One of the things Donald Trump has done brilliantly, perhaps the only thing he’s done brilliantly (and he’s had a lot of help from the conservative media), is to create the false impression that his family of grifters and gangsters is somehow equivalent to the family of the Democrats he has running against. And these false equivalences have worked extremely well for the first family, allowing the president to install family members in nebulous government positions. Not even Richard Nixon dreamed of installing Tricia as a senior adviser.
Between Hunter Biden’s tax investigation and Jill Biden’s dissertation, the Trump media complex has been extremely busy lately. Sure, Jared Kushner created a shell company to pay members of the Trump family, but how dare Jill Biden call herself doctor?
Well, I’m here to say these things are not equal, not even a little. Every time the mainstream media covers these “scandals” as equal, they are letting the Trump family off the hook for criming. I’m here to tell you that scamming your own donors and maybe stealing their money is not the same as calling yourself doctor, especially when you are in fact a doctor, and these false equivalencies are journalistic malpractice.
ADVERTISEMENT
It’s been a week of Trump plotting and scheming to stay in office. The word “coup” has been tossed around quite a bit more than one would like, but luckily, the National Review is laser-focused on defending democracy. Just kidding; it ran a sea of shitty misogynistic articles focused on the greatest danger to Americans right now, namely Jill Biden’s dissertation. Kyle Smith wrote three!
Kyle, a Yale graduate, is extremely mad at Doctor Jill for typos and he considers her dissertation to have the “wan, term-papery feel of middle school.” Clearly the most important thing during a week when America crossed the 300,000-death Rubicon. The right-wing media has to find scandals in Bidenworld so they elevate the most arrant nonsense in the hopes of creating a world where readers go, “Oh, OK they’re all corrupt.” But they aren’t all corrupt, and Doctor Jill’s doctoral thesis is like Obama’s almond scandal—just more bullshit from the right-wing media complex.
But the National Review wasn’t the only one to delight in the fake scandal. The world’s biggest misogynist and white-supremacist hobbyist, Tucker Carlson, said of Doctor Biden, “Dr. Jill needs reading glasses.” “Either that or she’s borderline illiterate. There are typos everywhere including in the first graph of the introduction. Dr. Jill can’t write. She can’t really think clearly either.” It makes sense because Tucker, Swanson frozen-fish heir, made such a big deal about Melania Trump’s dissertation. Just kidding. Tucker Carlson is the worst of the partisan hacks. But perhaps there was more afoot.
After all, last week we learned where all that Trump campaign money went. The campaign money it seems, went to Jared. You’ll remember Jared as the president’s completely unqualified son-in-law who botched the handling of the pandemic, reportedly saying “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”
Yes, while Tucker Carlson was breathlessly covering Jill Biden’s dissertation, we learned that the president’s son-in-law approved the creation of a shell company called American Made Media Consultants Corp., and this shell company spent almost half of the campaign’s $1.26 billion war chest, including on payments to Trump family members.
The allegation here is that Jared and the rest of the Trump family stole the campaign money and gave it to themselves. Meanwhile, earlier this month, Ivanka Trump was deposed in the District of Columbia AG’s investigation into where all the 2016 inaugural money went.
The allegation is that “The PIC [Presidential Inaugural Committee] thus paid 35 times more for rental of event space on Inauguration Day at the Trump Hotel than a comparable nonprofit organization paid for renting a substantial portion of the same event space earlier that day. Yet another heartwarming story of the Trump family potentially ripping off their donors. Again, these are just allegations, but man, it wouldn’t be the first time the Trump family got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Remember when they had to close Eric Trump’s kids cancer charity because of allegations of criming?
Granted Hunter Biden is no Amy Carter. He seems kind of sketchy, and he’s being investigated for tax stuff, and there’s a photo of him with a crack pipe floating around the internet. BUT he’s not working for his dad’s campaign or his dad’s White House. Nor is he working for his dad in any capacity. You may not like Hunter Biden, but there’s a big difference between Hunter Biden and Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump.
In one month, we will have successfully survived the Trump autocracy. Now the question is, how do we prevent a slide back? We prevent it by stopping these false equivalencies—Jill Biden’s dissertation is not the same as Jared allegedly stealing money. Criming is not the same as things you don’t like. Stop comparing the Biden family to the Trump family. The road to hell is lined with false equivalencies, and some things are not equal.
