Media Obsessed over Rumors of Trump ‘N-word’ Tape; Largely Ignore Hunter Biden Texts

Hunter Biden / clip from DNC August 18, 2020
DNC/YouTube

The mainstream media breathlessly reported rumors for several years that a tape existed of President Donald Trump saying the “N-word,” but largely ignored a report Tuesday that Hunter Biden used it in text messages with his lawyer.

On Tuesday, the UK Daily Mail reported that Hunter Biden had used the “N-word” repeatedly in text messages with attorney George Mesires, who is white. The text messages were downloaded from Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.

Hunter Biden’s father, President Joe Biden, is already known to have used the “N-word” often as a Democratic Senator, typically while attributing it to other people — such as his “less educated constituency” in Delaware in a 1973 hearing.

But Trump is not known to have used the word, though the media took great interest in the possibility that he might have done so, and reported on the rumors that a recording might have existed, hoping that it would undo his presidency.

CBS News, for example, reported in 2018 that disgruntled former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault-Newman claimed Trump staffers were aware of such a tape, but downplayed the fact that staffers later said no such tape existed.

Comedian Tom Arnold undertook a vast search for tapes from NBC’s The Apprentice on which Trump was supposed to have said the “N-word.” No such tapes were ever found, either during Trump’s presidency or in the months following.

The use of the “N-word,” even in a literary context, is often used as grounds for termination and marginalization — at least when the speaker is white. The New York Times recently forced veteran reporter Donald McNeil to resign for answering a student’s question about the word in 2019, even though McNeil apologized for having said the “N-word.”

Yet neither Hunter Biden nor Joe Biden have yet faced anything like the same scrutiny over their use of the “N-word.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new novel, Joubert Park, tells the story of a Jewish family in South Africa at the dawn of the apartheid era. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, recounts the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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