Smokescreens: Why Trump Is Encouraging the Investigation into Hunter Biden’s Taxes
By: Karyne Messina
Tags: Trump, Taxes, Projective Identification, Hunter Biden, President

Center for Strategic & International Studies, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, December 9th, the president-elect’s son, Hunter Biden, confirmed that he is currently under investigation for tax evasion. The DOJ has had an open investigation into Biden’s taxes since 2018 but paused briefly in the lead-up to the election in a bid to maintain political neutrality, despite Trump’s unending calls in October for Attorney General William Barr to move full steam ahead and release any juicy intel to the public ahead of the November 3rd election. That investigation has picked up again, which leads this psychologist to wonder: why now?

In 2018, the IRS issued a $112,805 tax lien against Biden and his then wife, Kathleen Buhle, which both parties paid in March 2020. Now, it appears the DOJ is getting involved and is being asked to scrutinize Biden’s dealings in China and his time as a board member of the Ukrainian oil company, Burisma.

Did Trump order the investigation to resume? I’d wager money on it: Trump’s obsession with investigating what he calls “the Biden crime family,” especially Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, led to his impeachment earlier this year.

Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated move, Trump is apparently considering preemptively pardoning his three eldest children and son-in-law Jared Kushner, though none have been charged with any wrongdoing. Trump may be concerned that a Biden administration will press charges against his children, though so far, only Ivanka has been deposed as part of a lawsuit alleging the misuse of inauguration money in 2016. Further, it’s worth noting that presidential pardons would only protect against federal charges, not those brought by the states.

As if there isn’t enough Trump ought to focus on right now (say, the unrelenting death and destruction caused by the pandemic), I see this redoubled interest on Hunter Biden and push to preemptively pardon his own kids as a classic case of projective identification, wherein Trump is deflecting blame and attention for his and his family’s alleged wrongdoings by shifting attention onto someone else.

Projective identification is the act of shifting blame onto someone else, and Trump is an expert at this. Based on my years of experience as a psychologist and psychoanalyst, I know that people who are insecure often project things they don’t like about themselves shift those feelings onto others, acting as if the problem resides elsewhere, causing all sorts of problems for the recipient of this treatment. This mental maneuver, which includes shifting blame to others, is something President Trump has done throughout his life and career and is something I explore at length in my book Aftermath: Healing from the Trump Presidency.

It’s important to recognize this attack on Hunter Biden as a smokescreen to distract the public from other, more pressing issues. Perhaps Biden has embroiled himself in legal or ethical quandaries that are worth examining — whether the DOJ is launching a criminal or financial investigation is still unclear at this point — but the timing and intensity with which Trump is pressing the issue strikes me as a power move to both divert the public from his own failure to deal with the pandemic and to deflect attention from the legal woes potentially facing his own family.