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Welcome to Thunderdome, your weekly update on Hunter Biden’s love life, which won’t require any conjugal visits after all! (A downside perhaps, because some girls find that hot.) Thanks for listening to our weekly podcast, the latest edition of which is available here. I hope you’ve subscribed, and you can stream it here:
The dynamics of parallel stories often create ridiculous scenarios for today’s partisan water-carriers. When a system is inhabited by people who often share aspects of corruption, the number of pot-kettle moments tends to overwhelm. So it is with the current dominant tropes being pushed wholeheartedly by those with no apparent compunctions. You can be lulled to sleep by an entire CNN panel agreeing that ProPublica’s targeted campaign against Supreme Court justices is on the up and up, with the suggestion that a lifetime appointee such as Samuel Alito can be bought with a fishing trip. Then you wake startled to see the same chorus decrying the Republican investigations into the millions upon millions of dollars from China raked in by a network of Hunter Biden LLCs, saying there’s nothing to see here and you’re a conspiracy theorist if you say there is!
The blatant nature lends itself to hilarity. Once, these media entities counted on you forgetting what you’d seen or read weeks or months earlier. Now, they assume you have the mental storage capacity of a fruit fly. And much as the Biden White House would like all of this to be the end of the Hunter Biden storyline, it refuses to go away, and Republicans aren’t about to stop investigating. Had the 2022 midterms gone differently and it was in the interest of Democrats to push Biden out, the New York Times would be covering this too. With things as they are, they need Biden to hold on, even if that grip is feeble. There’s too much risk that anyone else could lose to Donald Trump.
Trump can’t stop talking
When you are facing a delicate legal matter with the armed might of the government’s lawyers arrayed against you, giving a public national interview on the topic of your indictment is not typically advised by your attorneys, if they are worth much at all. That didn’t stop Donald Trump for one second. His choice to sit down with Bret Baier for an extended conversation about his campaign and his case is truly something only he would do — because it’s just so crazy! Prosecutors can use anything he says against him, and he’s obviously tipped his hand on how he views this entire situation. Perhaps the most useful thing he gets out of it is sympathetic support from the widespread number of hoarders we have in America. But a defense that amounts to “don’t touch my stuff, there’s golf shirts in there” is hardly the basis for confidence.
Beyond the former president’s comments related to his case, there were three moments that stood out.
First, his response to Baier’s question about how to win over the female independent swing voter whose turn against him was so critical to his loss in 2020. Trump launched into not a winning message for those voters, but a defense that accused Baier of ignoring evidence of a rigged election and meandered around his typical claims of malfeasance by Democrats here there and everywhere. No message for that hypothetical voter was ever really offered, and Trump doesn’t seem interested in offering it.
Second, there was this interesting line of questioning about criminal justice reform and the First Step Act, something that, as my colleague Amber Athey has pointed out, Trump and other Republicans have been stepping away from after progressive prosecutors made such a mess on crime in major cities. Ron DeSantis in particular has been attacking Trump on this. Per Semafor:
DeSantis has led the pack on repeal, calling the bipartisan legislation a “jailbreak bill,” blaming it for higher crime, and denouncing the release of a terrorism financier who benefited from its sentencing reduction.
“They’re releasing people who have not been rehabilitated early, so that they can prey on people in our society,” DeSantis said on The Ben Shapiro Show last month, echoing some of the law’s original critics, like Arkansas senator Tom Cotton.
Baier invited Trump to defend the law, which he did, of course, but also pointed out that he’s been calling for the death penalty for drug dealers, which created this awkward moment:
Baier: Critics of that law point out that 13,500 people have been released, about 12 percent of them have committed serious crimes after that. Joel Francisco was serving a life sentence for selling crack cocaine. He was released in 2019, allegedly stabbing a man to death. Rearrested. Paul Moore, drug trafficker, fatally shot a rival, received a reduced sentence.
Trump: But I focused on non-violent crime. As an example, a woman who you know very well was in jail. She had twenty-four more years to serve, she served for twenty-two years. Alice [Johnson]…
Baier: But she’d be killed under your plan.
Trump: Huh?
Baier: As a drug dealer.
Trump: No, no. No. Under my, oh, under that? Uhh, it would depend on the severity.
Baier: She’s technically a former drug dealer. She had multi-million dollar cocaine ring.
Trump: Any drug dealer.
Baier: So even Alice Johnson?
Trump: She can’t do it, OK? By the way, if that was there, she wouldn’t be killed, it would start as of now.
Baier: No, I know, but your policy—
Trump: Starting now. But she wouldn’t have done it if it was death penalty. In other words, if it was death penalty, she wouldn’t have been on that phone call. She wouldn’t have been a dealer.
