How to Think About Hunter

What About Whataboutism?

My phone’s been lighting up all day with texts from worried friends who want to know what I think about Hunter Biden’s conviction on gun charges. So much pearl-clutching, hand-wringing! So much fear that MAGA will effectively apply whataboutism to leverage Hunter’s felony convictions against the newly minted convicted felon’s father, President Biden, in November. 

As a public service for worried progressives, I offer a few thoughts on how to think about Hunter. 

First and most importantly: Hunter is not running for President of the United States. The Democrats will not be nominating a convicted felon to be their standard-bearer. Hunter Biden will never come close to the nuclear football, to holding a pen with which to sign executive orders. He will never appoint federal judges. He will not get to weaponize the justice department and pardon himself and his cronies. And this felon will not get his hands on state secrets to cart home when he checks out of the White House. 

All of those are things convicted felon Donald Trump can be expected to do if elected. 

Second: Miscreants in Presidential families are not unusual. They belong to an American tradition. Just in the last half century or so, numerous presidential family members have been tangled up in legal trouble or other scandals.

Lyndon Johnson supposedly had the Secret Service put his brother under virtual house arrest to keep his drinking habit in the home. Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy Carter was a hard drinker (a beer was eventually named after him), and once urinated on an airport runway in full view of the press corps. He also reputedly smoked pot at the White House.

Bill Clinton’s brother Roger spent time in a federal prison on cocaine trafficking charges in the 1980s. Clinton pardoned him on his way out of the White House in 2001. During Clinton’s presidency he accepted $50,000 and a Rolex from mobster. In 2016, he surfaced again to embarrass his sister-in-law, with a DUI for which he was sentenced to community service and a few days in jail.

Republican Presidents have had their share of Hunter-ish relatives. Richard Nixon’s brother Donald accepted a loan from millionaire Howard Hughes that ultimately was seen as a possible effort to buy influence. Nixon later sent a White House investigator to pluck Donald out of a hippie commune in the California mountains. 

A more recent Republican presidential analogy to the Hunter Biden situation as laid out in Republican conspiracy theories is the example of Presidential son and George W. Bush’s brother Neil. In the 1980s, when his dad was in the White House, Neil Bush was involved in a series of dubious financial deals, including serving as the director of a Colorado bank that collapsed and cost taxpayers a billion dollars. 

In the early 2000’s, when his brother was in the White House, the son of a Chinese leader offered him $2 million in stock and 10k for every board meeting he attended, to consult on a chip company, an industry in which he had zero experience. The LA Times reported that court documents showed him earing $400,000 a year from the company. He later bragged that while in Hong Kong, women whose names he didn’t know showed up at his hotel door, and he would have sex with them. "You have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," said his ex-wife Sharon's lawyer at the time. 

Neil Bush’s Chinese connections never got investigated and he still advertises himself as a China hand who has been to China 140 times. He now chairs the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations, a 501c3 organization named for his late father who was, in Neil’s words, “a huge believer in the importance of the bilateral relationship between China and the U.S.”  

(You can read more about the Bush family’s affairs with China here.)

None of those relatives were convicted of felonies while the President was in office. But Hunter Biden is not a candidate for President. Convicted felon Trump is. As historic as it is that a president’s son has been convicted of felonies, it is far more disturbing that the party of Back the Blue is willing to assault the legitimacy of the entire judicial system in order to justify nominating a failed businessman and wannabe dictator because he has the autocratic, lawless inclinations to force their white Christian nationalist agenda on the nation.

A word must be said here about the total hypocrisy of the lock-and-load MAGA crowd with respect to the charges against Hunter Biden, which have to do with him lying about his drug abuse on a gun permit application for a gun he only owned for 11 days. Republicans get elected and stay in office based on solemn promises to ensure that AR-15s remain as easily purchased as a bottle of milk. Their voters start frothing at the mouth at the first mention of the least incremental increase in background checks and restrictions.

MAGAs are steaming mad that Democrats can now point to Hunter’s conviction as proof that the justice system - which every Republican worth his or her Mar a Lago Christmas card is on record trashing as weaponized - is fair. President Biden has at least twice stated he would not pardon his son. They claim not to believe it.

There is one other important way to think about the difference between the Biden and Trump convictions: No one in the Biden family, the Democratic party, or the greater community of progressive Americans has, as far as I know, ever uttered a single word of threat toward the prosecutors, the judge or jurors in the Hunter Biden case. No Democrats are threatening to defund courts and law enforcers in revenge against the verdict. No Biden supporter is ready to take up arms in the streets, as the Trump white ISIS fringe has stated, to spring their leader should he get jail time. 

A Biden juror even stepped up to speak to the media, calling the case “heartbreaking” as it involved much testimony about Hunter’s drug addiction. Trump jurors in Manhattan will not dare to be known to the public as long as the MAGA menace exists as a force in America.