News coverage during presidential transitions often uses a split screen. On one side, the new man is sworn in or glad-hands supporters; on the other, the outgoing chief executive makes his forlorn last exit across the White House lawn.
Sometimes, though, history serves up not just scenes that are the unavoidable obverse and reverse of each other but a really dramatic juxtaposition, such as on Jan. 20, 1981, when Iran began releasing 66 American hostages moments after President Ronald Reagan finished his first inaugural address.
We have a similarly striking overlap now, with the unprecedented second impeachment of President Trump coinciding as nearly as possible with Joe Biden taking the oath of office. We capture this astonishing side-by-side on the cover of this week’s magazine, with Trump’s dark shadow falling across the ceremonial start of the new presidency.
A gob-smacking central feature of Trump’s impeachment is that it isn’t an enemy nation inflicting humiliation on the outgoing president, as it was 40 years ago, but the party of the incoming victor throwing a spanner into the works of its new leader’s first 100 days. Sen. Chuck Schumer will be majority leader a day or two after Biden moves into the Oval Office, and what does he propose to do — put the former president on trial each morning while passing the new president’s agenda in the afternoon? Biden can’t clearly oppose Trump’s impeachment and trial for fear of losing left-wing supporters already suspicious of his intentions. But if he actually liked the idea, he’d have said so rather than meekly commenting it was a matter for Congress to decide.
The irony is now that Trump’s social media megaphone has been silenced, his shadow might fade fast from the political landscape without the permanent disqualification from federal office that conviction would impose. You can see a genuine principle in the impeachment — what Trump did was disgraceful and dangerous — but you can also see Democratic obsession.
So, our split-screen magazine focuses on the new president and the old one. Timothy Carney and Katherine Doyle delve into corporate America’s rush to expunge Trump and install itself as a power within the Biden administration. Ilya Shapiro lays bare the opportunities and limits that Biden, a leading proponent of liberal judicial activism, will find when trying to undo Trump’s success in reshaping the federal bench. Byron York writes that a big winner in the Georgia runoff races was Hunter Biden, who once looked destined to be the Banquo’s ghost at his father’s inauguration but will now skate free of investigation by the Democratic-controlled Congress. Doug McKelway notes that in our politics, time does not heal but seems to aggravate animosities.
In Life & Arts, Park MacDougald reviews Helen Andrews’s witty Stracheyesque demolition of my self-regarding generation in Boomers, Peter Tonguette binge-watches Christmas movies, Eric Felten finds free trials expensive, and Rob Long discovers that his master tailor, Hong Kong Jack, didn’t do jack sh …
