Here's what Trump is terribly good at
The dehumanization of Hunter Biden shows how Trump gives his followers a revenge narrative that makes them feel powerful and victimized simultaneously.
The staggering corruption of Donald Trump’s first regime is almost impossible to hold in your head for long. And it’s even more challenging because the press decided not to make Trump’s undeniable and obscene in this campaign compared to the breaking news that Joe Biden is old and has a stutter.
Somehow, Trump's corruption was less of a campaign issue than Peanut the Squirrel’s, even after Trump's business, which he spent his whole life building, was found guilty of criminal tax fraud in 2022. When was the last time you heard that even mentioned? For instance, we never found out if Trump is an employee of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—something that Marcy Wheeler, and pretty much only Marcy Wheeler, has pointed out. Seems relevant. And the sundry financial rackets Trump’s kids are up to get less coverage than even Trump’s efforts to expel Don Jr.’s ex to Greece so Jr. can move on to the next socialite. Eric’s crypto scamming seems almost charming compared to the billions that Jared Kushner has racked up since 2020, as malign actors in the Middle East have banked billions of dollars of influence with him and the incoming regime.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden has spent the better part of the decade since he lost his brother Beau and responded with a horrific dive into addiction being hunted by the worst people on earth. And despite this hounding fueled by the staggering investigative powers of the Department of Justice under both Trump and his father, Hunter was only prosecuted for tax and gun charges that would have landed almost no one else in court.
The worst accusations against him and his father are the product of literal lies from literal Russian spies. And the central allegation that Vice President Biden demanded the firing of a corrupt prosecutor in Ukraine to help Burisma, the business that put Hunter on its board, has shown the exact opposite. Joe made a principled demand backed by much of the free world and Republican Senators that would have only increased the chances that Burisma and the oligarchs connected to the company would face prosecution.
You’re likely incredibly tuned into the news if you knew all this already. You might even be a Marcy Wheeler fan, or you should be because she is one of the very few, if not only, journalists who have attempted to tell the real story of the immoral hunting of Hunter Biden, which helped tens of millions of Americans believe that Joe Biden—a remarkably honest yet typically flawed politician—is somehow in the same league of possibly the most corrupt man ever to live.
I’m only able to recollect this key bit of recent American history because I’ve been helping Marcy put together Ball of Thread, her telling of how Trump brought us to the brink of fascism, which coincidentally reached the point where MAGA generally shifted its sights from Hillary Clinton to Hunter Biden.
It’s an absurd tale! A “blind” computer repairman in Delaware ends up with Hunter’s laptops despite Hunter having no recollection of ever entering the store, possibly due to his crack-induced stupor. When the FBI didn’t respond to the repairman’s attempt to make a criminal issue of this private data, perhaps because they suspected that the repairman was committing a crime by sharing the data, the repairman contacted Rudy Giuliani. And that led to five years of some of the most shameful attacks in American history enabled by a press corp that was grossed out by Hunter’s flailing and decided to focus on the most sensational aspects of the story, not the vast conspiracy that successfully tortured a recovering addict and blackmailed a president.
If you don’t know the dankest intricacies of Hunter Biden’s life, rest assured that your relatives who survive off the fumes of Fox News do. It was the channel’s most popular show for this entire decade, only fading from the screens sometime after the arrest of the man who was trying to frame the Bidens with the help of Russian spies and the ascension of Kamala Harris. Did this entire sham persecution help Trump win? Ask Al Gore how hard it is to run on the legacy of a running mate mired in ethical accusations, whether real or not.
All of this is to say that Donald Trump is very, very good at this. So what is “this?”
I’ve struggled with explaining what he’s good at as I’ve begged people to take Trump’s talents seriously and not count on any accurate media description of his conduct, which is drowned out by his fuckery and lies, to take him down.
He’s a master of what Republicans have spent the last half-century since Watergate creating—being the heroes of an alternate reality where Republicans are simultaneously persecuted and powerful. Everything about Fox and Trump reinforces the Conservative Moral Hierarchy as laid out by the great George Lakoff:
Yet Trump, also preys upon the story that this noble, God-delivered hierarchy has wrongly been upended by the Democrats or the woke or the secularists or the minorities or all of them. They’re stealing elections by letting Black people vote. They’re using the wrong bathroom. They’re bringing crime. They’re expecting billionaires to pay taxes.
This crime against order is the ever-present and free-floating inciting incident for the revenge narrative of the right. It justifies everything, even the destruction of your opponent’s son as he attempts to deal with the loss of a brother who was with him in the car as they, as small children, survived a car crash that killed his mother and his baby sister. And it even justifies fascism.
Trump includes all his fans in this narrative. He permits them to upend anything that gets in the way of his (and thus their) domination. And while there’s not enough of them to win the presidency—that requires scamming many Americans who’d never watch Fox—there are enough of them to terrorize anyone we love who is going through a rough time or making mistakes, the way we all do. And soon, they’ll be running the entire federal government.
Because the game of the right is we have to be perfect, and the Trumps can get away with anything. And until the press stops playing along, they’ll keep collecting victims until it’s impossible to ignore what they’re up to.