When former US President Donald Trump was impeached, for the first time, the cry from the (far) right was that this was all an act of political theatre. This, of course, was not true, but it may be that Republicans in Congress have come to believe their own lies and see impeachment as simply a political tool to tarnish an opponent. What they have overlooked is that like any other kind of trial against an accused person, getting to conviction requires evidence. The testimony of Lev Parnas at the impeachment hearing related to President Joe Biden on Wednesday brutally exposed the fact that the Republicans leading this charge have absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by either Biden or his son Hunter.

That the bombshell testimony from Parnas has exposed the GOP scam is all the more ironic for the fact that he, a former associate of disgraced former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, had been on the side of those who were responsible for fabricating the whole story in the first place.

The concocted tale revolves around an energy company in Ukraine called Burisma. In short, Hunter Biden had served on its Board while his father was the Vice President and point man for the Obama White House. Ukraine was already at war at that time after Russia created the hot war in the Donbas as well as illegally seizing Crimea in 2014. Biden’s remit related to those hostilities.

The allegations against the Bidens were that they had each received a $5 million bribe from Burisma, and got the then Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, fired for sniffing around Burisma too closely. The big problem here is that not a single part of that story is true. The bigger problem is that, according to Parnas, Fox News host Sean Hannity and several members of Congress were engaged in “knowingly” pushing disinformation from Russia.

It is with alarming regularity that the acts of the Republican Party and the Russian state align. The Russians have several motivations behind their troublemaking. Most glaringly, it would be thrilled by a Trump presidency because another tenure in the White House will certainly lead to chaos in the United States at a time when Russia is involved in a full-scale war against Ukraine. A war that saw 31 missiles fired at the capital city of Kyiv just the night before last. Another reason is that this story deepens the belief that Ukraine is a thoroughly corrupt country, one of the chief issues put forward by those who argue against the provision of further military aid.

The story of Burisma first entered the American body politic in 2020, as I wrote for Byline Times back then it was an attempt to distract from the facts of what Trump was then being impeached for. This is a disinformation tactic called ‘whataboutism’, there’s an allegation from one side, and so the other side screams “what about….?” Whataboutism is one of the standard tools of Russian dis- and misinformation operations, frequently employed by their armies of online trolls and useful idiots, and now the GOP.

The impeachment of Trump and the attempt to find grounds for the impeachment of President Biden could not be more different. The former was based on the “prefect phone call” between the Presidents of the US and Ukraine, in which Trump threatened to withhold a military aid package unless President Volodymyr Zelensky did him “a favour” by announcing an investigation into his political rival. The latter was based on Russian lies readily taken up and believed to be fact by large numbers of people in the US, both in and out of political circles.

As an outsider, and as a person directly affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is astonishing that there are so many American minds polluted by Russian propaganda. Some are genuinely duped, others are engaging in and embracing it for reasons of political expediency. Whatever the reason behind it, toeing the Russian line is something that would have horrified the old school of the Republican Party, who realised full well the danger that Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, represented.

Trump was impeached because he attempted to use a package of weapons destined for an ally at war with an adversary as a tool of leverage for his personal political benefit. As Parnas testified, he was instructed by the personal lawyer to Trump, Giuliani, to deliver a message that “unless Zelensky announced an investigation into the Bidens by Monday, that there would be no cooperation, no aid to Ukraine from the United States.” This was a President who not only believed that manipulating the assets of the nation for his personal benefit was perfectly fine, but who also, being unable to deny the charge because there were witnesses to this crime, insisted instead that the call was “perfect”.

Had the Republicans followed the evidence at that first impeachment (or for that matter at the second one) the inescapable conclusion would have been that Trump was guilty as charged and ruling such, the world would not be facing the theoretical possibility of this man, a convicted fraudster and rapist, reassuming the role of the most powerful man in the world.

The evidence in the hearings trying to establish grounds to impeach President Biden is just not there on the other hand. Again, according to Parnas, “I found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens corruption in Ukraine. No credible source has ever provided proof of criminal activity, not the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA. No respected Ukrainian official has ever said that the Bidens did anything criminal in Ukraine.” And “the only information ever pushed on the Bidens on Ukraine has come from one source and one source only, Russia and Russian agents.”

