NYT’s Peter Baker: Trump Family Profiting Off The White House Makes Hunter Biden “Look Like A Piker By Comparison”
New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker on Friday’s “Morning Joe” said President Donald Trump is using his family name to make money, making Hunter Biden “look like a piker.”
JONATHAN LEMIRE, ‘MORNING JOE’ GUEST HOST: Peter Baker, the concerns over the Trump Hotel in the first term seem almost quaint with where we are now. It’s a couple of days after the brouhaha over the Qatari jet. Now we have this and that package laid out so well, the concerns about President Trump and his family enriching themselves because with this meme coin, I mean, you’ve covered the White House for a long time. I mean, I’m almost speechless at this. Could you imagine if Barack Obama or Joe Biden did anything like it? PETER BAKER, NEW YORK TIMES: No, we couldn’t. They never did anything like this. It’s not the first presidential family that kind of profited off the White House. You can certainly find other examples of that in history. But the scale of this, the scope of this is so far beyond anything history has ever seen. It’s not just even this cryptocurrency thing, although hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to the president’s family and businesses in fees because of this coin, which is basically just a reminder. There’s nothing to it. A coin is not a value of anything. It’s not even a stock. It’s not even a share of a company that’s producing something. It’s just simply there for people to buy because they want to curry favor with the president. And they can do it anonymously. They can do it secretly. By the way, foreign entities can do that. We also saw as he went around the Middle East last week, the president, his family was out there, you know, sealing deals, making deals. They have been building projects that obviously had interest from people who would like to curry favor with the president of the United States. Melania Trump made $ 28 million from this Amazon, you know, film is, you know, whatever we want to call it, basically an extended advertisement for her that they have made her executive producer and she’s going to be profiting from. I mean, the endless numbers of ways that this family is making money, put even Hunter Biden, as much as the Republicans complained about him trading on his father’s name, it makes him look like a piker by comparison. LEMIRE: Yeah, simply not comparable.
