Guess who just provided a financial bailout to the Harvey Weinstein company?
In the week since the Harvey Weinstein scandal exploded, Donald Trump and his allies have begun trying to spin it into a Hillary Clinton scandal, simply because Clinton and Weinstein knew each other. But Trump and Weinstein also knew each other, and of course Trump and Weinstein are the two serial sexual assaulters in this story, not Clinton. Now it turns out Trump’s close ally is providing a financial bailout to Weinstein’s dying company.
This month the media has reminded us that Thomas J. Barrack Jr is the closest thing Donald Trump has to a friend. The two men speak regularly, and Barrack even recently insisted in the media that Trump is a “better” person than how he’s behaved. Now it’s Barrack who has some explaining to do, because according to the New York Post (link) he just used his own investment company to dump an “immediate cash infusion” into The Weinstein Company.
To be clear, The Weinstein Company just finished firing Harvey Weinstein after his sexual assaults were exposed, and the company is now controlled by his brother Bob Weinstein. But it’s been widely asserted that The Weinstein Company knew about Harvey’s assaults all along and worked to keep it under wraps, only opting to fire him after it had become a public scandal. Now Trump’s closest friend Tom Barrack is rushing in with a financial bailout at a time when the optics couldn’t possibly be worse.
This serves as a reminder of a few things. Donald Trump’s friends and allies are just as immoral as he is, or else they wouldn’t have become friends with him to begin with. People like Tom Barrack decided to stick with Trump after he was exposed as an admitted serial sexual assaulter, because they truly don’t have a problem with that kind of behavior – and they should be condemned for it. Finally, even as Harvey Weinstein has rightly been fired for his assaults, the Republican Party still refuses to fire Donald Trump for the same pattern of criminal behavior.
