I really shouldn’t have, but I recently shared a “snarky” Facebook post that said:
Trump’s daughter works at the White House
Her husband works at the White House
Rudy’s son works at the White House
Barr’s son in law works at the White House
Trump’s sons do foreign business
His daughter is getting Chinese patents
and Saudi grants.
But sure, let’s talk about Biden.
Mea culpa. I was hoping to “needle” some of my Trumpian Facebook friends, and it worked. They protested that Ivanka and Jared were doing “legitimate work” and even “for free” –– while Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was doing nothing legitimate for Burisma as a Board member, being paid $50,000 a month to do nothing but provide access to his father, the Vice President. This right-wing narrative suggests that “access” to then Vice President Biden was being bought by Burisma. My two Facebook friends were declaring, in effect, that any nepotism around President Trump was in no way corrupt, but that the Bidens were.
So, this rather lengthy post is about “merit,” “corruption,” “access,” and “nepotism.” Hold on, dear reader –– this is an interesting ride. For the less patient among you, let’s note first that corruption has many flavors, and that “corruption” is a vague and misunderstood term. Second, to preview the conclusion here, this looks like another case of “the pot calling the kettle black” or, more precisely, a pot posing as perfectly white calling out a pretty clean kettle for being very black, indeed. As to the Biden’s alleged corruption, it may turn out to be much ado about . . . .well, not very much. (Since the GOP dominated Senate is now bent on investigating the Bidens, presumably as “payback” for the House impeachment, we may eventually know more facts than have been reported by FactCheck.org, but likely not.) For the truly curious, the following link explains a lot.
The “we’re not corrupt but you are” is an old trope, for sure, and is closely related to what I call “false moral equivalence” and “moral misdirection,” where an individual, firm, or political party Tweets and expounds on the moral misdeeds of others to draw attention away from their own wrongdoing. Here are three points to help dispel confusion and illusion about corruption and nepotism.
Point (1) is that paying for access to the politically powerful is certainly legal, but is morally questionable. Lots of people and firms in the U.S. have been paying big money to politicians’ campaigns in order to get “access” to them. Bill Clinton’s use of the Lincoln Bedroom to get donations for access was (and should have been) controversial: using public property for private gain. That Trump repeatedly uses the public budget and his “bully pulpit” in many ways that benefit him personally does not alter the shady ethics of “pay for play”; but it’s wrong to conclude that “everyone’s doing it so there’s nothing to worry about here, folks.” It would be closer to the truth to say that corruption wears many hats, that “everyone’s doing it” is no excuse for bad behavior, and that some people are so corrupt they don’t even see it as corruption.
Below the Presidential level, campaign contributions to politicians in both parties are the tried and true (and legal) method of getting the ear of politicians. Trump’s parade of foreign ministers and dignitaries to his hotel amount to the same thing. Many a politician has succumbed to “Potomac Fever,” wanting to stay in D.C., whether as a Senator or Congressperson, which means having to ask for campaign contributions as a huge percentage of their time in office.
While House and Senate members campaign to get the vote of the average constituent, they govern mainly for the people and firms that have access to them through monetary contributions. This one form of corruption is corruption of the Democratic ideal of one person, one vote, and that all Americans are deserving of representation.
Academic opinion seems divided, but major campaign contributions to your federal representative is likely to skew what policies get made, and for whose benefit. In short, selling and buying access is perfectly legal, but ethically suspect. Bill Greider spelled this out in 1992 in his book, The Betrayal of Democracy, and despite some intellectual support for the notion that the Citizens United case has helped the citizenry and politicians have rational discourse over public policy, Greider’s work is empirically supported and his message is ever more clear and obvious: money corrupts, and a lot of campaign money corrupts what would otherwise be politics and policies for the marginalized and disenfranchised –– ironically, the very folks that hoped Trump would be their champion against “special interests.”
https://books.google.com/books/about/Who_Will_Tell_The_People.html?id=-7JU3Xk3NTgC
Point (2): Nepotism – hiring family and relatives instead of hiring people who bring the best talent and potential productivity to a job –– is legal, common and accepted in certain nations and places. And some great minds publishing in places like the Harvard Business Review that it’s not necessarily wrong.
https://hbr.org/1996/09/values-in-tension-ethics-away-from-home
But, point (3): whether it’s Biden’s son getting fat paychecks just for being related to a powerful politician, or Trump family members getting money or opportunities for profit by the mere fact of relatedness, the cases are part of the same phenomenon: the family members have done nothing to individually “earn” those benefits and opportunities, other than being family. This offends many who think of the U.S. as a merit-based society that values what you can do, not what you know. The very notion of a U.S. aristocracy was anathema to the founders. Modern day realists, however, rebuke such ideals with the oft-used phrase, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”
But my Facebook friends want to say that Hunter Biden’s hiring by Burisma, or getting money from China was ethically “worse”––or somehow more “corrupt” ––than the nepotism suggested in the Facebook post. But this is a stretch, and a fair case can be made for the proposition that the Trump family’s nepotism is even less ethical.