There was no $5 million bribe. Shokin, the Prosecutor General, was not fired because he was getting too close to finding wrongdoing in his investigation of Burisma, because he was not in fact investigating Burisma. Shokin was fired because he was acorrupt man who would look the other way for the right price. His belated dismissal was greeted with applause by Ambassadors to Ukraine from a great number of countries when it happened.

As for the underlying (Russian/GOP) message that Ukraine is a fundamentally corrupt country and therefore undeserving of US aid, the clear Russian goal is to leave Ukraine defenceless so that they can prosecute their war even more ruthlessly. But the fact is that a decade ago millions of brave Ukrainians across the country decided to stand up to the corrupt rule of the Yanukovych regime, and much has changed since then in terms of anti-corruption developments in the country.

At the insistence of civil society, under the watchful eye of allies such as the United States and the European Union, a great number of anti-corruption programs have been successfully implemented. Ukraine, as a nation that fights corruption, has created a new national police force from scratch and developed an award-winning app through which pretty much all government services are delivered, efficiently and transparently. In fact, just one month before the beginning of the big war, as it is called here, I wrote for Byline Times that it is precisely because Ukraine is a model for fighting corruption (and a democracy) that war was inevitably coming.

While President Biden and many in Congress support continued aid to Ukraine in their fight against Russia, American public opinion on this issue has, like so much else in the United States, become polarized along Democratic/Republican lines. At the moment, Republican opposition in the House of Representatives is holding up American military aid to Ukraine. President Biden has managed to send $300 million in emergency aid to Ukraine funded from cost savings from earlier aid packages. According to Politico, “The Pentagon has been unable to send additional weapons to Kyiv since December, when it ran out of money to replenish its stocks.”

This trend, of course, will directly impact the battle going on in Ukraine. It can also shed light on America’s feelings about NATO and international engagement in general. The question that arises from the polling data is:  if the United States is reluctant to provide military aid to Ukraine how willing would it be to defend NATO allies from Russian attack?

Polling conducted by the AP-NORC in late February of this year, found American public opinion split with 37% saying that the US is providing too much assistance to Ukraine while 33% say the US is spending the right amount and 27% say the US is not providing enough assistance.  Resistance to providing American aid to Ukraine is driven by Republican opposition. Fully 55% of Republicans say that America is spending too much on aid to Ukraine. Only 17% of Democrats say the US is spending too much on aid to Ukraine.

It would be a mistake to see Republican reluctance to support aid to Ukraine as a single issue. Rather, it can be seen to reflect a larger tend towards a GOP reluctance to respond to Russian aggression. The same February 2024 polling from the AP showed that only a modest 52% of Republicans support defending NATO allies as opposed to 67% of Democrats.

Former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has commented that he would not support NATO allies if they did not spend enough on their defence budgets. Though many Republicans may not agree with Trump’s harsh tone, current polling data indicates that many in his own party would be reluctant to defend NATO.  Significantly 28% of Republicans in the AP-NORC polling say they would oppose supporting NATO allies in the event of a Russian attack.

Gallup polling also found mixed sentiments on NATO. While a 47% plurality backed American involvement in NATO, 16% argue that the US should decrease its support for NATO while 12% want the US to pull out of NATO entirely. 

It is tempting to blame American reluctance to defend NATO allies on Trumpism. Certainly, Trump is a major factor here. However, it is also helpful to take a step back and view this moment in American foreign policy in context. Today, America’s role on the international stage is something that many take for granted. It was not always this way to put it mildly.

America was a reluctant partner to the Allied effort in World War I. Indeed, Democratic presidential candidate incumbent President Wilson successfully ran for re-election in 1916 on the slogan of “he kept us out of war.” Following World War I, America retreated from the world’s stage.

Isolationism was a powerful force in American politics in the 1930s and early 1940s, when the slogan that Donald Trump employed in the 2016 presidential campaign “America First” was widely used. Though the phrase first appeared in President Wilson’s 1916 re-election campaign, it truly came to national prominence when the name was adopted by the America First Committee, established in 1940, which lobbied to keep America out of any foreign wars. The Committee argued that no foreign power could defeat the United States and furthermore that a Nazi victory over Great Britain would not negatively impact the United States.

