“You Are in a Cult”: Democrat Slams GOP Reaction to Hunter Biden News

At a House hearing Tuesday, Representative Jim McGovern called out Republicans who have started to spout conspiracy theories after President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was convicted on federal gun charges.

“The only ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ going on around here is on the other side of the aisle. People are saying that Biden orchestrated the conviction of his own son in order to justify the criminal charges against Trump,” McGovern said. “That is how you think when you are in a cult.”

McGovern also called out the Republicans who claimed that Democrats had “weaponized” the Justice Department to go after Donald Trump, but were suddenly celebrating Hunter Biden’s conviction.

“The contrast today is just staggering. Apparently when a Republican is convicted, it’s weaponization. But when a Democrat is convicted, the president’s son no less, that’s justice? I mean, give me a break,” McGovern said. “Hunter Biden was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just like Donald Trump, because this is our justice system at work.”

McGovern can point to any number of wild Republican reactions to the Hunter Biden verdict, ranging from Representative Thomas Massie’s contention that marijuana users should not be in jail for buying or owning guns to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s statement that the verdict doesn’t disprove his theory that the Democrats are using a “two-tiered” justice system to target Donald Trump. Representative Matt Gaetz even called the verdict “kinda dumb” on X (formerly Twitter), despite having a contentious past with Hunter Biden.

But regardless of how Republicans are dealing with the verdict against Hunter Biden, it doesn’t change the fact that the Republican presidential nominee is a convicted felon in the state of New York and still has pending cases against him in Georgia, Florida, and Washington, D.C.

Republicans quickly hailed Hunter Biden being convicted Tuesday on federal gun charges for failing to disclose his drug use while purchasing a weapon—despite their objections that Donald Trump’s felonies were the result of a corrupt judge and an inherently flawed system.

Democrats wasted no time pointing out the hypocrisy.

“Hunter Biden was just convicted of every single count that was brought against him by the U.S. Department of Justice,” said Representative Jamie Raskin while testifying before the House Rules Committee. “I have not heard a single Democrat—anywhere in the country—cry fraud, cry fixed, cry rigged, cry kangaroo court, or cry any of the many epithets that our colleagues have mobilized against the U.S. Department of Justice and our federal court system, despite the fact that Donald Trump was not even tried in federal court. That was at the state level.”

Raskin then went on to draw further comparisons between the trials of the first son and Trump, arguing that both had the right to a presumption of innocence, a right to counsel, a right to a jury of his peers, and a right to a unanimous verdict.

“And in both cases, a jury unanimously found against the defendant on all counts in both cases. And compare and contrast the difference in reaction between the Republicans and the Democrats,” Raskin said.

The ranking member of the House Rules Committee, Representative Jim McGovern, also had harsh words for the conservative party over their duplicitous moral stance.

“The contrast today is just staggering. Apparently, when a Republican is convicted, it’s weaponization. But when a Democrat is convicted—the president’s son, no less—that’s justice. I mean, give me a break. Hunter Biden was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just like Donald Trump, because this is our justice system at work,” McGovern said.

“After the verdict this morning, how can any Republican in their right mind argue that the Biden administration is weaponizing the [Justice Department] to hurt Republicans and to help Democrats? They just convicted the president’s own son,” he added.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, accepted the outcome of the case shortly after the decision was released—a stark contrast to Trump’s constant raving about a two-tiered judicial system.

“I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal,” Biden said in a statement. “Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”

Donald Trump is lashing out after a report that those in his inner circle are considering reviving mandatory military service.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Trump’s last defense secretary, Christopher Miller, said a national service requirement should be “strongly considered” in order to boost numbers and morale in America’s armed services.

Trump, in response, took to Truth Social to decry the whole thing as “fake news.”

“The Story is completely untrue,” Trump said of the on-the-record interview. “In fact, I never even thought of that idea. Only a degenerate former Newspaper, which has lost 50% of its Readers, would fabricate such a tale. Just another Fake Story, one of many, made up by the DEAD Washington Compost!”

