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It’s not altogether clear why Donald Trump keeps accusing President Joe Biden of taking money from China. It appears to have something to do with the Democrat having relatives who did business with a company that has Chinese affiliates.
Regardless, the former president has spent much of the year talking about this with great enthusiasm. Biden, Trump told a South Carolina audience in February, is being “paid off“ by China. The Republican has pushed the same line in conservative media interviews.
In the year’s first presidential debate, the presumptive GOP nominee returned to the subject. The New York Times reported:
As the evening wore on, Mr. Trump’s discipline slipped. He began making wilder claims, asserting that Mr. Biden was a “Manchurian candidate” who was “being paid by China.”
The obvious problem, of course, is that there’s literally no evidence of Biden “being paid by China.”
The less obvious problem is that Trump is drawing attention to one of his own vulnerabilities.
In January, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a devastating 156-page report called “White House For Sale.” Relying on documents from Trump’s former accounting firm, congressional researchers determined that the Republican’s businesses received "at least" $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments — over a two year period — while Trump was in the White House, despite the prohibitions in the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
An NBC News report added that China was “the leading spender, paying more than $5.5 million to Trump-owned properties.”
A week later, the subject came up during a town hall event on Fox News, and the Republican didn’t make any effort to deny the accuracy of the Democrats’ findings. Trump’s defense, for all intents and purposes, was that it’s fine that he took millions of dollars from foreign governments during his presidency because he also provided services in exchange for the money.
In other words, the former president is falsely accusing his successor of taking Chinese money, despite the millions of dollars China spent — during Trump’s White House tenure — at properties Trump owns.
To be sure, this has barely registered as a campaign issue, and the Biden campaign doesn’t appear to have made much of an effort to draw attention to it. But the more the Republican candidate brings it up, the greater the likelihood that the attack will backfire.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.