President Biden and the triumphant return of “whataboutism”

Once upon a time, the practice of comparing yourself to your opponents and defending yourself based on the actions of others was frowned upon as Russian misinformation tactic, until, of course, it became useful to defend President Joe Biden.

In the Trump Era, as in less than three years ago, we were told that whataboutism, that is the practice of comparing President Trump to his predecessors and other politicians was bad, very, very bad.  How bad?  According to NPR in an article published on March 17, 2017, whataboutism is, in fact, one of Russia’s “favorite propaganda tactics.”  “President Trump has developed a consistent tactic when he’s criticized: say that someone else is worse.”  In support of this proposition, the author, Danielle Kurtzleben, recounted how the President responded at the time to criticisms of his proposed healthcare plan by pointing out that the existing Obamacare system was a colossal failure requiring millions of dollars in marketing alone.  President Trump asked, fairly enough in my opinion, “If Obamacare is so great, why’d they spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to ‘hype’ it? BAD!”  Similarly, Ms. Kurtzleben identified whataboutism in the former President’s response to former Fox News’ host, Bill O’Reilley.  Mr. O’Reilley questioned his seemingly cozy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, insisting “Putin is a killer.”  The President responded by stating the obvious, also in my opinion, “There are a lot of killers. You got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?”  One can certainly question the former President’s rhetorical style, but what precisely is objectionable either factually or politically about either statement is far from clear.  It’s not unusual for a politician to respond to criticism of a proposal by pointing out that the current system is flawed.  One might argue that the entire point of the new proposal is to resolve those flaws.  It is also fairly standard practice for Presidents to engage with foreign leaders who fail to live up to our values.  Putin might be a killer, but so is the Shah of Iran and the Chinese Communist Party.  There is little logic to embracing a dialogue with some but not others, not to mention progressives in general have elevated America’s purported sins into an entire realm of study.  Regardless, Ms. Kurtzleben found these exchanges and others quite troubling because,  “This particular brand of changing the subject is called ‘whataboutism’ — a simple rhetorical tactic heavily used by the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. And its use in Russia helps illustrate how it could be such a useful tool now, in America. As Russian political experts told NPR, it’s an attractive tactic for populists in particular, allowing them to be vague but appear straight-talking at the same time.”

Whatever the merits, the practice of accusing President Trump and his supporters of rampant whataboutism continues to this day.  Time Magazine, for example, remarked on “The Dangerous Whataboutism in the Trump Classified Docs Case” less than two months ago.  Barbara McQuade began by helpfully stating, “Whataboutism may have become a common political ploy but it is a trick straight out of the disinformation playbook.”  At issue was whether there were any similarities between the former and the current President’s unlawful retention of classified documents.  Necessarily, there are both similarities and differences in the two situations.  According to the government, both men kept records they should not, but only one of them kept these documents for years on end, hid this fact from the public after they were found, and was given the opportunity to conduct voluntary searches to secure any additional documents while the other was the subject of an FBI raid.  This does not mean the situations are identical.  No two situations are, but surely the idea that there are some similarities worth mentioning is not beyond the pale as they say.  Ms. McQuade, however, disagreed, taking issue with the former President assailing “the corrupt Biden Administration,” claiming he had been charged “seemingly over the Boxes Hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1850 Boxes at the University of Delaware, additional Boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more Boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over his garage floor where he parks his Corvette, and which is ‘secured’ by only a garage door that is paper thin, and open much of the time.”  Though the statement was factually correct, except for perhaps labeling it a hoax, it was still enough to prompt Ms. McQuade to accuse the former President of mimicking, you guessed it, Vladimir Putin.  “Whataboutism is a strategy used by authoritarian leaders to excuse their own misconduct. According to Russian analyst and writer Vadim Nikitin, whataboutism is an essential piece of Kremlin tradecraft.  The goal of this tactic is not to convince the public that the leader is innocent, but to portray all politicians as dishonest. Anyone claiming to value integrity is scoffed at as duplicitous or naïve.”  She went on to quote Ben Rhodes, a former White House Deputy National Security Advisor under President Obama, who famously ran a monstrous misinformation campaign of his own to advance his preferred Middle East policies.  Mr. Rhodes claimed the Russian President came to power not by convincing everyone he was honest, but by accusing other politicians of being corrupt.  “He simply needed to convince people that everyone was corrupt, and in that case, “Russians might as well have a strong, competent leader who shares their grievances and sense of national greatness.”   “Echoes of MAGA,” Ms. McQuade added ominously in case anyone failed to understand her meaning.

