Team Trump: Hunter Biden’s addictions off-limits

In the 2020 campaign, and now with the 2024 fight, it didn’t seem like there was much former President Donald Trump’s pit bulls wouldn’t go after when it came to bloodying President Joe Biden.

But there was one topic largely off-limits in the last campaign and so far in the 2024 battle: first son Hunter Biden’s personal addictions.

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“I never sought to attack Hunter for things directly related to his addiction, or for his condition of being an addict,” Trump’s 2020 press secretary Tim Murtaugh said.

And it wasn’t because he was soft on Hunter Biden. In a new book out in April and during an interview, he said that he had a little secret. He was an alcoholic himself.

Murtaugh, sober now for over eight years, said there was a fine line between criticizing Hunter Biden’s alleged criminal actions but not his addictions. And that line was whether he had paid a price for his actions.

He recalled reporters threatening to reveal his alcoholism and nights in jail, but successfully blocked those stories from coming out, arguing that he had paid for his failings.

They came at him again when the 2020 campaign raised allegations of crimes stemming from Hunter Biden’s computer and trips with his father to Asia. Reporters argue that since the campaign was going to bash Hunter Biden’s past, Murtaugh’s arrests for drunk driving were fair game.

Now a campaign consultant and podcast host, he said attacking Hunter Biden for alleged crimes versus personal addictions was different since Biden appeared to be getting away with alleged crimes because of his last name. “Big difference,” he told us.

In his book, he added, “I knew what it was like to be controlled by a substance, and I wanted to stay away from bashing him for that. But anything involving foreign payments that could have involved his father were totally in bounds.”

In Swing Hard in Case You Hit It, Murtaugh said that he is taking charge of his own story and hopes it can also help those in recovery.

“I’ve always thought the best recovery books were the ones in which real people told their own stories of struggling and succeeding. So, that’s what I wanted to write, and if it can help one person not drink for just a little while longer, then it will have been worthwhile. It certainly helped me in that regard while I was writing it,” Murtaugh said.

And, he added, “it allows me to take back my own story and tell it on my own terms. Political operators have repeatedly tried to peddle stories to reporters about my alcoholic past, and now I’ve taken away their power.”

The title of the book is a link to his family’s baseball past. His grandfather was Danny Murtaugh, a former manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and his father used the line attributed to Babe Ruth often. His consulting firm is appropriately named Line Drive Public Affairs.

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It includes passages about the campaign, how the coronavirus affected the election, and his recollections of Jan. 6.

He also included stories about the Bidens that the media refused to acknowledge, at least until after Biden won. For example, he recalled how the media looked the other way on reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“The point of telling this part of the campaign story is not to relitigate the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has since been confirmed as real by some of the same news outlets which refused to report on it originally. Rather, it’s to show how utterly uninterested the media were in following a story that was harmful to Biden, and how readily they accepted the phony smokescreen that the laptop story was a Russian operation,” he wrote.