We are all Hunter Biden to Donald Trump

Hunter Biden is a screwup. So are you. Who isn’t?

Ok. You’re probably less of a screwup than Hunter Biden. He had a pretty bad addiction and a tough childhood followed by a not-so-great adulthood. But so do a lot of people. So did someone you love. Could be you. Could be me.

But who wants to think about that?

Because Hunter Biden is a screwup and “icky,” the press just decided to largely ignore or sensationalize one of the worst scandals in the history of the presidency – with the almost single exception of emptywheel’s Marcy Wheeler, who has written 28 stories about Hunter’s trial in June alone.

This scandal is so complex and the context is so important that Marcy recorded a bonus episode for Ball of Thread that ties together some of the most important strands of this story.

You can join and watch it here.

We also talked about it on Nicole Sandler’s show, where we ended up talking about the depravity of MAGA’s endgame.

Nobody understands or explains this story like Marcy. The way she ties it into the Ball of Thread concept at the end of the bonus episode was essential for my understanding of how the march to fascism has been so successful.

But because there’s such a concerted effort through omission and commission to ensure this story is not explained as the massive scandal it is, I wanted to add a few thoughts.

This used to matter

When Hunter Biden, a screwup, became the star of Donald Trump’s effort to extort Ukraine’s president into framing the Biden family, most people understood why that was bad. The press treated it as a scandal, and the Democrats impeached Trump for the first time over it.

And then we moved on 

But you know who didn’t move on? Bill Barr, Paul Manafort, and Rudy Giuliani. And last week, they finally succeeded. The son of the president of the United States was convicted over charges that even Trey Gowdy, the former Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said shouldn’t have been brought. 

So many scandals in one

And that’s just the beginning of the scandal surrounding this trial. Here’s just a sampler plate of some of the takeaways of this story that have completely been missed in the press, as I understand them:

• The crime that the gun shop owner, a political opponent of Joe Biden, likely committed and was immunized for is far more significant than the one Hunter was convicted of.

• Hunter likely would have been allowed to plead out – the prosecutors and the judge blew up the pleas deal, not him – if David Weiss, the prosecutor Bill Barr picked to go after Trump’s opponent’s kid, hadn’t asked for special counsel privileges to investigate an obviously bogus attempt to frame the Bidens by someone who claims to have ties to Russian spies.

• Bill Barr’s corruption as Attorney General legalized the high crimes of framing the Bidens and injected the Department of Justice with Putin’s best efforts to do Joe what Russia successfully did to Hillary. 

Only Marcy Wheeler has truly spent the time trying to piece together both the details of the trial and the immense significance of this actual abuse of prosecutorial power enabled by media complicity.

But this story doesn’t only matter for Marcy. It’s one of our best harbingers of what a second Trump presidency would look like when it comes to the persecution and prosecution of political opponents, which began in the first Trump presidency despite the general effort to ignore that assault on justice.

And what this story shows is that they’re getting better at this. MAGA has learned from their fumbles. They’re emboldened by the shamelessness and the corporate media’s urge to minimize fascism. This is also why Project 2025 matters; every failure has become a vendetta with policy prescriptions designed to overcome the checks on power that come from democracy.

But it’s also personal.

“We are all Hunter Biden if Trump wins again,” Marcy said recently.

If we are in Trump’s way or useful at all as a pinata, he will go after us. And his allies will find something. And the MAGA prosecutors and judges will make it seem all very legal. And the press will cover it like you’re an icky fraud who deserves what you get.

Hunter Biden is a screwup, like you. He’s also five years sober. A dad. A son. A human being. And we’ve let the right turn him into a chew toy. And in return for our help, they’d do the same to you or someone you love.