President's Day Sale
All presidents half off for immediate access
When President Biden’s son, Hunter, was profiteering off the presidency by offering people in Ukraine close encounters with “the Big Guy,” Republicans were outraged and yelling for impeachment. Now the president’s son is doing it again on a vastly broader scale for a lot more money. So, you’d think these same people would be even angrier. Instead, crickets. Why? Different president. Different son.
In fact, you hear some of these same people bending over backwards to excuse The Don, Jr., for endlessly marketing access to offices of power all over the globe for literally hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, leaving Hunter in the dust as a drug-addled piker in the field of selling the presidency.
Trumping Hunter
Let’s take a quick trip down recent memory lane just so I can do a face plant on the pavement outside the White House: (Don’t worry, we’ll come back to Biden-his-Time Joe, who makes the news in a sleeper of a story today, too, as he gets paid millions to demonstrate his word-salad maker at big political marketing venues. I am, after all, an equal-opportunity critic of all political theater.)
Junior is out making a mint almost literally by creating all kinds of crypto, one for each family member it seems. It may turn out to be a giant Ponzi scheme where the new Big Guy takes in a huge number of his supporters, the coin ultimately crashes, but he walks away with a ton of their money, made good on all of his legal debts and they thank him for the opportunity of helping him.
The new national crypto scheme will even benefit, it appears, by having the US Treasury buy some $Trump (do you pronounce that “strump,” as in “strumpet?”) to sock it away in a new sovereign wealth fund if Trump gets his way. Access to the president, as you read here, was recently sold for those who invested millions in buying the new coin of the realm with the president’s face on it. But that is not paying for access to the president—just a nice dinner and some really nice artificial coins—no gold from the Golden Gollum, just plain Digital Dons.
Let’s put the rest in bullet points regarding one of the Dons’—Jr:
Donnie, far more brazen than golden, had the big balz to name the new social club he created the Executive Branch. That surely makes the connection a lot less clandestine than Hunter’s amateurish business. It’s even located near the White House, not far off in some frozen hinterland called “the Ukraine.” It is a posh club where cabinet secretaries can mingle with billionaires and deep-pocket Arab investors. Oh how fun! And membership in this rarified Washington fraternity only costs half a Mil. Surely, people are only paying that much to enjoy the panelling, not the president or other high political peeps.
The launch party last month included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson. David Sacks, the President’s crypto and AI czar, proudly announced himself as member number one. This tableau – celebrity, politics, profit – perfectly captures the Trump dynasty’s particular brand.
The Executive Club (or Branch) will surely make it handier to swing some of those Middle East property development deals that Donnie put together recently in locales like Dubai. He, of course, travelled as part of the presidential entourage while locking down some of these deals where his Arab business partners threw parties for the president while the deals were formalized. Humble Donnie says this is just making a living—Trump style—on Air Farce One until the new Arab Palace-in-a-Plane is put in presidential service. During the little Tour-de-Air-Force-One, an Abu Dhabi investment company selected Trump’s World Liberty Financial stablecoin for a $2 billion transaction, which passes a percentage of each dollar invested on to the Trumps.
“It’s laughable that the left-wing media thinks that I should lock myself in a padded room and cease what I’ve been doing for over 25 years to earn a living and provide for my five children.” (Don Jr.)
Private Citizen Don, Jr., notes one big diff between him and Hunter is that he’s not a crackhead and his dad doesn’t have dementia; but like Hunter he was brought onto the board of a big firm during the formative days of Dad’s presidency. Just six days after the election, DJ joined the board of 1789 Capital. No political branding there with that date that established the United States’ government under the constitution with George Washington's inauguration. The fund has rocketed from $200,000,000 under management to $500,000,000 since then with plans to hit its first $1,000,000,000 by the end of the year. I’m sure the cozy new club and the White House will help get it there, but I’m also sure to many I’m just being cynical. (Probably so.) That’s way better than Hunter Biden selling his lousy paintings for hundreds of thousands—more than they could be worth artistically, having been considered essentially valueless up until the commencement of the Biden presidency.
With Trump-branded properties materializing across Qatar and Saudi Arabia in perfect harmony with diplomatic visits, you have to wonder: has America ever witnessed such a brazen fusion of presidential access and private enterprise?
It’s almost as if Donnie J. is in competition with his brother Eric in “a blitz of family money making ventures” criss-crossing, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars in deals. This must surely exceed all the ventures of all past presidential sons … and their fathers … across the history of the United States, and certainly does exceed all of Junior’s previous accomplishments. But, hey, they’re Trumps. They just deal bigger in other realms than the rest of us, and it’s hardly their fault that their dad is president of the United States of America. These deals include the creation of an 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower where condos will sell to rich Arabs and anyone else who can unroll that much money to the tune of $20 million each. Trump change!
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, after sipping champagne at the Executive Branch launch party, scolded reporters, saying it was “ridiculous” to suggest “President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit.”
Of course it is. He doesn’t even draw a salary for cryin’ out loud! So, let’s move on now to …
SloMoJoe
While Joe Biden’s son was but a penny polisher in the posh and paneled world of pushing executive access compared to the gilded Trump Bros., and even though the demented president made mere millions to Trump’s billions, there is now talk that a different Biden should be charged with high crimes than Hunter.
The Trump DoJ is saying that Jill Biden should be criminally charged for elder abuse for not guiding her demented husband out of office once she knew he had advanced prostate cancer. (Why the Trump DoJ is more concerned about the presidential prostate than the remaining embers of Biden’s brain, I’m not sure.)
I’m sure that charge will fly, given the high risk presidency presents to prostates. Just ask the Clintons how heavily that organ can get worked among interns when one is in the Oval Office.
I would think “treason” for endangering the nation by covering up the fact that no president was ever home at the White House might be a more important charge and one with a small chance of sticking. I want to know who signed off on Biden’s brain. One could write a whole book by that title. It would be humorous, of course. Just listen to this deeply buried recording of Robert Hur’s interview if you can muster the patience to wait for a thought to gel: (It’s about as much much fun as watching a bowl of Jello set up in a glass-doored fridge.)
Biden’s Best Word Salad Sandwich
Hearing all the pauses and faltering makes the truth of the recording a lot more evident than the released transcripts did. One wonders if a sound engineer added the faint clock in the background—audible during the protracted pauses—just to help you measure one mental tic between each talk to reveal how slow the internal gears are turning as Biden falters to get each word to drop from his mind to his mouth. No wonder he was shaking hands with the curtains.
One is thankful no one had to decide about pushing the red button for the nuclear launch while he was in office:
“Mr. President, Do we launch the missiles at China now that China has nuked Taipei?”
“Well, I was … er … going to take a train … I think there was a trai… That was when Beau died … er … back in 2015 I think … he knew I loved him … or was it when Obama asked me not to run … well, anyway … you know he had a red button that looked shiny like this one, too … I never pushed it, though…. There was a reset button like that for Russia, too … My wife, Hillary had her hands on that one.”
“Do we launch, Mr. President?!”
And, so, the former president did not go to trial over his mishandling of top-secret documents because … er … because …
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report notes. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
“We also believe some of the same evidence that supports reasonable doubt for the classified Afghanistan documents also supports reasonable doubt for the notebooks, including Mr. Biden’s cooperation with the investigation, his diminished faculties in advancing age, and his sympathetic demeanor,” the special counsel’s report adds. “These factors likely make it difficult for jurors to conclude he had criminal intent.”
In the same manner it is difficult for some juries, apparently, to determine if the Trump Bros. have unconstitutional intent. They are clearly just making money the way billionaires do — hand over fist.
(Headlines for the quotes above appear in the listed articles below in boldface:)