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For my family
the curious feeling
swam through him
that everything
was
beautiful
there,
that it would always
stay beautiful
there.
—FROM “NIRVANA,”
BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI
PROLOGUE
“WHERE’S HUNTER?”
As I began writing this book from the relative calm of my home office, in November 2019, I sat in the center of a political firestorm, the consequences of which could change the course of history.
The president of the United States was smearing me almost daily from the South Lawn of the White House. He invoked my name at rallies to incite his base. “Where’s Hunter?” replaced “Lock her up!” as his go-to hype line. If you wanted, you could even buy a WHERE’S HUNTER? T-shirt directly from his campaign website—twenty-five dollars, sizes small to 3XL.
Not long after that call to arms became part of his stock repertoire, supporters sporting blood-red MAGA caps appeared outside the driveway gate of the private house I was renting in Los Angeles with my wife, Melissa, then five months pregnant. They snarled through bullhorns and waved posters depicting me as the titular character from Where’s Waldo? Red hats and photographers followed us in cars. We called the police, as did some of our neighbors, to shoo them away. Yet threats—including an anonymous text to one of my daughters at school, warning her that they knew where I lived—forced us to seek a safer address. Melissa was scared to death—for her, for us, for our baby.
I became a proxy for Donald Trump’s fear that he wouldn’t be reelected. He pushed debunked conspiracy theories about work I did in Ukraine and China, even as his own children had pocketed millions in China and Russia and his former campaign manager sat in a jail cell for laundering millions more from Ukraine. He did all this while his shadow foreign policy, led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, unraveled in plain sight.
It was a predictable enough tactic, straight from the playbook of his dark-arts mentor, Roy Cohn, the grand wizard of McCarthyism. I expected the president to get far more personal far earlier to exploit the demons and addictions I’ve dealt with for years. Early on, at least, he ceded that tactic to his trolls. One morning as I was working on the book, I looked up at a TV screen to see Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman and Trump henchman, read a magazine excerpt that detailed my addiction straight into the record of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on articles of impeachment.
“I don’t want to make light of anybody’s substance abuse issues…” Gaetz said, snickering for the cameras as he made light of my substance abuse issues.
“Again, I’m not… casting any judgment on any challenges someone goes through in their personal life,” Gaetz continued, as he cast judgment on my personal life.
This from someone once arrested for driving under the influence in his daddy’s BMW, and who later had the charges mysteriously dropped. Anything to keep the reality-TV narrative running.
None of that matters in an up-is-down, Orwellian political climate. Trump believed that if he could destroy me, and by extension my father, he could dispatch any candidate of decency from either party—all while diverting attention from his own corrupt behavior.
Where’s Hunter?
I’m right here. I’ve faced and survived worse. I’ve known the extremes of success and ruin. With my mother and baby sister killed in a car accident when I was two, my father suffering a life-threatening brain aneurysm and embolism in his forties, and my brother dying way too young from a horrible brain cancer, I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love.
I’m not going anywhere. I’m not a curio or sideshow to a moment in history, as all the cartoonish attacks try to paint me. I’m not Billy Carter or Roger Clinton, God bless them. I am not Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr.—I’ve worked for someone other than my father, rose and fell on my own. This book will establish that.
For the record:
I’m a fifty-one-year-old father who helped raise three beautiful daughters, two in college and one who graduated last year from law school, and now a year-old son. I earned degrees from Yale Law and Georgetown, where I’ve also taught in the master’s program of the School of Foreign Service.
I’ve been a senior executive at one of the country’s largest financial institutions (since acquired by Bank of America), founded my own multinational firms, and worked as counsel for Boies Schiller Flexner, which represents many of the largest and most sophisticated organizations in the world.
I’ve served on the board of directors at Amtrak (appointed by Republican president George W. Bush) and chaired the board of the nonprofit World Food Program USA, part of the largest hunger-relief mission on the planet. As part of my voluntary position for the WFP, I traveled to refugee camps and areas devastated by natural disasters around the globe—Syria, Kenya, the Philippines. I’ve sat with traumatized families inside homes fashioned out of aluminum shipping containers, then briefed members of Congress, or talked directly with heads of state, about how best to provide swift, life-saving relief.
Before that, I lobbied for Jesuit universities. I helped secure funding for mobile dental clinics in underserved Detroit, after-school training programs for teachers in lower-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and a mental health facility for underprivileged and disabled veterans in Cincinnati.
My point: I’ve done serious work for serious people. There’s no question that my last name has opened doors, but
