Split Screen America: Trump vs Hunter Biden

Imagine a man. Let’s say he’s in business and, by business, we mean the kind of multimillion-dollar business most of us can only dream about. His family is connected, also in a way most of us can only dream about. He’s young(ish), virile, but he’s going through a few things. Let’s say his family life has been complicated and has tested him in ways that few of us are ever tested. The combination of money, power, psychology, lust, and opportunity combine. He loses his way. He descends into the kind of depraved sordid lifestyle most of us can also only dream about. He even has the triple X-rated videos on his laptop.

Now imagine all this suddenly entering the public domain. There are two likely scenarios. The first involves the typical unravelling of another Great American Scandal. The man’s reputation is destroyed as the media pick over his life, turning it inside-out in an attempt to uncover every salacious detail, which they report in suitably shocking terms.

And then there’s the second scenario in which he is lauded by the Conservative Right as their Newest and Greatest Brother…

Because that’s what’s so striking about the MAGAWorld’s ongoing obsession with Hunter Biden. Had he been named “Don” and caught doing all the things he has been caught doing, they’d be using his face on campaign T-shirts. His tax avoidance would be described as a moral duty to ensure the federal government remains small. His drug problems? It’s libertarianism, baby! And his sex tapes would be an expression of those masculine values being threatened by Barbie’s pinkness. CNN audiences would be cheering his sexual misconduct. He’d be up there alongside the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse, Roger Stone, and Roy Moore as another toxic male whose very toxicity gives him leverage in the Republican game.

In the working diorama of Whataboutism that is American politics right now, the Great Irrelevance known as Hunter Biden remains the go-to symbol for familial corruption. Many of the New Right – the Trumpers like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Green – need Hunter because he’s the Biden administration’s weak point. Last month, Green appeared at a House Oversight Committee and held up graphic photographs of a nude Hunter Biden engaged in various sexual acts, proving the old point that those disgusted by sex the most also obsess over it the most. Plus ça change.

Republicans need Hunter to provide “balance” to what they’re witnessing on the screens every night. It doesn’t much matter that most of the headlines they generate amount to “Republicans Still Have Nothing on Hunter”. It’s also telling that on the morning after Trump’s latest indictments, there was no mention of Hunter or his legal woes on The Washington Post’s front page. Nothing too on the New York Times. Nothing on The Drudge Report and nothing on the page of the BBC’s news site dedicated to US coverage.

Meanwhile, The New York Post’s editorial was about the “Biden Crime Family”. He’s prominently there on Fox News’s website. OAN meanwhile devote one story to the Trump indictments but has two stories about Hunter. Two Hunter stories were on the Wall Street Journal. The National Review lead with Trump’s Indictment (“This Trump Indictment Shouldn’t Stand”) but beneath it are four Hunter stories.

It speaks to the partisanship of the whole business, how news is pedalled to two mutually exclusive audiences. That’s not to say Hunter Biden doesn’t have significant legal woes or that there’s not some public interest in those woes. But there’s just not that much. The last time we talked about the Great Irrelevance, he had negotiated a plea deal with the Justice Department over a failure to pay taxes and also his purchase of a gun whilst taking drugs. We reported at the time that the deal was considered fairly normal given his crimes. Since then, the plea deal fell apart under scrutiny from the trial judge. Biden’s legal team will now have to strike a new deal with the DOJ but the mistake here would be to think that this is in any way meaningful. In any normal political cycle, our attention should have already turned to more pressing matters, such as who is going to be the next President of the United States.

The fact that a person as irrelevant as Hunter Biden continues to make headlines reflects how fraught the next presidential election has become for the GOP. Republicans have very little to encourage them. Ron DeSantis’s campaign has imploded predictably, including him firing 30% of his campaign staff, while one of his SuperPACs has blown through $34 million without having any noticeable difference on the polls. Mitch McConnell’s very public health problems underscore his weakened leadership inside Congress. Meanwhile, various state-level Republican parties have gone broke, and Donald Trump has now been indicted for a fourth time, yet it looks like it will make no difference to him winning the nomination.

On Tuesday, Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump with four counts in connection to his behaviour around the result of the 2020 election. These were the most serious of the charges that Smith has brought against the former president, having been brought in Federal District Court in Washington where the case will be tried by U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan. Here the where, when, and who do matter. Chutkan was appointed by Obama and has a reputation for conducting speedy no-nonsense trials. She has also previously ruled on Trump, writing the memorable line: “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not president” regarding Trump’s attempts to prevent the January 6 select committee from accessing his White House files. Washington is also not the heavily MAGA Florida, where Smith previously brought cases under a judge appointed by the former President.

In contrast, the drama around Hunter Biden’s legal woes reflects not the seriousness of his charges but rather the lack of seriousness within the GOP. The Republican-led House Oversight Committee spent five hours this week grilling Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. Speaker Kevin McCarthy subsequently took to Twitter (sorry, X) to claim the Trump indictments were the “DOJ’s attempt to distract from the [Hunter Biden] news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, President Trump.” And what news would that be? Well, the headline out of that session was that Hunter Biden had been selling the “illusion of access” to his father.

The “illusion” of access.

The illusion of access is no closer to “real access” than saying that Republicans have an “illusion of a chance” means that they will win in 2024. As the Hunter Biden story continues to prove, Republicans can’t even win the daily news cycle and, for them, the White House gets ever further away.

@DavidWaywell

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