All in the Family

Back in the early 2020s, I noticed a flag a neighbor was flying that had a silhouette of President Biden in a mafioso-style tux and red carnation with the slogan “Biden Crime Family. Ten Percent for the Big Guy.”

Not well-versed in the minutiae of conspiracy theories, I had to Google it to discern the meaning and learned what any internet search today reveals: a murky story linking Hunter Biden to a $5 million Chinese business deal he was negotiating that would have earmarked a 10% kickback to Joe Biden, who was out of office at the time.

If true, which isn’t proven as far as I can tell, former Vice President Biden (then) would have reaped $500,000 from the transaction.

The purported deal occurred in 2017 when Biden wasn’t in office, but it morphed into a meme in the early 2020s during his presidency that became emblematic of what the far right claimed was the self-enrichment and vast corruption of the Biden family.

Thus, my neighbor’s flag, over accusations of a $500,000 kickback to a man who wasn’t president at the time it allegedly occurred.

As Archie and Edith Bunker sang in the theme song to one of my favorite shows, those were the days.

Fast forward to this summer and President Trump’s disclosure of his more than $2 billion in income during his first year in office, more than three times his income in 2024, before he was president.

As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board put it after the disclosure, “The main difference between Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings and the Trump projects is that the Trumps are brazenly open about theirs.”

The Journal went on to detail the more than $600 million the president and his family made from meme coin royalties launched just before the inauguration and another nearly $600 million made from token sales tied to World Liberty Financial, a company founded by the president, his sons and the president’s advisory Steve Witkoff, whose own son is the CEO of WLF.

While the president raked in hundreds of millions from his crypto ventures, the everyday Joes who took the bait on the scheme didn’t fare as well. According to data released in early July by well-regarded firm Nansen, a leading analytics platform in the crypto industry, about two-thirds of investors in the Trump coin suffered nearly $4 billion in losses from their investments.

Back in 2021, then former president Trump said he thought Bitcoin was “a scam,” and said, “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.”

He was right. But as president, he also went on to make a lot more than $500,000 from his family’s crypto dealings.

I admit I don’t know squat about crypto. I’m old school when it comes to investing my hard-earned dollars and agree with the 2021 Trump, who considered it a scam. I’ve always steered clear of get-rich-quick schemes, and while I’m sure I missed opportunities to make more money, I’m comfortable with my more measured and conservative approach.

It all makes me think about a recent letter to the editor of the Breeze by one of our readers whose friend was frustrated over his deposit of $100 and a year-long wait for President Trump’s “Made in the USA” smartphone, only to learn it was made in Asia.

When our reader pointed out to his friend that 600,000 other people ended up in the same boat for some $60 million, his friend “went on the attack, defending his party and justifying the fraud.”

That tracks with the world we live in.

The Trump Mobile website now says the phone “is designed with American Values in mind.”

I’d be curious to hear what exactly those values reflect.

Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.