And third, of course, was this amazing montage from Baier: the litany of former cabinet members and high-ranking staffers who are opposing Trump this time around, and the dismissive insults he uses even for those who were loyal till the very end:
This time your vice president Mike Pence is running against you. Your ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, she’s running against you. Your former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said he’s not supporting you. You mentioned national security advisor John Bolton, he’s not supporting you either. You mentioned Attorney General Bill Barr, says you shouldn’t be president again, calls you a consummate narcissist and troubled man. You recently called Barr a gutless pig. Your second defense secretary is not supporting you, called you irresponsible. This week you called your White House chief of staff John Kelly weak and ineffective and born with a very small brain. You called your acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney a born loser. You called your first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson dumb as a rock and your first defense secretary James Mattis the world’s most overrated general. You called your White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany “milquetoast.” And multiple times you have referred to your transportation secretary Elaine Chao as Mitch McConnell’s China-loving wife. So why did you hire all of them in the first place?
Of course, Trump fired back that he had ten names for every one bad one. But this itself is an object lesson in how difficult it will be for Trump once he returns to office to have the best people in critical roles. If the only way your story ends is with him turning on you, who wants to sign up for that? But that’s a problem for future Trump, so it essentially doesn’t matter at all.
The NYT: isn’t it weird Ron DeSantis has kids?
Well, that didn’t take very long. The New York Times is targeting the DeSantis clan for having the audacity to be youngish in a political climate that rightly belongs to the recently deceased:
As top-tier presidential candidates go, Ron DeSantis is something of a rarity these days. He was born after the Vietnam War, he came of age when computers were common in American homes and he still has young children of his own, rather than enough grandchildren to fill a basketball team.
Mr. DeSantis would be forty-six on Inauguration Day if elected, younger than every president since John F. Kennedy. It’s a fact he doesn’t state explicitly, but his campaign has set out to make sure voters get it.
The Florida governor talks frequently about having the “energy and discipline” needed for the White House, keeping a busy schedule of morning and evening events. He and his wife, Casey DeSantis, often speak about their young children, who are six, five and three and have joined their parents on the campaign trail. One of the few candidates with kids still at home, Mr. DeSantis regularly highlights his parental worries about schools and popular culture as he presses his right-wing social agenda.
When he signed the state budget on Thursday, he joked that a tax break on one of parenthood’s most staggering expenses — diapers — had come too late for his family, though not by much.
“I came home, and my wife’s like, ‘Why didn’t you do that in 2019 when our kids were still in diapers?’” Mr. DeSantis said.
One dynamic that is sure to be a factor in this election should DeSantis end up as the nominee — other than an inevitable heart attack for noted political guru Larry Hogan — is the age factor. We don’t know how much the country has an appetite to move on from the 75+ crowd until it actually is tested in front of a general audience. Personally, I think it’s much higher than anyone anticipates.
Does Gavin Newsom have to run?
The California governor’s shadow campaign has been very blatant, but for now, he’s been behaving like a loyal pro-Biden soldier — and the White House is throwing him love for it at every turn. Viewing Newsom as a top surrogate is all well and good, of course, until Joe takes a wrong turn stepping over a sandbag and drops into the orchestra pit. We all know what Newsom’s playing at, here, but he doesn’t dare challenge the old man and risk being blamed for a Trump return next November. But at some point, he’ll have to make a decision about how far he’s willing to go to ensure next spring doesn’t see Kamala Harris ascending to the top of the ticket.
Super early veepstakes jockeying
Whoever Trump chooses as his running mate, it’s not going to be Mike Pence or anyone like him. Trump wants a show pony this time around, not someone who’s going to be charting their own policy plan or have any tendency toward the much feared “disloyalty” which runs in only one direction in these parts. Everyone assumes that the likeliest choice is a woman, and that woman is likeliest to be South Dakota governor Kristi Noem.
That hasn’t stopped one would-be veep from lobbying openly for the job. According to People, Kari Lake has practically set up camp in Mar-a-Lago — she’s certainly not spending time in Arizona — in hopes of being considered. But this leaves something to be desired. Trump likes winners, real winners, and there’s enough victimhood and martyrdom in his own narrative to double it up with Lake.
As for a dark horse candidate, there’s this item from my colleague Oliver Wiseman on one Nancy Mace, who has been notably cozying up to Donald Trump in recent months:
Missing from the Politico report, however, are words like “vice president” or “running mate.” There’s gossip among South Carolina politicos that Mace is on the Trump campaign’s shortlist. And there’s some logic to it: she’d be a candidate with a genuinely compelling backstory, she is a prominent lawmaker on TV, including non-Fox channels, and she has plenty of appeal to exactly the sort of independents who would decide the race.
You can imagine the appeal to Trump — the only thing he likes better than a true believer is winning over someone who opposed you at first. You can read our profile of Mace here.
One last thing
I’ve interviewed Will Hurd several times and think he’s an interesting fellow, but his decision to be one more long-shot addition to this presidential field is bizarre to say the least. Perhaps it’s about elevating his profile to try to mount a comeback in Texas politics, but unless you’re aspiring to a career in media or lobbying, 1 percent finishes are just not the way to kickstart anything. Expect Hurd to get a lot of attention from the media, given that he’ll hit Trump but doesn’t have the baggage of being Chris Christie. Yet surely there’s something better to do than wander around Iowa and New Hampshire for a few months before inevitably giving up. There was a time when Beto O’Rourke and Will Hurd were both thought of as part of the future of their respective parties. That time is called the past — and it’s a different country.