Oddly, there seems to be no such concern over the widespread use of whataboutism to defend President Biden from charges of corruption and influence peddling as more details about his son’s business dealings have entered the public consciousness.  Rather than accept the obvious, undeniable fact that there are ethical concerns and potential criminality when a sitting Vice President allows his son and other family members to sell access to his office for a fee, the reflexive defense is to accuse President Trump of doing far worse.  Hunter, they say, might have made millions arranging meetings and phone calls between his father and foreign nationals seeking an audience for whatever reason.  His associates might have visited the Obama White House dozens of times.  They might also admit that President Biden himself was the “brand” for close to thirty shell companies that funneled this foreign money to at least nine members of his own family.  This may all be true, but it’s not relevant because whatever the case, President Trump made billions, not millions, therefore we need not be concerned about any of President Biden’s ethical lapses or potentially corrupt criminal behavior.  Thus, progressives have recently rallied around reporting from The Washington Post accusing Donald Trump and his son in law, Jared Kushner of shady deals with Saudi Arabia.  “The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source, according to previously unreported details of Securities and Exchange Commission forms reviewed by The Washington Post. His business used a commonly employed strategy that allows many equity firms to avoid transparency about funding sources, experts said.  [Note the odd phrasing, the structuring of the funds to avoid disclosure sounds ominous until they note its a commonly employed strategy, meaning there is nothing unusual here.] A year after his presidency, Trump’s golf courses began hosting tournaments for the Saudi fund-backed LIV Golf. Separately, the former president’s family company, the Trump Organization, secured an agreement with a Saudi real estate company that plans to build a Trump hotel as part of a $4 billion golf resort in Oman.”  In their view, these “substantial investments by the Saudis in enterprises that benefited both men came after they cultivated close ties with Mohammed while Trump was in office — helping the crown prince’s standing by scheduling Trump’s first presidential trip to Saudi Arabia, backing him amid numerous international crises and meeting with him repeatedly in D.C. and the kingdom.”

The innuendo is clear:  President Trump and his son in law closely engaged with the Crown Prince while they were in power only for business purposes.  They quote former Trump National Security Advisor turned administration critic, John Bolton.  “I think it was an obvious opportunity for them to build their Rolodexes.  And I think they were probably hard at work at it, particularly Jared.”  “Why should Jared be worried about the Middle East?” He asked. “It’s a perfectly logical inference was that had something to do with business.”  “Inference,” of course, is not evidence and, to be clear, they present absolutely none that anything improper much less illegal occurred.  The Post found no one to assert that either President Trump or Mr. Kushner discussed business with the Crown Prince or used their position in the government for business purpose.  They have merely the suggestion this might have occurred, based on the only timing of what occurred after the former President and his team left office, and the suggestion itself takes the form of whataboutism.  “A former administration official allied with Kushner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter publicly, said there are numerous examples of top former government employees doing business with people they once dealt with while in public service. Kushner had such a broad agenda that it would be unfair to block business relationships with those he knew from his White House days, the former official said.” Putting this another way, political relationship become personal and business relationships all the time, as one would assume they would. Indeed, the entire Military Industrial Complex is based on a revolving door between the Pentagon and the Defense Industry. The current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was a board member of Raytheon, one of the government’s largest contractors. There is a revolving door between the media and the government, where people frequently move from the public to the private sector and back again based on their network of relationships. This necessarily offers the opportunity for corruption, but to ascertain the truth of the matter in regard to President Trump, one should at least consider his agenda in the Middle East before leveling evidence from accusations. The Post, however, studiously avoids that the former President viewed Saudi Arabia’s role in the region differently than his predecessors and therefore, had every reason to pursue a different type of relationships. NBC News, for example, summarized the Trump Administration approach for us as President Biden took office.  “From the start of his presidency, Trump cultivated Saudi Arabia and placed the kingdom at the heart of his Middle East policy, backing its stance against Iran and encouraging its purchase of U.S.-made weapons.”

In addition, President Trump sought to normalize relationships between Israel and countries in the broader Middle East.  He secured the historic Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, the first such peace deals in well over a generation, and succeeded in opening up air travel between Saudi Arabia and Israel, what was seen as a major breakthrough at the time.  How major?  Despite his initial reticence, what NBC News described as a desire to “reassess” the Trump strategy, President Joe Biden is currently attempting to build on it.  Last week, the Financial Times reported “Joe Biden makes his big Middle East push: a Saudi Arabia-Israel pact.”  Yes, the current Administration is now actively following the blueprint President Trump provided in his engagement with Saudi Arabia while also practically begging them to increase oil production.  These are self-evidently relevant facts when evaluating why President Trump would so closely engage with the Crown Prince, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary except innuendo, it strongly suggests the former President was actively courting the Crown Prince for foreign policy, not fiduciary reasons.  Given how the current President has been repeatedly rebuffed by the same Crown Prince, one might dare to suggest that he should be doing more courting himself.  Beyond the specific details of our engagement with Saudi Arabia while President Trump was in office, there is also the indisputable, numeric fact that his wealth did not increase while he lived in the White House.  As even the Post acknowledged, “In early 2021, as Donald Trump exited the White House, he and his son-in-law Jared Kushner faced unprecedented business challenges. Revenue at Trump’s properties had plummeted during his presidency, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters made his brand even more polarizing. Kushner, whose last major business foray had left his family firm needing a $1.2 billion bailout, faced his own political fallout as a senior Trump aide.”

