Trump lampooned the Bidens at an October 2019 campaign rally in Minnesota, making jokes about how Hunter Biden knew nothing about the places and industries where he was collecting large checks overseas.
NBC News simply decided to cut off coverage of the rally. As MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace ended coverage of the Trump event, she told viewers: “We hate to do this, really, but the president isn’t telling the truth.”52 The president was telling the truth, and it hurt their narrative.
In a tweet the next day, NBC’s Meet the Press said: “The president held a campaign rally last night and attacked Hunter Biden. We cannot in good conscience show it to you.”53
The program’s host, Chuck Todd, told viewers, “We aren’t going to play the sound. We aren’t going to repeat the President’s vicious attacks on Hunter Biden. The President of the United States stood in front of a crowd of supporters and character-assassinated a man.” Todd added that Hunter Biden is “not a public figure, he isn’t running for office, and he’s not a campaign surrogate. He’s not even on the campaign trail, and he isn’t in any way asking for this attention, obviously.”54 Yes, obviously no one seeks attention for being handsomely compensated in situations involving clear conflicts of interest for a relative serving as vice president of the United States.
Todd even admitted the Trump remarks were “newsworthy” but insisted that he couldn’t “in good conscience amplify those attacks.” Todd didn’t claim Trump’s comments were untrue but vaguely asserted that they “seemed to cross a line.” Then the anchorman instructed, “We all need to play a role in not rewarding this kind of politics—not just the press. This is the job of anyone who has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution.”55 There’s nothing in the Constitution preventing people from questioning the way relatives of politicians monetize their proximity to power. In fact, the First Amendment ensures that people can raise such questions without fear of government interference.
The effort to bury the story wasn’t confined to NBC. “There is no evidence of Joe Biden doing anything wrong…,” asserted CNN host Erin Burnett in cutting off discussion of the Ukraine deal.56
There’s also no evidence that Hunter Biden did anything but rent his famous name and connections. Neither he nor his foreign associates could explain what exactly he had done to deserve the millions of dollars he had collected overseas. In 2019 he quit the Ukraine and China ventures and pledged not to do such things again if his father wins in 2020. Essentially the media was defending Biden conduct that the Bidens were hardly willing to defend. The situation became almost comical when reporters at Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post attempted to get some answers from Hunter Biden’s Chinese associates:
BHR (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company has grabbed global media attention for its links with Hunter Biden, the son of former United States vice-president Joe Biden, after US President Donald Trump fired a barrage of corruption allegations at him and requested China investigate the Bidens’ financial activities in the country.
The company has repeatedly declined to elaborate on the younger Biden’s role at the firm when contacted by the South China Morning Post via phone, mail and visits to the office. But Jonathan Li Xiangsheng, the firm’s chief executive and Hunter Biden’s partner, has said the company was working on an explanation about the American’s role.
Li refused to comment on the younger Biden when reached by the Post on Monday.
A recent visit to the firm’s registered address in Beijing found a small, plainly decorated office, where a receptionist said she had never seen Hunter Biden.57
More than five years after going into business with Hunter Biden, his associates in China were still “working on an explanation” of his role there. If this doesn’t arouse the curiosity of a real journalist, it’s hard to imagine what would. But the reaction of much of the American media tells us how rare such journalists have become.
The impeachment drama didn’t last as long as the collusion saga, although it dragged into February 2020, when perhaps another story coming out of China should have been getting more attention from Washington lawmakers.
As for the collusion story that dominated the news for years, Trump tweeted in May of 2020:
When are the Fake Journalists, who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!58
Now that everyone knows the history, some readers may wonder if Trump’s tweet was too polite.
8
The Cost of Covid
Covid-19 emerged in China in late 2019 and by the end of July 2020 had killed close to 700,000 people worldwide. During that same time period more than 30 million people in the world died of other causes. The virus has not been as fatal as many feared, yet many politicians keep insisting that it is.
As we write in the summer of 2020, Congress has already spent more than $2.6 trillion in response to the coronavirus. Lawmakers are considering plans to spend trillions more. The federal government is borrowing the money and saddling future generations with more debt. If Americans were forced to pay the Covid bill this year, income taxes would have to more than double. Along with the direct spending, the Federal Reserve has essentially printed nearly $3 trillion of new money, much of which it uses to purchase federal debt. If this binge of money creation ever causes people to lose faith in the U.S. dollar, the cost to America and the world will be many times that amount.
Even now the cost of the virus response is not limited to the burden placed on federal taxpayers. Businesses and opportunities disappear, many never to return, and treatments for numerous other health problems
