The Republicans have spent the last four years caterwauling about the “Biden Crime Family” and its alleged connections to foreign countries, especially China. They called it the greatest corruption scandal in American history. There was no evidence of this, of course. But they just repeated it relentlessly and pushed hearings and investigations until the old “where there’s smoke, there must be fire” dynamic kicked in.
Well, here’s a raging, out of control conflagration and nobody cares:
[W]ith Trump running for the presidency once more … foreign governments — including brand-new regimes that weren’t involved in Trump’s first whirlwind in the White House — have only spied new opportunities to burrow into his pockets and into a second administration.
Many of these networks are already known, if forgotten. Trump’s financial links with regimes in places like China, Kazakhstan, or Indonesia were already reported in detail during his presidency. Even after Trump left the Oval Office, the revelations about his subterranean financial links as president with foreign regimes continued spilling out; it was only this year, for instance, that congressional investigators revealed that the first two years of Trump’s presidency included countries as far afield as Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, and many more patronizing Trump businesses. Any of these details on their own would be exceptional — can you imagine how much any other presidential candidate’s secret Chinese bank account would dominate a news cycle? — but they’ve been subsumed in the broader morass of Trump’s scandals. They’ve become, to an almost shocking degree, normalized.
They are completely normal. The media didn’t even really care about the bombshell Washington Post report by some of its top investigative reporters about the 10 million dollar gift (bribe) by Egypt to Trump’s campaign back in 2016. Why would it care about the ongoing bribes Trump is taking from Saudi Arabia and other middle eastern countries much less the dubious deals Jared Kushner is making with authoritarian despots all over the globe he reports in the article.
Trump exists on a different dimension than everyone else. They succeeded in making the fact that he is always awash in scandal, corruption and criminality into such a mundane story that he’s no longer held responsible for any of it. It’s quite a trick.