My oldest brother has an incredible gift: He’s capable of saying the most incendiary, inappropriate things at the perfect moment and somehow getting a laugh regardless of who he’s in front of.
I’m not quite sure how he does it. But I’ve watched him perfect this art since I was a kid. It used to be most apparent with my parents, who’d sometimes have trouble disciplining him because he could essentially shit-talk his way out of any situation and earn a laugh. As we got older, it felt like this talent elevated to a new tier, like he’d beaten the “mom is mad” boss and moved onto “can I get the priest to crack a smile in the middle of the funeral?”
I’ve been thinking about this skill a lot recently. This innate ability some people have to do something in a particular way that disarms everyone around them, and then the way some people try to replicate that behavior in the exact same context, with the exact same approach, and get disastrous results (I think, often, about trying some of the jokes I’ve heard my brother make to my mom, knowing full well they would never quite land, though I can’t say exactly why).
Anyway, in April, The New York Times broke the story that President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law are negotiating a luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires who are simultaneously lobbying the president to lift economic sanctions on their country. I’ll write that sentence again just in case it didn’t land the first time: President Donald Trump’s children are negotiating a luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires who are simultaneously lobbying the president to lift economic sanctions on their country.
I can’t explain why that story doesn’t have quite the same punch as, “According to The New York Times, Hunter Biden is negotiating a Biden-branded luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires; those Syrian billionaires are also lobbying President Joe Biden to lift economic sanctions on their country.” Yet I know that, for some reason, the real story we’re living through right now — the one where Trump’s kids are funneling money directly to their family fortune while the U.S. government hands out favors in return — just doesn’t seem to get any traction with the public.
I consider myself a pretty fair-minded guy whose politics are quite moderate. And I still believe the Hunter Biden story deserved as much attention as it got. I spent years following the laptop and gun charges story, and I found the details both alarming and unsavory. If you click the “Hunter Biden” tag on our website, you’ll see more than 20 stories that involve the president’s son from the four years of the Biden administration. We wrote about everything from the suppression of the laptop story to the Twitter files to the business deals Hunter tried to loop his dad into to his prosecution for gun possession, and I spent most of those four years demanding more answers than we were getting.
I don’t regret pursuing or publishing any of those stories. There was plenty of smoke, and Biden wrapped his time in office by abusing the power of the pardon to ensure there would never be real accountability if there was criminality. But I’m disheartened and frustrated now to see that right-wing writers, Trump voters, and Republican politicians who cheered me on when I was investigating potential Biden corruption are now just ignoring the comparably gargantuan scandals of (alleged) corruption we’re witnessing now.
On some level, I can understand the discrepancy: There’s so much news, and so many allegations about Trump that it becomes easy to tune it all out (both for his supporters and critics). News fatigue is real, and when we consume the news we are often fed content from organizations and individuals that share our politics.
But, to state it plainly: After reviewing the evidence of the first 15 months of President Trump’s second term, I believe the president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it.
I can’t level that claim directly and unambiguously because we haven’t really had the basic facts adjudicated, since Republicans in Congress have opted for complete and utter fealty to Trump in every manner imaginable. There is no oversight, or accountability, or even the slightest inclination to ask about these actions in the majority party. The Trump administration has also dismantled many of the federal watchdogs responsible for prosecuting fraud, grift and corruption, so few of its actions have been probed in any meaningful way.
Instead of indictments, congressional investigations, or public hearings, the best we are left with is great reporting from journalists, the occasional leak from the administration, a right-wing writer here or there willing to say the real thing out loud, and then a whole lot of “Occam’s razor” questions like, “Which is likelier, that the person who made a massive financial bet on oil prices 20 minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire knew about it or just got extraordinarily lucky?”
During President Joe Biden’s term, the Department of Justice could say, at least, that it had investigated the president’s son. Republicans in Congress also conducted a yearslong investigation into the Hunter Biden business ties and how they might link back to the president. Here, though, we have nothing; every story I’m about to point to has not produced even a unified statement of concern from, say, a half dozen Republican senators worried about government corruption.
Remember, Hunter’s story was about drawing a $50,000/month salary while his dad was vice president and then allegedly trying to arrange some business ventures he might cut Joe Biden in on once he was out of office. Republicans’ yearslong investigation never turned up any hard evidence of the latter, though there was enough smoke I still think the story was plausible.
Today, we’re talking about the president’s children launching multi-billion dollar business ventures — several of them — while the president is in office, and then explicitly exchanging all manner of domestic policy victories, foreign policy concessions, and literal pardons in the construction of those deals. Trump himself has all but admitted this is happening. He told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he tried to separate his family business from his administration during his first term, so he isn’t even trying now.
I have tracked these stories with one of my senior editors for the last year and a half. The list of things that have happened is so long and shocking when you see it all together that I’m not entirely sure how to present it. I’ve gone back and forth; maybe I should build a flow chart? What about a spreadsheet? Should this be a YouTube video, instead of a written piece? Will anyone actually read the entire thing? Can anyone actually process this level of self-dealing, corruption, and shadiness at once?
Ultimately, I decided that the best I can do is try to write all these instances down in an engaging way that might grab your attention and wake us all up from whatever stupor we’re in. So… here goes.
