And so another presidency is about to begin amid scandal. This one, involving Joe Biden’s son Hunter, seems to be an improvement on the last in that it looks more plausible than the Russian baloney the deep state served up after President Trump won the 2016 election. That fiction, concocted by Hillary Clinton, included an invented encounter with peeing prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room and lies of commission and omission by rogue elements in the intelligence services apparently bent on inculpating and perhaps toppling an elected president. One hopes special counsel John Durham will eventually report precisely who did what to whom, and how, so the public will see how much in need of cleaning the Augean bureaucracy has become.
The new scandal, in which the president-elect’s son is being investigated for alleged tax crimes and, previously, for laundering money from his no-qualifications employment in foreign countries, does not suffer from such obvious flaws, such as even its own advocates admitting they lack direct knowledge of its details. And on this occasion, it is not the investigators but their target and his father who are most likely to be tainted, even disgraced. (It has already disgraced the Democrats’ poodle media, as Byron York noted in his newsletter on Dec. 10. House-trained news organizations repeated for more than a year that there was “absolutely no evidence” against Hunter Biden, even as prosecutors investigated actual evidence.) Hunter’s nefarious money interests were central to Trump’s impeachment. It was his pressure on Ukraine’s president for an investigation that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff seized on for lack of a smoking gun.
It’s easy amid this foreign-linked scandal to lose sight of the fact that President Trump has been more successful than his predecessors in many of his dealings with the rest of the world, even though the rest of the world often didn’t like it. Our magazine cover captures the fact that when Marine One carries Trump away from the South Lawn of the White House next month, he will leave behind a world made better by his foreign policy. Mackubin Owens concludes that Trump’s “America First” approach was never “America Alone,” as the president’s critics contend, and was, rather, an often effective and always proper attempt to favor solid national interests over a self-effacement in pursuit of a vague international comity. Seth Mandel writes that Trump’s ability as a deal-maker, focusing on tangible benefits rather than ancient hostilities, often proved wiser than the conventional wisdom of his predecessors, especially in the Middle East.
In our packed Life & Arts section, Rob Long and Eric Felten lament the internet ruin of conspiracy theories and celebrate the humble subtitle, Graham Hillard delves into the emotional isolation of the latest series of The Crown, which remains “one of the best shows on television,” and Mark Hemingway reveals himself to be perhaps the only person to believe that 1984 was the best year for pop music. It takes all sorts.