Support for the Committee was strong at the grassroots level and in the halls of Congress. At the height of its power, the Committee had 800,000 members and was backed by both Republicans and Democrats. Its most prominent champion was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic and regarded by many as a Nazi sympathiser.

The German victories in the spring of 1940 did not put a dent in American isolationism. Only Franklin Roosevelt’s superb political and communications skills allowed the US to support Britain in 1940 and 1941. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 to catapult the United States into World War II. 

American support of isolationism this time round is less widespread, being based primarily in one political party. This is good news for those who want America to continue to play a role on the global stage. However, given the nature of the American political system, a committed majority in either house of Congress can effectively check a President’s foreign policy initiatives.

So, while the current polling does not necessarily foreshadow a return to American isolationism, it does, along with a reading of American history, strongly suggest that America’s role on the international stage is not guaranteed.

An empty bucket, a Zappos shoebox, potting soil, a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, some synthetic firewood—the flotsam and jetsam of the half-forgotten years. These leftovers from past lives accumulate in suburban garages as the people who once wanted them get older and older. Useless and unnoticed, they yet cling on doggedly until time does its work, their owners depart for good, and new people move in and take them to the dump.

But this particular jumble of detritus has been rescued from oblivion and given a new home in the eternal archives of US history. For it included another item: a damaged box containing classified documents relating to America’s failed war in Afghanistan. That box, like Pandora’s, contained a whole world of trouble. From it has emerged the reality that the Democrats have been trying to evade—the vulnerability created by Joe Biden’s senescence.  

In the report of the special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s retention of official documents at his homes, there is a photograph taken in the garage of his residence in Wilmington, Delaware, by an FBI agent in December 2022. It shows a familiar chaos of discarded objects: the console of a treadmill, red drain rods and a blue ladder, dried white flowers drooping disconsolately from a basket—kept, presumably, because they once meant something. Among them is the open brown cardboard box, its left side tattered and dented, from which peep the blue and white tops of documents Biden used when he was vice-president and then forgot to return after he left office.

US Department of Justice

A photograph of Joe Biden’s Delaware garage reproduced in the special counsel’s report, December 21, 2022

Seen differently, it might all be a conceptual art installation, a mordant commentary on the way America’s longest war has already been consigned to the national garage as just another dust-gathering discard. Instead, it dramatizes a much more literal question of memory and forgetting. Hur used the opportunity of his report to characterize Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” In his disastrous press conference of January 8, responding to Hur’s report, Biden in turn made a verbal slip that seemed to contradict his insistence that “my memory is fine,” describing the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico, el-Sisi.”

The irony here is that Hur uses the location of the box of Afghanistan-related papers in the garage in Wilmington as evidence of Biden’s likely innocence of any crime:

A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy. Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.

Hur, in the body of his report, is actually quite good on the subject of forgetfulness. He recognizes that Biden, after he left office as vice-president, had such long experience of reading official documents that they might not be especially memorable to him: “Mr. Biden, after all, had seen classified documents nearly every day for the previous eight years.” In relation to the contentious documents that Biden retained, including a memo he wrote to then-president Barack Obama opposing a “surge” of US troops in Afghanistan, Hur suggests that some members of a putative jury might “conclude that if Mr. Biden found the classified Afghanistan documents in the Virginia home, he forgot about them rather than willfully retaining them.” In other words, Biden’s forgetfulness was not pathological—it was merely the mundane operation of the human mind, which a jury would accept as normal and understandable.

