Triggered

  I’ve never heard any story—not even a fake one—that comes close to Biden’s. Here we have two sons of the swampiest swamp creatures the swamp has ever seen, Kerry’s and Biden’s “swamp babies,” hitching a ride on Daddy’s plane and cutting deals during official state business. If there were any money to be made, all 330 million citizens of the United States should write letters and demand stock in Hunter Biden’s company. After all, they’re the ones who paid for the deal that got it going.

  Now, if you’re thinking that Joe Biden’s son having business interests in China doesn’t change the way Biden would deal with our adversary as president, consider this: The Chinese government plays a much different role in that country’s economy than our federal government does in the US economy. Banks in China are not private businesses. They are owned by the government. So when you do business with a Chinese bank, you are doing business with the Chinese government. There’s simply no way around it. And when you do business with the Chinese government, you are signing on to its terms, not ours.

  Make no mistake: China is what happens when you run an economy based on the tenets of communism, socialism, and favoritism. It’s the worst of crony capitalism. The welfare of the state is all that matters, and the workers exist only to make sure the state has enough money. The state decides who is awarded lucrative businesses. If it weren’t for political opposition in the United States, the left would be pulling us further and further into a system just like that one.

  Biden’s chummy relationship with China dates back at least as far as the Clinton administration. In the closing months of the Clinton White House, Congress granted China “permanent normal trade relations” (PNTR) status. Biden supported the measure and in doing so completely underestimated the future of our trade relations with China. On the floor of the Senate, Biden said he saw no reason to think that trade deals with China would hurt US manufacturing. Nor did he see China as a competitor of ours. He said that China had an economy “about the size of the Netherlands.”

  It was that kind of thinking that put us behind the eight ball with a $400 billion–plus trade deficit with China and why my father is doing all he can to rectify it.

  Of course, a guy as savvy as Biden would realize the error of his ways, right? Well, here’s what he said during a campaign event in Iowa City in May 2019: “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They’re not competition for us!” Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs to cheap labor and horrible trade deals with China.

  Now, for Joe and his family, I’m sure this is true. After all, you can’t be in competition with an entity that you’re doing billion-dollar deals with. But for the rest of the United States, I would say that China is going to be a major competitor in the years to come. This doesn’t mean that its economy is stronger or that we can’t beat it. It does mean that China does not operate on a level playing field and that this creates several disadvantages for us. For example, the Chinese government is able to spy on its citizens with a kind of accuracy that Josef Stalin could only dream about.

  Now about Hunter. I’ve been in the political eye for just a little over four years. During that time, I have been accused of colluding with Russian spies, trading on my father’s position for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of business deals, and sympathizing with white supremacists. The only thing I haven’t been accused of by the liberal press is global warming, but I’m sure that’s coming. Even though all of the aforementioned accusations are stone-cold lies, I almost understand why I’m such a target for the left. I’m Donald Trump’s son, and by virtue of that alone, I’m on the left’s most wanted list. Add that I’m a hunter, a shooter, and someone who doesn’t abide by political correctness, and the target on my back gets bigger. Then add my Twitter account, and it’s no wonder I’ve become the left’s public enemy number two behind my dad. What baffles me, however, is how someone like Hunter Biden gets a pass from the press. Only recently has Hunter garnered any newspaper ink or mention on cable news for the stunts he’s pulled. For the entire time he was the vice president’s son, Hunter operated without any scrutiny at all. And boy, oh boy, did he operate. Here’s a highlight reel of his biggest hits.

  In 2009, after closing a swampy lobbying firm in Washington, Hunter Biden opened a venture capital and investment firm called Rosemont Seneca Partners with Heinz and two other partners. Five years later, square in the middle of Obama’s second term, they set up shop in China. They named the company Bohai Harvest RST. The “Bohai” represented the Chinese stake in the company, the “RS” stood for Rosemont Seneca, and the “T” stood for the Thornton Group. A consultancy firm in Massachusetts, it was run by James Bulger, the son of longtime Massachusetts Senate president Billy Bulger and nephew of James “Whitey” Bulger, the infamous Boston gangster. Isn’t that nice?

  In his book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Peter Schweizer described the curious timing of a 2013 trip to China the vice president made with his son and daughter:

  Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden and [Hunter’s daughter] Finnegan arrived to a red carpet and a delegation of Chinese officials. Greeted by Chinese children carrying flowers, the delegation was then whisked to a meeting with Vice President Li Yuanchao and talks with President Xi Jinping.

  According to Schweizer, that trip coincided with the deal between the Bank of China and Rosemont Seneca that formed Bohai Harvest RST.

  “In short, the Chinese government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers,” Schweizer wrote.

