At a cursory glance, they seem like two peas in a pod or two nuts in a shell – or, perhaps, two inmates in a cell: “convicted felons” Donald Trump and first son Hunter Biden.
The Democrats cannot win in November if the American public believes they’ve unethically weaponized the judiciary against their political opponents, which was why Hunter Biden’s conviction was – for the Left – a godsend: a sacrificial lamb miraculously trapped in a thornbush. It allowed Democrats to argue that the judiciary must be even-handed, apolitical, and totally fair. “See, we didn’t only target Trump. The President’s son wasn’t spared either! Hunter Biden’s conviction proves that justice is blind.”
The GOP must proactively dismantle this argument, or they’ll fail to capture the post-felony messaging: Trump’s convictions mean nothing because they’re the end result of a weaponized, politically biased judiciary that’s wielded by liberal hacks, cronies, and anti-MAGA activists. Republicans cannot win the PR war if the Hunter Biden-Donald Trump convictions are perceived as (more or less) equivalent.
Why?
Because of how audiences process information. Let me explain:
Most people don’t know this, but the home shopping channels (HSN, QVC, etc.) probably have the best institutional knowledge of how audiences respond in real-time to sales messaging because they've meticulously tracked and monetized the data for decades at a time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s called DPM — Dollars Per Minute — and it’s the formula used by home shopping channels to optimize TV sales pitches on a minute-by-minute basis.
It's also why virtually every infomercial is structured identically: First, you have to tell the audience what the problem is overtly; otherwise they’re unreceptive to your solution. (“Oh, no! Not again! Don’t you hate it when…”) Then, you delve into features and benefits and tie it all together with an emotional, urgent call to action. Eventually, you repeat the messaging at around the five-minute mark because audiences’ attention spans are limited. This formula wasn’t accidental; it was the byproduct of nearly 40 years of DPM testing and analysis.
However, when audiences listen to your sales pitch, if they have an obvious concern or perceive a logical disconnect, they’ll tune you out, and your DPM crashes. Instead of making a sale, your audience fixates on their unresolved questions. (This is why infomercials and home shopping channels routinely say, “You’re probably wondering how we can afford to sell such an amazing product for the low, low price of $19.99! Well, the reason is…”)
Until the GOP overtly rebuts the Hunter Biden/Donald Trump comparison, it will lose the PR argument — and thus the election — because the audiences’ cognitive dissonance will dissuade them from considering additional information.
Related: PR Primer for the Trump Convictions: Make Voters Understand Who the Real Monsters Are
So how does Trump win?
The first step is to differentiate the two situations: The Biden administration and like-minded left-wing prosecutors explicitly – and aggressively – targeted Donald Trump for everything under the sun. But nobody targeted Hunter Biden! He was just a drunk, stoned, privileged dumbass who fell on a target.
And, by the way, it was a “target” that everyone was conspiring to protect him from — with sweetheart, one-of-a-kind plea deals that the prosecutor even admitted were so highly atypical that he couldn’t think of any comparable example whatsoever. Hunter literally had to get so high that he lost his laptop (where he weirdly documented his crimes), lied on a gun form, knocked up another woman (before abandoning his child), and had his gun tossed in a dumpster near a school(!) before the prosecutors finally responded — by offering him a slap on the wrist, no jail time, and total amnesty from future crimes.
It was only after the judge noted the bizarreness of the plea deal that it was taken away.
So forget about comparing Hunter Biden to Donald Trump: If Hunter Biden were Donald Trump Jr., he would’ve been convicted and locked up years ago!
Second, a president’s children getting arrested is absolutely not a deviation from long-established political norms: Just a decade or so ago, both of George W. Bush’s daughters were arrested for having fake IDs.
Question: If President George W. Bush had cheered from afar as a rural Alabama jury prosecuted his left-wing enemies – i.e., Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Kerry – do you really, truly believe that the Radical Left would accept any kind of equivalency between the Bush daughters being charged, and the prosecutorial headhunting of key Democrats with White House ambitions?
Mere months before a national election?
Of course not! Instead, they’d scream and yell that Republicans were all fascists and a threat to democracy (just like now).
MAGA boosters must make it 100% clear that attempting to lock up your political opponents is shockingly – and brazenly – anti-American, whereas a president’s family getting into legal hot water is about as American as apple pie – especially for Democrats, where the Kennedy family alone has tallied millions and millions of dollars in attorney fees.
Hunter Biden was never on the ballot. He never will be. He matters as much as Roger Clinton. Hunter Biden is just another name in a loooong line of losers who happen to share DNA with a first family.
But Donald Trump matters. Right now, he’s the odds-on favorite to be the next president of the United States. And because of Joe Biden’s weaponized judiciary, he can’t campaign freely.
He can’t travel freely.
He can’t speak freely because he’s under a gag order.
And he might not even be able to attend the Republican Convention.
This is direct, deliberate, orchestrated electoral interference – and an attempt by Democrats to rig the first Tuesday in November because they don’t trust the American people in a free and fair election. If there’s a snowball’s chance in Hell that Americans will choose Trump, the Democrats will take their choice away—which is exactly what they already tried when they attempted to remove Trump from the ballot via “creative interpretations” of the 14th Amendment.
Today’s “Democrats” simply don’t believe in democracy.
Meanwhile, prosecutors did the exact opposite for President Biden: They found new, novel reasons not to charge him for corruption, crimes, and illegal activities. They’ve bent over backward to protect him, declaring that he’s just too senile and feeble-minded for a jury to convict.
(Yet, I have a sneaky feeling that a jury in, say, South Carolina, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Louisiana, Florida, Wyoming, North Dakota, Idaho, Kentucky, Arkansas, or Texas would be willing to overlook President Biden’s senility and/or dementia — should the Republicans, at long last, finally decide to fight fire with fire.)
Hunter Biden was convicted because he’s a drug-crazed dummy who refused help. Donald Trump was convicted because millions of patriotic Americans support him, and he’s probably going to be the next president.
The two are not the same.
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