One of my Trump-embracing friends answered the post by saying “Legitimate work,” referring to Ivanka and Jared. But Jared surely didn’t do much work at diplomacy; more likely, he took notes from Netanyahu (never seriously trying to understand the Palestinian perspective or bring Palestinians to the table) and called it a “peace plan.” Is Jared being paid by the government? His expenses certainly are, and he fully expects to make profitable business connections for the Trump empire, if not now, then in the future. They are getting exceptional access to leaders of many countries to pave the way for future deals, and perhaps even deals not made public; we simply can’t know, as there is no transparency around what deals Jared and Ivanka are making as they make their contacts abroad. Jared’s close ties to Mohammed bin Salman seem especially worrisome.
Jared’s kinship with Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) is likely motivated by potential “deals” that Jared could make with the Kingdom. It also puts the U.S. squarely in the Saudi side of the Iranian-Saudi conflict, and likely encouraged MBS to have his agents kill and dismember Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. citizen journalist that was exposing the corruption of the Saudi regime. MBS almost surely knew in advance that Trump would not downgrade U.S.-Saudi over the “internal politics of the Saudi regime.” To the consternation of many GOP politicians in D.C., Trump soft-pedalled the murder of a U.S. citizen by agents of MBS. Khashoggi’s “crime” was that he was active in trying to publish the truth about corruption in the Saudi regime. Kushner’s relationship with MBS, which bypasses established channels of diplomacy, corrupts the accepted diplomatic processes the U.S. has maintained since World War II, and is problematic in the extreme.
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/21/jared-kushner-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman/
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/democrats-probe-jared-kushner-relationship-with-mbs
Jared’s wife, Ivanka may be working for “free,” but she is also riding to international meetings at taxpayer expense, and presumably working to profit from those contacts. Again, it’s hard to know because of how much is hidden. The Chinese patents she was awarded are often mentioned, as well as grants from the Saudis.
Side note: in the Facebook flame wars that obscure sound moral inquiry, there is also considerable misinformation about Ivanka’s role in the $100 million grant by the Saudis to a program she championed –– the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative—better known as We-Fi, or the “Ivanka Fund.” That misinformation showed up in the snarky Facebook posting. A fuller explanation can be found in the Atlantic article linked here, which leads us to the conclusion that people from all over the political spectrum are inclined to obfuscate the truth and make “the other side” look more corrupt. (Though I hasten to add that Trump’s ongoing demonization of mainstream media has been a factor in the de-rationalization of political discourse in the United States, and that his administration seems content to allow Russian bots to poison social media with gross misrepresentations, as long as it benefits Trump.). As to Ivanka’s evidently unfair treatment in social media, see
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/05/the-ivanka-fund/559949/
In a similar way, Hunter Biden’s relationship with Chinese firms has been misrepresented repeatedly by Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, have both claimed that Hunter Biden got “$1.5 billion” from China for a private equity fund. Don, Jr. has taken up the accusation, but it’s just not true. Claims like these obscure the truth, much like claims that Ivanka got money from the Saudis.
What is true, then? We can safely say that a similar kind of corruption occurs on both sides. In each case, a politician (Trump, or Biden) could be benefitting a family member financially by virtue of his position, or family members can benefit financially just by being related. But how are they dissimilar? For one thing, there is no evidence that Joe Biden asked or encouraged Burisma to hire his son, or that he received any benefit. For another, there is no evidence that Ukraine did any favors, or was asked to do any favors, by Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, or Burisma. Rudy Giuliani wants people to believe that Biden pushed Ukraine’s prosecutor to “go easy” on Burisma, but the known facts don’t bear that out. Finally, there was no change in U.S. foreign policy as a result of Hunter Biden’s employment by Burisma.