This is surely right. It’s not just that the evidence related to the classified documents does not support any accusation that Biden deliberately withheld them from the archives. It’s also that it does not support the much more politically charged implication that the poor treatment of these documents is evidence of senility. Biden had these papers in his homes quite legitimately while he was vice-president. Some of them got shunted into the memory hole of an ordinary suburban garage. That he forgot about them is emphatically not evidence of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

The plain fact is that memory is always somewhat hazy, at any age. Indeed, as the White House noted in its rebuttal to the report, Hur references other instances of imprecise recall. Biden’s counsel Patrick Moore had the job of sorting Biden’s archives and searching for potentially missing documents that Biden should have handed over. Moore found documents in a small closet in Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Hur reports that “When interviewed by FBI agents, Moore believed the small closet was initially locked and that a Penn Biden Center staff member provided a key to unlock it, but his memory was fuzzy on that point.” Equally, Hur reports of another of Biden’s lawyers, John McGrail, that his memory of certain events was inconsistent with contemporary written records but concedes sensibly that “McGrail’s memory of these events could well have faded over the course of more than six years.” Does this mean that Moore and McGrail had diminished faculties? Of course not—people forget things.

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The politically explosive part of Hur’s report, however, relates to a much more concentrated period of time: what Biden identified in his press conference as a five-hour grilling by the special counsel’s team over two days on October 8 and 9, 2023. This was in the immediate aftermath of the shock of Hamas’s atrocious assault on civilians in Israel. As Biden put it in his press conference, “it was in the middle of handling an international crisis.” In its rebuttal, appended to Hur’s report, the White House says that “in the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.” If Biden’s mind was elsewhere during the interviews with Hur, most of the world would surely agree that that’s exactly where it should have been.  

Hur’s account of this meeting is nonetheless worrying:

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013—when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.

These lapses of memory are significant and they do provide a troubling glimpse of how Biden may sometimes function in private meetings in the White House. But Hur also performs a sleight-of-hand. He turns the evidence from these two meetings in October into a much more sweeping insinuation about Biden’s mental capacities by linking it back to his unremarkable amnesia about the storage of the documents. He does this by projecting himself into the minds of putative jury members who would see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

How does he reach this surmise? He tells us explicitly: “At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him” (my emphasis). What Hur does here is to fuse the events that would be the subject of such a trial—Biden’s failure to remember where some documents were stored, a failure Hur accepts as perfectly normal—with his own characterization of Biden’s demeanor at the two meetings in October. Thus the perfectly mundane imperfections of memory become part of an accusation of near-senility, the only evidence for which is in those two meetings on especially fraught days in October.

This is grossly unfair. Insofar as Hur has a legitimate concern with the operation of Biden’s memory, it relates to the actual subject of his investigation: the storage of the documents. He provides no evidence at all that there was anything remarkable about Biden’s forgetfulness in this regard. Instead of sticking to his brief, however, Hur then shapes a politically lethal phrase out of a judgment he is not qualified to make—the lawyer appointing himself both as a doctor making a cognitive assessment and as a dramatist inventing a scenario for how twelve members of an imaginary jury might perceive Biden’s imaginary appearance in a witness box. It would be naive to think that Hur was unaware of the potentially historic consequences of this leap from evidence to conjecture.

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This unfairness creates in turn a natural reaction among Democrats. If Biden is being treated so badly, the decent thing is to defend him and to dismiss the whole story as a politically motivated farrago. This is a serious mistake. Hur’s commentary on Biden’s cognitive abilities may be irrelevant to the job he was supposed to be doing. But it is not, alas, irrelevant to a presidential election that could shape American history for decades to come. For even if Hur’s is a low blow, it is a punch that someone was always going to land. Biden’s age is a gaping vulnerability that the Democrats have pretended not to see.

The right seizes on and magnifies every gaffe that Biden makes, but the blunders are real and seem increasingly frequent. In the days before he mixed up Sisi and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he also confused Helmut Kohl with Angela Merkel and François Mitterrand with Emmanuel Macron. Under the pressure of a vicious election campaign, these moments may well happen more often and attract more attention. Hur’s report feeds into a narrative that was already established—that Biden is losing it—and makes it unavoidable.

Four days before Biden’s disastrous press conference, Hage Geingob died in a hospital in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Geingob, who was eighty-two and the serving president of Namibia, was the only other octogenarian running a democracy. His death leaves Biden in a club of one. Biden really is exceptionally old for a working head of government. And there has been consistent polling evidence that this is one kind of exceptionalism that Americans don’t want to claim. As the New York Times’s chief political analyst Nate Cohn puts it, Biden’s age is “arguably the single most straightforward explanation” for why he is trailing Donald Trump. “It’s what voters are telling pollsters, whether in open-ended questioning about Mr. Biden or when specifically asked about his age, and they say it in overwhelming numbers.” Those numbers include a majority of Democrats.