  Bad, right? It gets worse. One of Bohai Harvest’s investment partners in China was the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). Just the year before, according to the Wall Street Journal, AVIC had stolen technologies dealing with our stealth fighter for the Chinese version. Can you imagine anything remotely close to that happening during my father’s presidency? We’d have a special counsel appointed faster than you could say “Adam #FullofSchiff.”

  “My frustration is not that the solid reporting on Trump has been too tough, but that the reporting on the Obama administration has been way too soft or in some cases nonexistent,” Schweizer wrote.

  But if you think China was bad for Joe and Hunter, things really got interesting a few years later in Ukraine. On March 16, 2016, Joe Biden flew to Kiev on a mission. In his sights was Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who was so corrupt that the vice president of the United States had to fly to Ukraine to take matters into his own hands. In no uncertain terms, Biden told the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin or the United States would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees. One billion is a lot of money, and the threat worked. The prosecutor general was voted out by the Ukrainian parliament soon after.

  Now, on the surface, it would seem that Biden was like a new sheriff in town, riding to the rescue. The only thing he was missing was a stallion and a white cowboy hat. Like a lot of things about Biden, however, what’s on the surface has very little to do with what’s going on in secret.

  About the time of Joe’s visit to Kiev, Shokin had reopened an investigation into a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings. On the board of Burisma Holdings, getting paid upward of $50,000 a month, was one Hunter Biden. Hunter, who even the failing New York Times had to admit had no prior experience in energy, had just been discharged from the navy reserve for a cocaine-related offense, and had been given the job solely for his connections in Washington. “Hunter Biden and his American business partners were part of a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connected Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama administration,” the Times stated. In other words, Hunter was enlisting high-profile Democrats and the swamp creatures who surround them to shield his company from scrutiny by the US government! By any measure, it was a pretty bold m
ove by the vice president’s son and one that sent the Washington rumor mill into overdrive. Everybody in the Obama administration had to know what he was doing. Everyone except dear old Dad, who claimed that he had found out about his son’s involvement in Burisma only when he had read about it in the newspaper. Now, my father calls the former vice president “Sleepy Joe” for good reason. But he’d have to have been in a coma not to know what his own son was doing in Ukraine. And I’m not even talking about the lines!

  I began this section by telling you that I’ve learned a thing or two about politics. Here’s another thing I’ve learned: The hypocrisy on the left has no limits, and the Mueller Report might be the best example of this. Victor Davis Hanson, who wrote The Case for Trump, summed up nicely the double standard Mueller applied to Democrats in a piece he wrote for National Review: “The problem with the Mueller investigation, and with former intelligence officials such as Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe, is pious hypocrisy. Those who have lectured America on Trump’s unproven crimes have written books and appeared on TV to publicize their own superior virtue. Yet they themselves have engaged in all sorts of unethical and illegal behavior.” And when their lies are exposed, they just cook up new ones. When it’s not collusion, it’s obstruction. Then, when it’s not that, it’s something else. It’s a constant cover-up, and it always leads to nothing.

  When it comes to being sanctimonious, Democrats literally wrote the book, and Joe Biden is a prime example. One of the best things about my father’s presidency, however, is how he’s exposed the deception under which Washington operates. Still, people such as Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and Biden continue to get away with criminal behavior because the left refuses to see what is now plainly evident. So we have to fight fire with fire. If liberals get to investigate, so should we. As Peter Schweizer wrote in an op-ed for the New York Post: “If a two-year investigation of President Trump, Russia and the Trump family was justified to ensure the president isn’t compromised, an investigation into Joe Biden, China, Ukraine and the Biden family is imperative.”

  I can hear the left now: “You can’t investigate Joe Biden; he’s running for president!”

  Yeah, right. Nobody running for president ever gets investigated.

  As the election approaches, there are some things you probably won’t be able to avoid. First, there will be the inevitable “town hall” events during which Democrats will try to tap into some of the off-the-cuff magic that got my father into the White House in 2016, rolling up their sleeves and putting one foot on a stool while they do their best Gee, that’s a good point faces. There will also be a thousand photo ops with blue-collar workers, all screen-tested by the campaign staffs for diversity and camera-readiness. These will probably end with the candidate promising to “keep jobs in America” and “look after the working class.” If you’re lucky, the candidate might even be wearing a cute little hard hat.

  Please know that no matter how uplifting they may seem, the photos are all bullshit, especially if Joe or Bernie is wearing the hard hat.

  16.

  THE OPPOSITION

  AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: THE DEMOCRAT CANDIDATES ARE OUT OF TOUCH, OUT OF THEIR MINDS, AND FRANKLY DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE AVERAGE AMERICAN.

  IN ASSESSING THE 2020 Democrats hoping to run against my father, I have to be careful. It’s very easy for me to become sarcastic.

