At Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Minnesota Thursday night, Eric Trump led the crowd in a chant of “Lock him up!” against Hunter Biden.
At the event, Trump baselessly accused former Vice President Joe Biden’s son of embezzlement and suggested the infamous chant Trump supporters have used against Hillary Clinton since the 2016 campaign should now be applied to Hunter Biden.
“Maybe ‘Lock her up!’ goes to ‘Lock him up!'” Trump said.
The audience obeyed and picked up the chant.
Trump’s performance at the rally is the latest example of his personal crusade against Hunter Biden. While the rest of the news-cycle has been focused on impeachment, Trump has spent more than a week on a Fox News offensive, complaining that the media is unfairly critical of him and his siblings while letting Hunter Biden off the hook for nonexistent crimes.
In the past week, he’s gone on The Ingraham Angle, The Story,” and Hannity.
On Oct. 7, Trump joinedFox & Friends to argue that the media has unfairly targeted him despite his “scandal-free life.”
“I’ve lived a totally scandal-free life, I’ve lived an incredibly clean life,” he said, “and they go after me, and they go after Don, and Ivanka, and Barron, and Tiffany, and our children. For what?”
He made these same arguments in op-ed he wrote in The Hill earlier this month, accusing the media of “viciously” attacking his family.
“But can you imagine, if they were willing to try and destroy a ‘kid’ who dedicated his life to pediatric cancer and philanthropy, what the media would say if I had secured a $50,000 a month job on the board of a Ukrainian company, with no discernable duties, in an industry I knew nothing about, in a country where I did not even speak the language?” he wrote.
This, he insisted, is a “double standard.”
Trump claimed that in less than a decade he “raised more than $20 million for terminally ill children at Saint Jude Children’s Research Hospital.” Despite that charity work, he said he “was viciously chastised by the Democrats and the media who relentlessly tried to manufacture stories about me, my mission, and my intentions with the charity.”
However, Trump has hardly led a “scandal-free life,” and his charity is under investigation.
A 2017 Forbes report found that the Donald J. Trump Foundation gave $100,000 to the Eric Trump Foundation in order to cover the cost of fundraisers held at Trump properties, a move that turned charitable donations into profit. The Forbes report prompted the New York attorney general to launch an investigation into the Eric Trump Foundation and to expand the already-ongoing investigation into his father’s charity.
In the past Eric Trump had claimed that all money raised for his charity “obviously goes to the children of St. Jude.” The foundation’s website also assured donors that all donations went to supporting St. Jude. But the Daily Beast reported in 2018 that his foundation spent $145,000 of the $1.8 million it raised in 2016 on covering the cost of fundraisers at various Trump properties, including Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, Trump Golf Links Ferry Point, Mar-a-Lago, and the Trump SoHo, now called the Dominick.
The Donald J. Trump Foundation, of which Eric Trump was listed as an officer, along with his siblings Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, dissolved in 2018 under the weight of the New York State’s attorney general’s investigation. Eric Trump’s foundation remains under investigation.
But to Eric Trump, it’s Joe Biden’s son who deserves the media’s scrutiny for debunked conspiracy theories — and now jail time, too.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
