The moment had finally arrived. Late Tuesday morning, nearly five years after Republicans first went after it Hunter Bidenthe president’s son could finally be called a convicted felon.
But Donald Trump and other Republicans did not appear to take advantage of this opportunity. The early reaction to a jury’s guilty verdict against Hunter Biden on three gun crimes resembled a shriveling balloon.
“Hunter Biden’s gun conviction is pretty stupid,” a close Trump ally, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, said in a post on the social platform Another Trump aide, Charlie Kirk, called it a “bogus trial.”
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Many Trump allies had secretly called for acquittal. The talking points wrote themselves: it would have been yet more evidence that the American legal system was rigged in favor of the Bidens and against the Trumps. Tuesday’s guilty verdict contradicted that narrative.
Even more valuable would have been the fundraising potential.
A person with knowledge of the Trump campaign’s fundraising plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there had been discussions about how much an acquittal would help Trump, potentially raising tens of millions of additional dollars, because they planned it as to provide more evidence. the justice system had been manipulated. After Trump was convicted of 34 crimes in Manhattan, his campaign raised record amounts of money online, and some of his advisers recognized that an acquittal of Biden’s son had the potential to raise far more money for Trump than a conviction, the person said.
Prominent Republicans, including those in the Trump campaign, immediately downplayed the three gun crime charges, complaining that the charges diverted public attention from unspecified crimes they alleged President Joe Biden committed and that a justice system they insisted that it was still very much twofold. tired.
It spoke volumes that the initial reaction from the Trump camp did not come directly from Trump himself, who hours after the ruling had still not posted a word about the verdict. Instead, his campaign released a statement describing the conviction as a “distraction.”
“This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary. “Corrupt Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal gain.”
The president has not been charged with any crimes, and Republican leaders in the House of Representatives abandoned their efforts to impeach Biden after it became clear that too many Republicans believed they had insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to impeach . Hunter Biden will be tried again in September on nine charges stemming from failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019.
Behind all this, Trump, who aggressively attacked Hunter Biden in the 2020 election, has changed his mind about the political value of doing so now, at least regarding the younger Biden’s personal problems, according to people close to the former president .
At a meeting last year, Trump privately acknowledged to an aide that attacks on the president’s son had the potential to backfire politically, according to a person who attended the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. Trump said Republicans should be careful, the person said, “not to go overboard” with the Hunter Biden attacks, especially on the drug addiction issue, because doing so could generate sympathy and make people see the president as a caring father can show.
The way Trump talks about the Hunter Biden case today is markedly different from his drumbeat about what he called “the laptop from hell” in 2020.
During their first presidential debate, in September 2020, Trump directly attacked the president’s son over his drug use.
“Hunter was kicked out of the military,” Trump said during the debate. “He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged, for cocaine use.”
His attack was technically false. The president’s son had been given an administrative discharge from the US Navy Reserve – not a dishonorable discharge – after testing positive for cocaine. But true or not, the attack was widely seen as politically misleading. It gave Biden a chance to stand next to Trump on the debate stage and connect emotionally with millions of Americans watching on television who knew someone affected by drugs.
“My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” Biden said. “He caught it up, he fixed it, he worked on it and I’m proud of him.”
During the final eleven days of the 2020 campaign, Trump referred to Hunter Biden more than five dozen times at rallies, during interviews and in social media posts. Instead of focusing on an argument for why he deserved a second term, he repeatedly posted the question, “Where is Hunter?”
“It’s treason, or whatever you want to call it,” Trump said on the final day of the 2020 race. “We captured the whole thing. The son – where’s Hunter? Where is Hunter?”
Trump appears to have learned a political lesson from that experience. Now he sometimes leads with empathy about the plight of addiction and his own family experience with it, including in a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.
“I had a brother who suffered tremendously from alcoholism and alcohol,” Trump told Hannity of his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., whose battle with addiction Trump often attributes to why he doesn’t drink himself. “And it was horrible to see. He was an incredible guy with the best personality. He was the most handsome person you ever saw. Everything was perfect. But he had an addiction. And so I understand addiction.”
In other interviews this year, he has used questions about Hunter Biden to suggest his empathy for those struggling with addiction and to lament the destructive effects of fentanyl flowing over the border.
These days, Trump rarely mentions Hunter Biden on the stump. Instead, he has tended to cast Biden and his family broadly as corrupt.
Trump himself appeared to notice the shift at a rally in North Carolina in March. “Remember when Hunter… remember when we used to say, ‘Where’s Hunter?’ At least now we know where he is.”
Yet at campaign events before he had won the delegates needed to secure the Republican nomination, Trump often invoked Hunter Biden as a way to accuse the Justice Department of putting its thumb on the scale of the election. At the end of several meetings in February and March, Trump accused the FBI of insisting that the “laptop from hell was Russian disinformation” to help Biden win the 2020 election.
Trump stopped making specific comments about Hunter in his stump speech as he headed into the general election and as his own criminal trial began in Manhattan, instead using the “Biden crime family” as a universal slur.
Not all Republicans saw the conviction as a diminishing return that undermined their message. House Republicans’ campaign arm was already raising money for the conviction, distributing so-called “jumpsuit orange” shirts accusing Biden and his son of criminal corruption.
When asked by CNN whether Hunter Biden’s conviction undermines his claims to a two-tier justice system, Speaker Mike Johnson replied: “It does not. Every case is different. And the evidence here was clearly overwhelming. I don’t think that’s the case in the Trump trials.”
Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives who has remained close to Trump, said in an interview that the trial against Hunter Biden was fair. The Trump trial, he claimed, was a predetermined outcome that took place in a liberal district.
“In my view, it would have been another blow to the entire system if Hunter, who was so clearly and vividly guilty, had been released because it was Delaware,” Gingrich said, referring to the location of the trial, which was held. within walking distance of the president’s campaign headquarters in Wilmington.
Still, the Republican Party’s indecisive and largely muted response to the verdict said more than any protests to the contrary. A Trump ally who spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly describe private conversations explained that once it was clear that Hunter Biden’s gun case could not be used against the president, the topic dropped off the radar for political reporting.
“The only good thing that could come out of this was that he was acquitted on charges he was clearly guilty of,” the Trump ally said. “An acquittal on charges that he was clearly guilty was the only advantage for us.”
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