Donald Trump Jr is facing a wave of mockery after suggesting that Hunter Biden is somehow responsible for the crisis in Ukraine.
“Will it ultimately be Hunter’s lucrative and shady AF business dealings in Ukraine that gets us into a war with Russia?” Mr Trump tweeted on Monday.
Russia has amassed over 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, sparking fears of an invasion. Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, once served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Mr Trump did not explain how he believed these two facts were connected.
On Twitter, many ridiculed the scion’s attempt at foreign policy analysis.
“Hunter Biden is apparently causing Putin to threaten an invasion of Ukraine, according to this geopolitical genius,” one reader commented.
“Why yes…” another wrote sarcastically. “Russia often invades neighboring countries because of their ties to Hunter Biden.”
“When my cholesterol numbers spiked recently, I blamed it on Hunter Biden,” another mocked. “My doctor didn’t buy that either.”
Hunter Biden has long been a target of conservative accusations. In 2019, then-president Donald Trump pressured the country’s president to publicly investigate the younger Mr Biden’s work at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company. But the browbeating backfired when an anonymous whistleblower revealed it to Congress, leading to Mr Trump’s first impeachment.
A year later, during the US presidential election, Mr Trump’s allies released a trove of embarrassing photos and documents regarding Mr Biden’s past drug addictions, allegedly taken from his laptop.
That backfired as well. Many journalists believed the story was not backed up by enough sources or evidence, and it failed to gain momentum outside of conservative circles.
Mr Trump himself complained that the scandal was not catching on.
“You can’t have a scandal if nobody writes about it,” the former president griped at a North Carolina rally, shortly before the election. “We have the fake news not writing about it and the Big Tech not writing. How can you have a scandal? Nobody’s talking about it.”
On Monday, some on Twitter accused the Trumps of repeatedly using the president’s son as a distraction.
“Trump family playbook: when things start looking down for the family, bring Hunter back into the spotlight!” one user commented.