By contrast, Trump’s “perfect phone call” was by all reliable accounts an attempt to benefit himself, skewing and confusing U.S. foreign policy; whether it was or was not intended to benefit Trump’s political prospects (it was), it could not have actually furthered U.S. interests in the region and could only have hurt Ukrainian efforts to push back Russians in the Eastern parts of Ukraine. Finally, if Trump were seriously interested in corruption, his Presidential words and acts would be markedly different. As Jonathan Chait wrote in November of 2019, “Trump’s interest in rooting out corruption in Ukraine was not even zero. It was, in fact, less than zero.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/trump-ukraine-corruption-lie-biden-perry-impeachment.html
So, it was anything but a “perfect phone call” but rather it was an illegitimate effort to extort the new Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into the Bidens. So, how “legitimate” and “free” is the work of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner? They are not entirely working for free, since a lot of their travels are taxpayer funded, and they may well be serving their own financial interests, whether short term or long term. It seems fair to be skeptical of any claims that they are volunteering their time and efforts for “free,” given Trump’s own history of self-enrichment, fraud and deceit as a businessman. There is a glaring lack of transparency around Trump and his ongoing businesses, now led by Don, Jr. The former White House ethics advisors argue that Trump’s publicly announced plan to divorce himself from his own business interests while President is deeply flawed, and has not even been followed.
Setting all that aside, however, there is still room to criticize the Bidens. Joe Biden could have told Hunter that taking money for nothing was not morally right; he evidently did not do so. (He reportedly said to him “I hope you know what you’re doing.”) Granted, telling your offspring to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest is something we would not expect Trump to understand or implement; it is only in an ethicist’s wildest dreams that Trump would tell family members that they could have no role in his administration, given all the potential conflicts of interest. In this way, my Facebook friends want to hold the Bidens to a standard that they would apply to the Trumps.
Admittedly, my snarky reposting on Facebook, like many false pronouncements from Trump, is a classic example of “whataboutism” –– a phenomenon that will only be more obvious once the Democrats have nominated a person for Trump and his allies to attack. These will predictably fall into the category of “I’m not so bad, but you are worse,” or “I’m perfect, and you’re an enemy of the people.” It’s predictable that Trump would call his opponents “evil” and “sick,” because anything repeated often enough short circuits rational thought.
All that political trash talking is not designed to get to the truth, but only to obscure what’s really going on. To be fair, other Presidents have tried to obscure what’s really going on in their administrations. But Trump hides the truth with particularly tenacity and effectiveness.
Tellingly, Trump has even demanded a pre-publication review of John Bolton’s book, which may claim that Trump directed the entire Ukraine “do us a favor” fiasco.
As far as Trump and the family finances are concerned, he has succeeded in hiding the truth thus far, and it works for him politically to accuse opponents of being corrupt. At this point, what’s perfectly legal but wrong is that the lies are not illegal and seem to work politically. Why? Carefully reading FactCheck.org on the Biden allegations is not simple for the average citizen, and many do not even care to ferret out facts from fake allegations on the “Biden scandal” or any other matter. It’s much easier for the people of one tribe to say that “the other side is evil and corrupt” or conclude that all politicians are corrupt, so none of it matters. That’s a perfect recipe for citizens to engage mindlessly, or to disengage entirely, driven by the now well-known tendency of people to view events through a lens that is predisposed to believe what they already believe –– confirmation bias. Confirmation bias enables distortions of judgment, enables tribalism and “how can I be bad when X is worse?”
As Michael Josephson reminds us, “When winning is the most important thing, people will do anything to win.” If America is to be the “shining city on the hill,” an image that Pres. Reagan invoked, then freedom of speech, rational discourse, and the search for truth must be part of that. But obfuscation reigns, and the Commander in Chief is particularly adept at the art of misdirection and obfuscation. My father, an accountant with Price Waterhouse, was particularly proud of a needlepoint he hung in his office that said “Eschew obfuscation.” He liked the irony. But there’s nothing ironic about a President and a party that promotes obfuscation, especially hiding the facts of ongoing corruption and pointing the corruption finger at others.
Trump has been touted by many as the most corrupt politician in modern times. The list is long and mind-boggling, and Alex Schultz and Jay Willis have already summed it up through November of 2019.
https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-corruption-timeline
But Trump, and Trump partisans, will not look at any such list with any degree of moral reflection. Tribalism and party loyalty cannot take seriously the words of Jesus Christ from the Sermon on the Mount: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
That would take mental effort and moral courage, both of which seem in very short supply these days.