  Lord knows, the last thing today’s political debate needs is more sarcasm from me. I mean, what purpose would it serve for me to call Vice President Biden “Joey Hands”? Or make fun of Crazy Bernie—oops, Senator Sanders—again? Or refer to the senator from Massachusetts as a fabled Native American princess from the 1600s? There is no reason to add fuel to the fire, especially in today’s political atmosphere. Anyone who does so is provoking just for the sake of provocation.

  Besides, if I make fun of Senator Sanders, he might throw one of his famous crippled-granny right hooks my way.

  But before I get to the circus, er, candidates, I’d like to say a word or two about today’s political process.

  With the exception of the last presidential election, over the past few decades the elite political class has made sure that real people who communicate to voters in understandable ways can’t make it through the primary process and the general election. Instead, they have closed off that path to just about everyone except for a few airbrushed, camera-ready candidates. Those people spit out the right slogans; have big, absolutely unattainable ideas; and bend to the will of the establishment. Both political parties are guilty of this. By the time my father threw his red MAGA hat into the ring, we had been padding the corners of our public discourse for so long, pandering to the most sensitive people among us, that—never mind the Democrats—the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and decent, hardworking people everywhere, was only a fading shadow of its former greatness.

  I’ve said it a few times already in this book, but it bears repeating: Donald J. Trump single-handedly pulled American conservatism back from the brink of extinction, and he did it by ignoring every single rule of American politics. He didn’t pose for the typical candidate photographs or use establishment-approved phrasing in his speeches; he definitely didn’t adhere to the usual norms of practiced dialogue. He made his own rules and beat the system by breaking the old ones.

  Even so, it’s still a hard fight. After all, how do you run against free college, free health care, free housing, and free everything else? Sadly, it doesn’t matter that there is absolutely zero chance of liberals delivering on their insane promises, because today, the sound of the promises is all that matters. And in case you haven’t thought about it, the phrase “Yeah, but that costs money” isn’t exactly a killer campaign slogan. Remember, this is the party that wants to drop $93 trillion on farting cows.

  If Democrats want to have any chance of defeating my dad in 2020—and, to be honest, I think they have very little—they’re going to have to learn to play by his rules. That means no focus groups or debate answers that have been rehearsed a thousand times (or given to bad candidates ahead of time), no resorting to accusations of racism every time they can’t answer a question, and definitely no pretending to be for the American worker when you’re planning to raise taxes, increase spending, and ship American jobs overseas. No promising free stuff that they definitely can’t deliver, either. Instead, they’re going to have to nominate someone who’s smart and authentic and has the support of the people. In other words, someone just like my dad. In the absence of that, they run the same risk of becoming completely irrelevant, just as the Republican establishment did.

  Why am I telling them this, you ask. Because I believe in the American political system and I want it to survive for the future of my children—and theirs. My father’s election proved a lot of things. One of the biggest is that given an even chance, the American people know what they’re doing.

  THE DEMOCRAT HOPEFULS

  By the time you read this, I’m sure that the field of Democrat presidential hopefuls, which was about 412 at one point, will have gotten smaller. Most of them have no chance of winning anyway. They’re just looking for some free and much-needed PR help for their otherwise nonexistent profiles. As I write this, some have already dropped out and are running for lesser offices such as US senator, governor, high school class secretary, etc. Kirsten Gillibrand has already hoisted the white flag and said she’d be willing to be the Democrat nominee’s running mate. She’d do anything for a leg up, like the time she tried to hit me up for a donation by telling me how much she loved the second amendment—true story. When I heard that, it got me thinking about VP candidates for Joe Biden. If he becomes his party’s nominee, it’s a pretty good bet he will be thinking out of the box, making a daring choice that will add a little mystery and romance—er, excitement—to his campaign. I’d really like to hear from you about this. So for Joe’s sake, whataya say we give him a hand? Please tweet your ideas to @DonaldTrumpJr #BidenRunningMate and let�
��s see what we come up with.

  Joe Biden. Since we’re speaking of the former vice president, let’s start our analysis of the Democrats with him. For months, Joe’s go-to line on the stump has been “Government has failed you.” Now, call me crazy, but I’m not sure a guy who’s done nothing but—hold on, let me check my notes here—oh, yeah… be in government for the last fifty years should be complaining about how horrible the government has been, do you? I actually agree with Gropey on this one, but if I were him, this probably wouldn’t be my lead. If things were really that bad, shouldn’t he have done something to fix it by now? What you see here is an aging Democrat who is so close—I mean so close—to actually being self-aware. He knows government sucks. He knows he’s been in government for the last fifty years. He just hasn’t quite put those two things together yet. Oh, well. There’s still time for him to figure it out. Not much time, but still.