American politics enters its most dangerous period since the Civil War
Joe Biden’s misbehaviour doesn’t excuse Donald Trump’s misbehaviour. America needs to move on from both these self-seeking and vindictive old men.
If the answer is Donald Trump or Joe Biden, it’s the wrong question. American politics is entering its most bizarre, shabby and perhaps dangerous period in modern times, at least since the civil war in the 1860s.
This past week has seen the former president, Trump, indicted on fresh criminal charges alleging he committed fraud against the American people in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Meanwhile, compelling evidence from Devon Archer, a former business partner of Joe Biden’s errant son, Hunter, suggests Biden Sr has lied repeatedly about his involvement in Hunter’s grimy international business affairs.
US politics has vast real-world consequences. The Fitch Ratings agency stripped the US of its AAA credit rating. Two of the three agencies now have the US at the second credit level.
Consider the implications. By a vast distance the US is the world’s biggest economy. The US dollar is the reserve currency of global trade. But the US budget deficit for the first nine months of this year was $US1.4 trillion ($2.1 trillion). Interest on the debt this year is nearly $US700bn.
No one is focusing on mundane issues such as debt and deficit, spiralling even though the US economy is growing.
The first Republican primary debate is scheduled for August 23 and Republicans will be talking about nothing but Trump. The first Republican primary is next January, the first episode in what will be surely the most bizarre and wretched year in modern American politics.
If Trump wins the presidential election, as he well might, he will be a sprightly 78 on inauguration day. Biden would be 82. Neither man is really fit to be president. There’s still a chance both parties will switch to new candidates, but the longer each dominates his party, the less likely that is.
Trump is now defending 78 criminal charges after special prosecutor Jack Smith charged him with conspiracy to defraud the American people over the election results, as well as trying to deprive them of a fair election and overturn a fair election.
The sheer multiplicity of charges Trump is facing can be eye-glazing. So far there are three main groups of charges, with one more biggie to come.
Trump is charged in New York with paying hush money to a former porn movie star, Stormy Daniels, and failing to declare it properly in business returns. That’s the most ludicrous charge of all.
He’s also charged with unlawfully keeping documents from his presidency, including national security documents, at his home at Mar-a-Largo, and failing to return them to the government when requested.
In the past few days he has been charged over the way he disputed the presidential election results.
In coming weeks he may be charged in Georgia with attempting to influence state officials to falsify election results there.
In all these cases, Trump’s behaviour is contemptible, but it’s a gross and corrosively damaging abuse of process to bring criminal charges against Trump for them. They should be adjudicated politically by voters, not in courts.
The Democrats behind the prosecutions so far (Georgia could be different) seem all too transparent in their motivation. They want to make Trump the centre of attention and ensure he wins the Republican nomination. They believe he’s the candidate they have the best chance of beating. Their calculation is twofold and prodigiously cynical. They think these prosecutions will help Trump win the Republican primary but help him lose the general election.
But all the players are likely miscalculating. Millions of Americans, and the vast majority of Republicans, think these prosecutions are politicised and unjustified. The RealClearPolitics polls still put Trump more than 30 points ahead of his nearest Republican rival, Ron DeSantis.
Trump has constantly defamed and belittled DeSantis, and the Florida Governor has no love for the former president. While criticising Trump, DeSantis nonetheless also condemns these prosecutions. He said: “When I’m president, I will end the weaponisation of the justice system. That means new leadership at the FBI, new leadership at the Department of Justice. A Washington DC grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, and it would convict a ham sandwich if it was a Republican.”
Republican voters have rallied around Trump. Assuming Trump wins the primaries, the US will face an election with one of the candidates possibly on bail in four jurisdictions.
It’s still not absolutely certain Trump will be the Republican candidate. Prosecutors in all his cases will try to bring on trials as quickly as possible so they are held next year, after Trump becomes the candidate, but well before the election, preferably during the campaign.
If it looks as if Trump will actually be convicted of something, it’s just possible the Republicans will switch candidate.
There’s also an emerging “indictment fatigue” that’s having unpredictable effects. After Trump’s first criminal indictment he got a huge bounce in fundraising. The bounce this time was much smaller.
The charges hurt Trump’s campaign in many ways. Despite Trump’s billions, he has always been remarkably reluctant to put his hand in his pocket to fund any part of his campaign expenses or legal bills. Karl Rove reports that this year Trump has raised $US53m for his campaign. Raising that money cost him $US17m. And he spent $US22m on legal fees. These will rise astronomically as cases go to trial.
It doesn’t leave much money for an actual campaign, whereas the Democrat, presumably Biden, will be lavishly funded.
But, as Trump showed us in 2016, he’s intensely unpredictable. Former president Barack Obama recently warned Biden that Trump would be formidable in 2024.
A New York Times poll a couple of days ago showed Biden and Trump dead even at 43 per cent each. This suggests the Democrat theory of the prosecutions – help Trump in the primaries, hurt him in the general election – may not be watertight. If Trump does win, he’ll pardon himself on all federal charges, producing a colossal constitutional crisis.
In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by seven million. He won the electoral college convincingly. But he won several critical states quite narrowly. If he had lost even a couple of those, Trump would still be president.
Biden has been a poor president, good on China and AUKUS, bad on almost everything else. He’s manifestly in serious mental decline. This will get only worse.
What a campaign it will be, Trump in and out of court, maybe even in jail; Biden too fragile and vulnerable to appear at live debates, retreating once more to the passive, isolated style that Covid providentially made possible for him last time.
In my view, all the prosecutions against Trump so far are an abuse of process. I believe Trump is a despicable politician whose behaviour after he lost the 2020 election renders him manifestly unfit for high office. But these are all matters that voters should decide. The Democrat determination to judicialise and criminalise politics is destructive, anti-democratic and sets dreadful precedents.
