Even Writing About Trump’s Large Adult Sons May Now Get You In Trouble

President Donald Trump’s war on the media is expanding. Now accurately reporting on the griftiness of his eldest failson, Donald Trump Jr., puts the media in the crosshairs. 

On Monday, Business Insider published a piece about how much cash Don Jr. is stacking since Dad became president again. It’s not a particularly sensationalized piece, but it is a detailed look at how Don Jr.’s lot in life continues to improve. 

The piece is mostly about his investment startup, 1789 Capital, was languishing as a tiny venture capital firm before Don Jr. joined as a partner, but now it’s blowing up, investing millions in Elon Musk’s companies and in defense startups that just happen to be eligible for federal Defense Department contracts. 

Presumably, just noting that Don Jr. is getting even richer from his connections to his father isn’t what caused so much consternation here. The administration is gleefully flouting conflict-of-interest laws, and Trump the elder is perfectly comfortable bragging about how you can buy access to him if you’re rich enough. But the piece’s real sin appears to be that it compares Don. Jr. with former President Joe Biden’s younger son, Hunter Biden, saying that Junior is doing precisely what Republicans accused Hunter Biden of: trading on his father’s name and position. 

In reality, there’s not much of a comparison. 

At the very worst, Hunter Biden’s misdeeds consisted of asking the federal government for help getting an energy contract in Italy on behalf of the Ukrainian company Burisma when his father was vice president. He also took a board seat at a Chinese private equity firm around that same time. The most explosive allegations about corruption in the Biden family proved to be a lie told by FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who is now in prison for it, but—surprise, surprise—the Trump administration wants him released. 

And let’s not forget that when Joe Biden was president, he did not try to stop the Department of Justice from prosecuting Hunter over tax evasion and a gun charge, though he did pardon him shortly before leaving office. 

Altogether, that’s little compared with the amount of money Don Jr. has managed to acquire by implicitly or explicitly saying that if you give him money, you can talk to his dad. 

The comparison so enraged the Trump administration that it’s making noises about opening a federal investigation into Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer. A frantic Breitbart News article waxed rhapsodic about how the BI piece “backfire[d]” because it now has drawn “massive federal attention onto its foreign ownership structure and lobbying activities before the federal government.” Breitbart even tried to give the so-called scandal a catchy name: “German Influence Operation.” 

It’s laughable that the Trump administration has only just learned that Business Insider, along with Politico, is owned by a German company, Axel Springer. When Axel Springer bought Politico, it was a billion-dollar deal, and media coverage rarely failed to mention the company was based in Germany. But now everyone on the right has to pretend this was a secret, that the Germans were slipping in under the cover of night to gobble up American media companies to push their foreign agenda.  

Targeting Axel Springer is even more laughable given that the company has a history of pushing right-wing causes. Its CEO, Mathias Döpfner, is known in Germany for his anti-woke and libertarian views. Even before buying Politico, Döpfner was chummy with Ric Grenell, Trump’s ambassador to Germany during his first term. 

But the type of mobster-style fealty that Trump demands is absolute. So even though Axel Springer is obviously not using the American media to push some sort of anti-Trump, pro-German, pro-woke socialism or whatever, even one negative article about the family is too much. 

An unnamed White House official told Breitbart that the piece about Don Jr. could be considered “illegal foreign political meddling.” Perhaps that statement says more than the official realized: that writing negatively about the president’s son is somehow “illegal” and somehow meddles with American politics. 

That’s not based on showing that BI’s piece was inaccurate. It’s saying that the mere act of talking bad about Don Jr. is criminal, and that doing so interferes with America’s political goals. Junior’s business interests must be protected, for freedom’s sake or something. 

There are things, of course, that do raise the specter of illegal foreign political meddling, such as letting the Qatari government give Trump a $400 million plane. Or Don Jr. reportedly dangling access to himself—and, by implication, the president—as a way to get people to buy Trump condos in India. Indeed, either Junior or Eric Trump, one of the president’s other nepo babies, is apparently set to return to India next month to oversee the development of two Trump-branded towers. 

Meanwhile, their father, the president, has taken aim at media outlets, and some of them are not covering themselves in glory here. ABC News kicked things off before Trump even took office, coughing up $15 million to settle the defamation lawsuit he had brought against the network. He barred the Associated Press from access to White House events because they refused to change how they referred to the Gulf of Mexico, disinterested in adopting Trump’s dumb, jingoistic renaming. He issued an executive order that seeks to defund public media, which is not a thing he can do via executive order, but it’s the thought that counts. 

It’s not clear what stage of fascism it is when accurate reporting on the family of the president warrants the threat of federal investigation, but that appears to be where we are now.