the post before that, I explained that he’s good at “what Republicans have been doing for 50 years.” This includes strategic racism, weaponizing revenge to fuel status envy, and neutralizing or co-opting the media.

This post ties those two threads together in one “package,” a package it’s almost impossible to get anyone to care about—the targeted and relentless persecution of Hunter Biden.

At some point in 2018, probably right after the Mueller Report, which we call the Mueller Referral in Ball of Thread, Hunter Biden replaced Hillary Clinton as the central villain in MAGA Cinematic Universe. Democrats in Congress and the rest of the country recognized the high crimes Trump was willing to commit in pursuit of destroying the son of the man he correctly assumed could beat him. That became Trump’s first impeachment. And after the House voted to impeach Trump in December 2019, the story pretty much ended for Democrats.

For MAGA, it had just begun.

In the middle of impeachment, Trump’s “lawyer” flew to Ukraine to get dirt on Hunter Biden from a Russian spy. In the middle of impeachment, Trump’s “lawyer” flew to Ukraine to get dirt on Hunter Biden from a Russian spy.

This is a point Marcy Wheeler repeats twice in the bonus Ball of Thread episode on Hunter’s pardon above because you’ve probably never heard it. And if you’ve come across it, you’ve undoubtedly heard about Biden’s dick pics and cocaine use far more.

That’s just one of more than a half dozen examples of direct political interference by Trump and his allies in the prosecutions of Hunter Biden that you’ve probably never heard about. Marcy lays them out in the explainer above about what your complaints about Hunter’s pardon must include.

And you can be forgiven for not knowing much or *any* of this.

Democrats and the media have intentionally avoided digging deep into any story that casts Hunter, with all his flaws, as a victim. Meanwhile, the right has reveled in this mess for six years now, as they’ve told themselves over and over that they’ve discovered massive corruption. However, all they’ve found—with the full weight of the Republican Party, the GRU, and the Department of Justice behind them—is some tax evasion that’s relatively minor compared to, say, the tax evasion a jury found the Trump Organization had committed.

Hunter was also found guilty of illegally purchasing a gun while addicted to drugs, something pretty much no conservative jurist thinks is a crime. Evidence suggests that it’s the gun shop that may have committed the crime, if there is one, and we know the shop, at the very least, doctored the forms in a highly shady manner. And while we’re talking about this, why was the mass exposure of Hunter’s private data treated as anything other than a massive violation of a private citizen’s privacy and a possible crime abetted by the top echelons of the Republican Party, the DoJ, and the IRS?

But do you see how into the weeds we must get to defend Hunter? And even the defense doesn’t make Hunter look great. And what does all that digging even tell us about Donald Trump? It tells us something that everyone who cares already knows and probably already hates or loves about Donald Trump: The past and future president will break any norm, precedent, and—often—law to destroy his enemies.

You know this.

But that’s not why the Hunter Biden story matters. It matters because the coverage of the pardon of the president’s son drowned in false equivalencies. And this shows how the press trips over itself to help Trump destroy his enemies.

That’s why I asked Marcy to turn this thread on “what your whine about Hunter’s pardon must include” into a Ball of Thread bonus episode.

She concludes with this:

Hunter Biden's considered icky by everyone. And so, no journalists care. With the exception of me and maybe three or four others, no journalists have given a fuck all about Hunter Biden's due process rights as the course of this carried out because he's icky, right? No journalists, very few journalists—Charlie Savage did very good job with the Durham case—but few journalists cared about Igor Danchenko's due process rights, few journalists cared about Michael Sussman's due process rights. So they were, they were off going through hell without any attention on what it should have been, which is, "God, this was really corrupt. God, John Durham's case is real dog shit."

And if we continue forward on that path where people prosecuted by Donald Trump are presumptively treated as icky or presumptively treated as guilty, as happened with John Durham's targets, then we're in trouble.

So, back to what Trump is getting better at…

Hunter Biden was a much better victim to pick than Hillary Clinton.

He has no real power of his own. He has lived a complicated and tortured life riddled with mistakes that reached a full-blown crisis after he lost his brother, who had also survived the car crash that took the lives of their mother and baby sister. It’s a story that makes me tear up to think about, yet he has been flattened into a dick pic for most of the media—left to rot so MAGA can pick at his carcass. Maybe, given all Hunter’s troubles, Joe should never have run in 2020. But he did, and that doesn’t give the right a license to devour a human being for sport.

That’s why it was so important for me to help humanize Hunter after a half-decade of some of the most concentrated dehumanization that any American political figure has faced, with episode 11 of Ball of Thread:

Trump is getting better at picking his victims. And he’s getting better at picking apart the media so they’re afraid to tell the truth about what he is doing. He is aided in this by a thoroughly corrupt GOP, an anti-American MAGA Supreme Court majority, and a media landscape that has been tilted to the right by billionaires led by Elon Musk who are tired of average us Lilliputians who think we can tether our betters to our surly bonds with things like laws, regulations, and taxes.

Or maybe we’re just getting worse. Maybe we’re tired of caring. So who will give a shit when he comes for us?