It reflects trends throughout the West. The mild version we have, so far, is that each side of politics when it gets into government holds royal commissions into the policies and performance of its predecessor.
The politicisation of the law happens in other ways as well. Cardinal George Pell, a completely innocent man, went to jail for more than a year, essentially because he was demonised in the public square. In Britain the government cannot implement border control because liberal judges don’t like it.
The US is enacting a version of what’s happening in Israel, where each side of a political/cultural divide regards the other side as so objectionable it won’t accept the rulings of state institutions when the other side controls those institutions.
Trump would almost certainly be convicted of any charge before a Washington DC jury and almost certainly would be acquitted of any charge before a Florida jury. That’s an appalling way for the US justice system to have evolved.
The US Department of Justice combines what in most Anglophone nations are two separate functions. Generally, there is an attorney-general who is a politician and a cabinet member. But the decision to launch any prosecution is in the hands of non-political civil servants, typically a director of public prosecutions or some such.
Trump is being pursued by Smith, a special prosecutor appointed by the Biden administration. Under previous legislation a special prosecutor, or independent counsel, was appointed at the instigation of the administration but chosen by a panel of judges. That had its problems but it certainly looked less political than simply having the Biden administration appoint a special prosecutor to savage Trump.
Most figures on the centre-left, most Democrats and most of the media love the prosecutions, claiming they demonstrate no one is above the law. Trump supporters hate the prosecutions.
It’s possible, I would say compelling, to regard Trump and his actions after the 2020 election as utterly contemptible and still see these prosecutions as politicised and dangerous.
In claiming to prosecute Trump for fraud because in Smith’s view Trump didn’t really believe the election was stolen, Smith is taking prosecutions into a bizarre new dimension of subjectivity. As president, Trump was tried for his misdeeds in the right forum, congressional impeachment. Ultimately impeachment failed. After that, it should be up to voters.
The National Review, the magazine founded by the legendary William F. Buckley Jr and the most venerable conservative journal in America, judged the Smith prosecution thus: “We have on many occasions condemned Trump’s appalling actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election … now the Biden Justice Department is attempting to use the criminal process as a do-over for a failed impeachment. Jack Smith is attempting to criminalise protected political speech.”
Trump was obviously lying about the election being stolen. But a politician telling lies is not a criminal offence, it’s a political offence, to be punished, or not, by voters.
The double standards are ubiquitous and odious. When she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, against government regulations, used a secret and private email server to conduct official business. She had thousands of government documents and communications, including sensitive national security material, on this server. When this was discovered and she was required to hand it over, her staff deleted more than 30,000 emails they said weren’t relevant to government. Nobody got to see these emails before they were deleted.
When then FBI director James Comey investigated, he ruled that Clinton had breached the law but no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute the case. Clinton was plainly at fault, but the decision not to launch a criminal prosecution against a former secretary of state in a matter that resided in a grey zone was probably defensible. But these exact same considerations must apply equally on both sides of politics, and to political officeholders the zeitgeist doesn’t like, or otherwise the rule of law is a partisan farce.
While all these developments have been unfolding regarding Trump, the news about the Biden family is appalling. Biden claimed throughout the last election that he’d never discussed son Hunter’s international business activities with Hunter. Yet Archer says that at least 20 times Biden, as vice-president, came on speakerphone calls Hunter was having with business associates. The point of all this was to “reinforce the brand”, that is, the Biden brand, used to make big money for Hunter, and perhaps other Bidens, in sleazy international business deals.
Whistleblowers have come forward from within government claiming their investigations into the many alleged criminal activities of Hunter Biden were suppressed by Biden administration Justice officials.
Hunter Biden made huge sums of money from China and Ukraine while his father, as vice-president, was dealing with those governments. In the case of Ukraine, Biden as vice-president was demanding certain figures be sacked in the Ukrainian government while his son was making hundreds of thousands of dollars from businesses affected by these actions. At the very least, Biden as vice-president could have asked that the secretary of state handle Ukraine rather than him.
At the last election, 50 former senior intelligence agency officials said the discovered laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden and contained much salacious and criminal material was not genuine but bore all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. Biden repeatedly endorsed and relied on their testimony.
Yet Biden or his staff must have discussed the laptop with Hunter. Both Joe and Hunter Biden surely knew it was real and the information on it was accurate. Therefore both Bidens repeatedly lied over a national security matter during the campaign.
You could argue that the suppression of the laptop story – the testimony of the former intelligence bosses was crucial in justifying social media companies censoring the story – was important in the election result. Surely under Smith’s bizarre new doctrine of political fraud, Joe Biden could be prosecuted. That of course would be insane.
Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal on tax, gun and drug charges also unravelled in court. The Justice Department wanted to continue to claim it couldn’t answer questions about Hunter Biden because the investigation was ongoing but then in the plea deal give him a clean pass for the future. The judge asked if Hunter could still be charged with failure to declare himself a foreign agent, which is required under US law. That was enough to see the deal collapse.
A US firm that hired totally unqualified employees at vast cost who were closely related to government figures in foreign countries they were doing business in would be liable for corruption charges.
Let me be quite clear. Joe Biden’s misbehaviour doesn’t excuse Trump’s misbehaviour. Nor does the odious nature of Trump’s political persona give a free pass to Democrats to misuse Justice Departments and prosecutorial discretion.
America needs to move on from both these deeply unattractive, self-seeking and vindictive old men. With these politicised prosecutions, Democrats have done comparable institutional damage to the US as Trump has.
All those around the world inspired by America, in my case inspired my whole life by its ideals, must surely weep at the debased, shabby, poisonous nature of its politics right now. with worse possibly to come next year.
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