It’s no good pointing out that Trump is almost as old and equally prone to verbal slips. It’s no good highlighting the undoubted truth that, while Biden’s language may sometimes be uncomfortably sloppy, Trump’s loose lips utter toxic lies and dangerous slurs. These things don’t change the facts that no one has ever run for a presidential term at the end of which he would be eighty-six, that Trump gets a free pass on almost everything, and that Biden, fairly or otherwise, is the lightning rod for deep generational discontents and widespread unhappiness at the persistence of an American gerontocracy. His age gives Biden an apolitical way to retire gracefully, standing by his considerable achievements in office while passing the problem of being too old to be president onto Trump.

Nikki Haley was probably not wrong when she suggested after Biden’s press conference that “the first party to retire its eighty-year-old candidate will win the White House.” But if Biden persists in running, there will in effect be only one candidate: Trump. He will be the Republican contender but he will also be, as the monster to be feared, the primary motivator for Democratic voters. The election will be a referendum not on the incumbent president but on his challenger. Since Biden is unable to shake off the perception that he is too old to be president, he cannot make his own case effectively. He will rely on the simple proposition that he is not Trump. In a deeply uncomfortable sense, Trump, having taken ownership of the Republicans, will own the Democrats too.

The post The Memory Hole appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The Silent Revolution in American Economics

I don’t think you’re expecting what I’m about to say, because I have never seen anything like this in fifty years in politics.

For decades I’ve been sounding an alarm about how our economy has become increasingly rigged for the rich. I’ve watched it get worse under both Republicans and Democrats, but what President Biden has done in his first term gives me hope I haven’t felt in years. It’s a complete sea change.

Here are three key areas where Biden is fundamentally reshaping our economy to make it better for working people.

#1 Trade and industrial policy

Biden is breaking with decades of reliance on free-trade deals and free-market philosophies. He’s instead focusing on domestic policies designed to revive American manufacturing and fortify our own supply chains.

Take three of his signature pieces of legislation so far — the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and his infrastructure package. This flood of government investment has brought about a new wave in American manufacturing.

Unlike Trump, who just levied tariffs on Chinese imports and used it as a campaign slogan, Biden is actually investing in America’s manufacturing capacity so we don’t have to rely on China in the first place.

He’s turning the tide against deals made by previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, that helped Wall Street but ended up costing American jobs and lowering American wages.

#2 Monopoly power

Biden is the first president in living memory to take on big monopolies.

Giant firms have come to dominate almost every industry. Four beef packers now control over 80 percent of the market, domestic air travel is dominated by four airlines, and most Americans have no real choice of internet providers.

In a monopolized economy, corporate profits rise, consumers pay higher prices, and workers’ wages shrink.

But under the Biden, the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department have become the most aggressive monopoly fighters in more than a half century. They’re going after Amazon and Google, Ticketmaster and Live Nation, JetBlue and Spirit, and a wide range of other giant corporations.  

#3 Labor

Biden is also the most pro-union president I’ve ever seen.

A big reason for the surge in workers organizing and striking for higher wages is the pro-labor course Biden is charting.

The Reagan years blew in a typhoon of union busting across America. Corporations routinely sunk unions and fired workers who attempted to form them. They offshored production or moved to so-called “right-to-work” states that enacted laws making it hard to form unions.

Even though Democratic presidents promised labor law reforms that would strengthen unions, they didn’t follow through. But under Joe Biden, organized labor has received a vital lifeboat. Unionizing has been protected and encouraged. Biden is even the first sitting president to walk a picket line.

Biden’s National Labor Relations Board is stemming the tide of unfair labor practices, requiring companies to bargain with their employees, speeding the period between union petitions and elections, and making it harder to fire workers for organizing.

Americans have every reason to be outraged at how decades of policies that prioritized corporations over people have thrown our economy off-keel.

But these three waves of change — a worker-centered trade and industrial policy, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, and moves to strengthen labor unions — are navigating towards a more equitable economy.

It’s a sea change that’s long overdue.