Joe Biden and Donald Trump aren’t two peas in a pod—but Biden’s failure to secure classified documents is another reminder that he and Trump have more in common than just their advanced ages.
And the similarities don’t end there. We have long known about Trump’s nepotistic and (quite likely) illegal family dynamic. But as House Republicans prepare to ramp up investigations of Biden, mainstream media news items are shedding new light on how the “Biden crime family” keep cashing in on the family name.
CNN reports that in the summer of 2021, the president's younger brother, Frank, spoke to a health technology company called BioSig Technologies where he boasted about “the bully pulpit that I have as a result of the privilege of being associated with my brother Joey.” He also vowed to “do everything in my power…to get federal dollars to your research.”
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Additionally, the president’s brother gave a speech for BioSig in Italy, and then gave conflicting reports about who paid for the trip.
If you want to fully appreciate how sketchy this situation is, Frank Biden told CNN that “he had consulted for BioSig for about a year.” But, according to the report, “He then reversed himself, saying he had never worked as a consultant for the company. He later clarified in a text message that he had provided BioSig informal sales assistance. As for his Italian travel, Frank Biden said in another text message, ‘someone’ paid for it, though he did not say who.”
Someone paid for it?
And Frank is just one of Joe’s kid brothers; don’t forget that Biden has another younger brother, James Biden.
One of many troubling details about James is that he and his wife Sara were paid $250,000 by a Joe Biden donor to generate business for the donor’s company.
That’s plenty swampy, but it gets worse. According to The Washington Post, the donor’s firm alleged that the couple had “promised to help land clients in part ‘through his family name and his resemblance to his brother…’” The donor’s firm also alleged that James and Sara Biden “generated business for themselves rather than the firm.”
Of course, Hunter Biden gets most of the Biden family attention, what with his missing laptop and very public self-destructive behavior. As I have previously noted, the allegations that Hunter traded off of his family name are real and deserve scrutiny.
And as CNN notes, in his own memoir, Hunter admits that his last name was a “coveted credential” when it came to landing a gig with the Ukrainian oil firm Burisma, and that they “considered my last name gold.”
This doesn’t prove that Joe Biden was “the big guy,” or anything that might be dispositive regarding allegations that the elder Biden got a cut of the action. But it is an admission of what we already know: Hunter Biden traded off his family name and took money from foreigners who believed that hiring him might result in some sort of access to Joe Biden or otherwise favorable treatment.
It’s also worth pointing out that the sketchy connection between Joe Biden, his family, and money has been going on for decades. According to The Atlantic, “...about a fifth of the $11.1 million raised by Biden’s [1988] presidential campaign went to his family members or companies that employed them.”
To be sure, the Biden family’s swampiness looks tepid when compared with Trump son-in-law and former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s deal with the Saudis—or China fast-tracking Ivanka Trump’s trademarks after her dad was elected (to mention merely two of the many instances of the Trump family flagrantly profiting off of the presidency.)
Biden’s sins seem to err toward incompetence or sloppiness, while Trump’s sins are more overt and nefarious. But the cumulative effect of two such families consecutively occupying the White House is the sense that the game is rigged to benefit political elites—including their “royal court” and retinue.
Aside from the obvious point that corruption is bad, this matters because citizens who believe the fix is in and the game is rigged for the powerful are more likely to give up on this great experiment and turn to darker political forces.
A 2015 Pew survey found that “Roughly three-quarters (74 percent) [of people surveyed] say elected officials put their own interests ahead of the country’s, while just 22 percent say elected officials put the interests of the country first.”
That was before Trump ever won a single vote in 2016, paving the way for Biden’s 2020 victory.
For the sake of liberal democracy, it’s time to vanquish the idea that favor can be purchased by paying off a politician’s loved ones.
Unfortunately, as we head into the 2024 presidential election, it is plausible, if not likely, that Trump and Biden will once again face off, giving us four more years of the Trump or Biden family circus.
America can do better than these two old men—and these two corrupt families.