None of this should imply that allegations of impropriety are not worthy of investigation or reporting, but it does self-evidently fail the Democrats own whataboutism standard by an objective criteria.  There is no evidence of any wrongdoing on the former President’s part, no allegation of an actual pay to play or influence peddling, and a legitimate foreign policy goal which has been embraced by the subsequent Administration.  There is also the obvious fact that President Trump was an international businessman before he came into office, and expanding his footprint in the golf and hospitality industries is a continuation of what he’s already done for decades.  It is true that Mr. Kushner is not a private equity expert, but even then, the Affinity Partners firm he founded can be seen as a direct economic extension of the Administration’s foreign policy and following the success of the Abraham Accords, there is little doubt he is an expert in the region who knows the key players.  Mr. Kushner himself has said as much, that he hopes to open up an “investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel” and views it as a “sign of warming ties between two historic rivals.”  Mr. Kushner is also Jewish, and we can assume he has a vested political in financial interest in the region, where he believes they “kicked off historic regional change which needs to be reinforced and nurtured to achieve its potential.”  The Wall Street Journal has already found evidence of this in action after the fund invested in Israel-based technology companies, “the first known instance that the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s cash will be directed to Israel, a sign of the kingdom’s increasing willingness to do business with the country.”  Further, the House of Representatives, under Democrat leadership, opened up an investigation into these matters in June 2022 and produced no accusations of wrongdoing.  This should not be surprising when these business arrangements were formalized after President Trump left office and the arrangements themselves are to produce (or invest in) a specific product or service, meaning there is a legitimate business goal no matter how the respective parties were first introduced.

Meanwhile, one of the fundamental problems for President Biden has always been that no one, as in not even his most strident supporters, can identify any rational reason why foreign companies would funnel at least $20 million through almost 30 shell companies to his drug addicted son.  Democrats and the media, for example, have taken to claiming that Hunter Biden was selling the “illusion” of access to his father, but we know that in many instances that illusion became all too real and access was actually provided.  Devon Archer recently testified that Joe Biden was the organization’s “brand” while he was Vice President, joining over 20 calls with clients and attending in person meetings after payments were made to his son.  These meetings included representatives of Burisma, where his son earned almost $1 million per year, and Russian oligarchs.  Similarly, Hunter’s business partners visited the Obama White House over three dozen times while his father was in office, suggesting that Hunter’s clients received precisely the access they paid for.  This is despite the President himself repeatedly lying about these very dealings, insisting he knew nothing and met no one.  In reality, there is little, if anything in common between the two scenarios, and Democrats are readily engaged in the very tactics they claim are inspired by Russian disinformation campaigns. It is also worth considering the underlying fact that President Trump has long been known as a freewheeling, no holds barred, international business man who’d cultivated lucrative deals all over the world.  His business relationships and contacts were debated endlessly during the campaign and his time in office.  He was variously attacked for making money in Russia, China, and just about everywhere else, and a plan to build a hotel, the same as he has done his entire adult life, was suddenly seen as a new, anti-American conspiracy if not outright treason.  There were even lawsuits that attempted to have him removed from office for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution.  The debate, as you can see here, continues to this day.  Moreover, no one, not even his most ardent supporters, have ever suggested President Trump was a model of ethics or character.  Instead, it was believed that his pugnacious nature and outsider status were far more critical than traditional political concerns at this point in our nation’s history.

You can debate whether or not we were correct, and you are certainly free to disagree, but the same is not true of Joe Biden.  He was not marketed as a little better or a little worse than his predecessor in this regard or that regard.  He was sold as something different entirely, a lifelong public servant and family man, Scranton Joe.  The Washington Post itself claimed during the campaign that “Mr. Biden is almost uniquely positioned for the moment. He would restore decency, honor and competence to America’s government.”  Keeping that image intact was one of the main reasons the original Hunter Biden laptop story was so aggressively suppressed in 2020.  The idea that his family (or even he personally) was corruptly profiting from his office is antithetical to everything they ever said about him and why people voted for him in the first place.  Defending him by claiming Trump is worse is not only whataboutism at its best, it flies in the face of the entire point of his Presidency, but we should not be surprised:  These people are not now, nor have they ever been honest brokers interested in the truth.  They are political propagandists who will say and do anything to support their own positions, even use the very tactics they claim are straight from Putin’s playbook.