President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was frequently targeted by ex-President Donald Trump, who took a step away from Hillary Clinton’s emails, and instead became upset [1] over the younger Biden’s emails and business deals. And Trump used every excuse available to his little sticky fingers to smear [2] Hunter Biden whenever possible.
So it’s no wonder that Hunter doesn’t describe the former president in glowing terms in his new book, Beautiful Things, a memoir that was obtained by The Guardian. [3] Indeed, Hunter describes Trump as “a vile man with a vile mission,” who explored “unprecedented depths.”
Ouch!
In his book, Biden alleges he “became a proxy for Donald Trump’s fear that he wouldn’t be re-elected,” and said Trump floated “conspiracy theories” about him to bolster his chances of being re-elected, The Hill [4] reports.
“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 (Paul Manafort) sat in a jail cell for laundering millions more from Ukraine,” Biden writes.
On the campaign trail, Trump constantly slammed Hunter Biden in an attempt to undermine his father. At one point while the campaign was in full swing, Trump and his cronies alleged that while the elder Biden was Vice President, he interfered in Ukrainian affairs so that his son would be given preferential treatment while he served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.
The Hill notes this claim has been disputed.
Trump has always viewed the world with jaundiced hypocrisy, but perhaps never more so than when he blasted Hunter Biden’s China dealings, especially since his daughter Ivanka’s own dealings with the country raised questions [5] with from the ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics In Washington (CREW) in 2018. And The Washington Post [6] reported in April 2017 that at least one manufacturer in her China-based fashion line relied on sweatshop labor.
But despite all this, Donald Trump continued to focus on Hunter Biden’s Ukraine dealings during the Obama administration, even to the point of discussing this in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That phone call became the linchpin in the former president’s first impeachment.
“None of that matters in an up-is-down Orwellian political climate,” Hunter Biden writes. “Trump believed that if he could hurt 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.”
And in comparing himself to Trump’s children, he noted “I am not Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr. I’ve worked for someone other than my father. I rose and fell on my own.”
Biden’s book will be available on April 6.