Speaking to the Post, Miller outlined a vision, also detailed in the Trump team’s Project 2025 document, to give military recruiters increased access to schools and mandate the armed service’s entrance examination at public schools that receive federal funding. “If we’re going to prepare for a great-power competition,” Miller said, “it’s helpful to have a baseline understanding of the pool of potential military service members and their specific aptitudes prior.”

Though Trump tried to distance himself from the report, he’s had nothing but good things to say about Miller in the past, and Miller is reportedly being considered for defense secretary if Trump retakes the White House. According to the Post’s reporting, other former Trump officials are also musing about bringing back mandatory military service.

But perhaps Trump’s reaction to a mandatory service requirement isn’t all that surprising. Though he attended a military academy, Trump notoriously dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. More recently, his infamous “suckers” and “losers” quote, referring to fallen U.S. soldiers, has come back to haunt him.

According to polling, the public’s confidence in the military is at a multidecade low, and over the past several years, branches of the military have struggled to meet their recruitment goals. The idea of mandatory service is not a radical idea in the Republican Party. Senator J.D. Vance, a Trump V.P. contender, and Senator Lindsey Graham have both voiced support for a compulsory service program in the past. “I like the idea of national service. And I’m not talking about in wartime,” Vance said, calling for more Americans to put “some skin in the game.”

It seems that nothing, not even a guilty verdict for Hunter Biden, can convince right-wing conspiracy theorists like House Speaker Mike Johnson that the Department of Justice is not under the direct control of the Democratic president.

CNN’s Manu Raju spoke to Johnson shortly after the ruling on Tuesday, and asked him whether he felt Biden’s guilty verdict undermined the GOP narrative that Democrats have implemented a “two-tiered” justice system to target Donald Trump.

“It doesn’t, every case is different, and clearly the evidence is overwhelming here,” Johnson said. “I don’t think that’s the case in the Trump trial, and all the charges that have been brought against him have been obviously brought for political purposes. Hunter Biden is a separate instance.”

Ever since Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in his hush-money trial, the former president’s allies in the far-right GOP have claimed louder than ever that the Department of Justice is a politically motivated weapon of the Biden administration. One might think this notion would be challenged by Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict, but that person would also have to imagine that these Republicans operate on a baseline of logic or reason. No such luck.

The Republican response to Biden’s conviction is unsurprising, since the cast of disgruntled lawmakers hasn’t been convinced by any other evidence that challenges their worldview. Last month, the Department of Justice released an indictment against Texas Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife, charging them with bribery and money laundering. On Monday, a witness in the case against Bob Menendez testified that the New Jersey senator agreed to intervene in two criminal investigations, in exchange for a Mercedes. Both Democrats. Both pursued by the Justice Department.

The reality that Johnson would have the public ignore is that the evidence was overwhelming in Trump’s case too. That’s precisely how a unanimous jury found him guilty of all charges.

In terms of Biden’s case not being “politically motivated,” it’s worth noting that the case brought against him is considered relatively rare among gun prosecutions, with even Fox News commentator Trey Gowdy suggesting he might be subject to political persecution. None of this can penetrate the victim complex of the Republican front-runner, however, or his cronies like Johnson.

As conservatives sort out their preferred conspiratorial reactions to Hunter Biden’s felony conviction on Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene has helpfully come along to merge two competing conspiracies together.

Conservatives initially reacted to Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict by largely choosing one of two conspiracies: that Biden’s conviction is an offering from the Department of Justice to weaken outrage over Trump’s conviction, or that Biden’s gun conviction is simply smoke and mirrors to distract from the (very false) allegation that Joe Biden took a bribe to coerce the Ukrainian government away from investigating a gas company whose board Hunter Biden sat on.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has opted to blend these two together, posting well after the initial surge of hot takes that Hunter Biden is “the Deep State’s sacrificial lamb.”

It will likely never occur to those circulating these conspiracies that Trump’s conviction in the hush-money trial came from a city-level investigation unaffiliated with the Justice Department, which began more than a year before Biden announced his bid for president. Nor will it become apparent that Hunter Biden’s charges and conviction are relatively routine and that the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy to which conservatives clutch so tightly was found to have been totally made up by a former FBI informant with reported ties to Russian intelligence.