Opinion by: Saagar Enjeti
Yesterday I outlined for you all the pretty serious allegations of financial wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s son Hunter with business dealings in Ukraine. I touched briefly on how Biden has been able to cite the latest press coverage of these serious events as the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing. It’s a clear cut example of the alliance between the powerful and the people tasked withholding them to account.
I think this has something to do with the media’s Trump problem, which I also see as a big problem for Democrats. The media and much of the democratic base is united in its hatred of Trump, a hatred that generally runs to their very core. Ergo if Trump or his supporters suggest something or declare something it becomes the Dems’ very mission in life–to disprove or poke holes in that statement to score a pyrrhic victory of the soul.
The problem is that while yes Trump says things that are not true all the time, sometimes he says things that are very true. Or he highlights stories that are beneficial to him and are also true, and in those cases like this one that so many Democrats and the media lose their credibility and ultimately do themselves a disservice whenever they deny them. There are entire rooms of people in CNN and MSNBC right now trying to prove that Hunter Biden is an innocent and brilliant entrepreneur who speaks fluent Ukrainian and Chinese.
We all know that there was something fishy going on with Hunter’s business dealings, but admitting it is something that they simply cannot bring themselves to do. Perhaps no better example than this clip from Ali Velshi at MSNBC yesterday:
Velshi’s claim was just completely false. Biden admits to using his political pressure to fire Sholkin, he just says he was doing it for the interests of the US government and not his son’s position as a board member on a Ukranian energy company. I know that parsing these details is extremely tedious, but the media would do themselves quite a bit more favors to accurately report the situation today than go back and revise when this becomes an even bigger thing if Biden becomes the nominee.
I’ve also noticed that Democrats in the primary are very reluctant to talk about this. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have made rooting out political corruption the near center pieces of their campaign and yet? Many of these supporters agree that this is an obviously nefarious business deal that needs to be investigated and I doubt that we’re going tol hear anything from either candidate any time soon.
Too often Democratic candidates are afraid of admitting the truth or using obvious future attack lines against their potential opponents because they believe that they will sound too much like Trump. Trump did not get into the oval office by being a stupid man. Sometimes his political instincts are very good.
The perfect example is Elizabeth Warren lying about her heritage. It’s easy for those who support her to brush it off. But to me and to millions of Americans who may eventually hear about her if she’s the nominee, it demonstrates a known and strange pattern of misrepresenting yourself, doubling down when caught, and ultimately refusing to grapple with just how much of a boondoggle that you’ve gotten yourself into.
There is no question from the body of evidence available that she benefited tremendously from her fake heritage and if it truly was in error than she would not have clung so deeply to it over the many years she was confronted about the issue. Yet she has not had to answer for it once since she became a serious contender for the Democratic nomination.
There hasn’t been a single question posed about it at any of the party debates and not one of her opponents has ever raised the issue. I rarely agree with Julian Castro but he said it best at last Democratic debate when Pete Buttigieg short circuited over an original policy debate: primary elections and debates are about hashing out who is best suited to carry a party’s flag and who has the best ideas.
Being afraid of sounding too much like Trump or reporting something that may be beneficial to him is a major weakness for the media, and Democratic candidates who see obvious misdeeds and wrongdoing but refuse to call it out are doing a large disservice to them and their supporters.
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