Eric Trump, arguably the most irrelevant of President Trump’s idiot adult children, could do with a little less hair gel and a little more self-awareness. Over the weekend, Donald’s second son went on Fox News, which is basically the family’s personal broadcasting channel, to complain about corrupt politicians. “Why is it that every family in politics enriches themselves?” Eric asked the host Jeanine Pirro. “It is sickening.”
Young Eric, I am sorry to say, has not gone rogue. He wasn’t speaking out about the moral rot of his own family. He was criticising the foreign business dealings of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. “You have a guy [Biden] whose son is embezzling money from everybody and enriching himself off of, you know, his father’s position,” he lamented. (I will pause here for a moment to allow you time to marvel at the fact he was able to say this with a straight face while his dad was justifying attempts to hold the G7 conference on a Trump property.)
To be clear, there is no evidence that Hunter has ever done anything illegal – apart from, as he has freely admitted, taking cocaine and trying to buy crack. However, Eric is right that Hunter appears to have profited from his father’s position by taking a lucrative board position in a Ukrainian gas company when his dad was vice-president. It is always possible that he got that job on his own merit – despite possessing little experience or expertise in either the sector or the country – but one imagines his dad’s position had more than a little to do with it. Seriously, does anyone really believe he would have got that job if his dad had been Joe Bloggs instead of Joe Biden? In a statement last week, Hunter denied doing anything wrong, but did say: “It was poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is … a swamp in many ways.”
Getting paid up to $50,000 (£39,000) a month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while your father is VP of the US does not just sound like poor judgment to me; it sounds highly immoral. And it is, to use Eric’s words, “sickening” that so many Democrats have excused or brushed over the Bidens’ behaviour. The narrative among a certain group of liberals seems to be that you simply cannot compare Hunter raking in money from foreign governments to the corruption in the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Joe, the guy who keeps promising to bring integrity back to the politics, refuses even to admit that his son’s dealings seem sleazy. “The fact of the matter is that this is about Trump’s corruption,” he said when asked about the issue at last week’s Democratic debate. “That’s what we should be focusing on.”
I don’t know about you, but I am perfectly capable of focusing on corruption on both sides of the aisle. There is no question that the Trump family are using the presidency to line their pockets – but they are far from the first people to profit from public office. Politics is a swamp – not just in the US, of course, but around the world. In the UK, it was basically a tradition for MPs to hire their relatives and pay them more than their other staff, until anti-nepotism rules were outlined to crack down on the practice. There is a reason nobody has any trust in government any more. Trump may be one of the most obviously corrupt presidents in a long time, but he is by no means an aberration. Rather, he is an exaggeration of the sort of everyday cronyism and nepotism that has long plagued politics. We must remove Trump in 2020, but we must do a lot more than that; we must finally drain the swamp.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
