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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 if information is of a personal nature, and is unrelated to the job, my default position is to leave campaign staff alone.”
Murtaugh addressed the seeming contradiction between calling the personal trials of private individuals off limits while running a campaign that stood to benefit from Hunter Biden’s illicit laptop revelations.
“We went after the Bidens because they mostly got away with what they did, and no one went to jail,” Murtaugh told a reporter. “But the difference between them and me is that I did face consequences. I went to jail twice, for a total of 15 days, I was on probation for three years, my driver’s license was suspended, I paid fines, and I had one of those breathalyzer things on my car. I paid for what I did.”
Murtaugh also made clear that as a spokesman for the Republican presidential campaign, “I never criticized [Biden] for his addictions, only the illicit business dealings that involved his father.”
Murtaugh is an example of someone who triumphantly conquered addiction, rising from the depths of chronically maintaining a certain blood-alcohol level to get through the day to the heights of advising the president of the United States throughout the week. After multiple stays in rehab, he writes how alcohol almost ruined him several times, personally and professionally. Murtaugh was looking down the barrel of an 80-day prison sentence for another alcohol-related misdemeanor that threatened to cost his job and marriage before his final push for sobriety would prove successful.
“My life, as I had known it and hoped it would be, would be over,” Murtaugh said.
“That’s the only thing that did it,” he added, “the knowledge that if I didn’t stop drinking immediately and permanently, life as I knew it would be over and unrecoverable.”
Democrats, of course, would later exploit the arrest records in his past to deliver the consequences his sobriety had thwarted. Talk about a political party constantly lecturing the public about second chances in prison reform.
The memoir is a breeze to read. He gets to the point without meandering on and on about the finer details of addiction, but instead briefly chronicles his own experiences with alcoholism to contrast them with the narrative of his life after drunkenness. Murtaugh also explained how he struggled to find private-sector work because of the newfound stigma associated with Trump following the 2020 election.
“Many people who have held the top comms jobs on campaigns in both political parties — even the ones that lost — have been able to walk into high-profile public relations gig in corporate business, tech, sports, and other private endeavors,” Murtaugh wrote. “But none of those avenues opened up to anyone from the Trump campaign.”
None of those jobs had anything to do with solving the nation’s addiction crisis, Murtaugh said in a text to The Federalist, and he didn’t say whether he would leverage his story to be an advocate for addicts in recovery after the election. But if he did embark on any ventures related to combatting alcoholism, he’d obviously have an ally in the former and potentially future president, whose ability to speak candidly about addiction in the Trump family has generated some of the more viral and authentic moments of this year’s race.
