Democrats and the media cried foul on Republicans four years ago when Hunter Biden’s chronic drug use emerged in the spotlight as a campaign issue. The Democrats, however, had tried to exploit the alcoholic past of a senior Trump campaign official in the same election.
A chief spokesman for former President Donald Trump’s latest two presidential runs battled a severe alcohol addiction for nearly 30 years before finally remaining sober. He had almost been clean for four years by the time Democrats tried to weaponize his history with alcoholism to attack him.
In 2019, Tim Murtaugh, the newly named communications director for Trump’s 2020 reelection effort was faced with questions from reporters about a pair of previous DUI convictions that included jail time. Murtaugh detailed the attempted character assassination in his recent memoir, Swing Hard In Case You Hit It, comparing existence as an addict to his new life as a senior spokesman for a presidential campaign.
“We managed to fight them all off,” Muraugh wrote, “and I learned through my conversations with those reporters that my arrest record was being shopped around by a specific Democratic opposition research firm that typically looks into the backgrounds of Republican candidates for office.”
Murtaugh said the experience led him to develop “a strong aversion to attacking the staff of any campaign.”
“Naturally, a candidate is an appropriate target of criticism, and a staffer who says or does things that are germane to the campaign should be considered in bounds,” Murtaugh wrote. “But
