A day in the public life and politics of a fractured America

Washington: To get a sense of the intense pace at which events in American public life are unfolding, sample a day in the life of a fractured polity and a divided nation in an election year.

Wednesday began with Hunter Biden’s surprise appearance in the US Congress in Washington DC. He faces a federal indictment for tax crimes related to foreign business dealings. Hunter Biden’s business dealings and allegations of conflict of interest implicating the president himself -- Joe Biden has been on calls between his son and his foreign partners before becoming president. The Republican House has used the charges as a basis for an impeachment enquiry against Biden senior, alleging he was complicit in the business deals, a charge the Bidens have consistently rejected.

While Hunter offered to publicly testify, including on Wednesday, Republican lawmakers, who had sought a closed door deposition, rebuked him for not appearing in response to past subpoenas; he subsequently walked out; and Republican-dominated House committees eventually charged him with contempt of the Congress. In election year, America’s Grand Old Party (GOP) hopes to keep the issue alive as a useful tool to deflect charges of corruption and explicit conflict of interest in the case of Republican presidential aspirants, especially the most prominent one.

The day ended with that aspirant, Donald Trump, on Fox News projecting himself both as a candidate of order and disruption, the twin staples of his campaign as he continued to surge ahead of rivals in the first Republican primary caucus in Iowa scheduled for January 15. Trump portrayed the Biden presidency as marked by chaos. “They have chaos at the border. They have chaos in the military. People are going woke. We have chaos now. Look at Hunter Biden going into Congress and just sitting down and the bedlam that’s been caused today. You have chaos”. He mocked Biden for not having the smarts to deal with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, both of whom were “cunning”.

Trump claimed that his term, by contrast, wasn’t marked by chaos and he was the first president in 72 years who didn’t have any wars. He attacked Biden for the situation at the southern border and illegal immigration. He said he would be a “dictator” only for a day to tighten the border and “drill, baby, drill,” a political marker of commitment to fossil fuels without any sensitivity to climate and environmental factors. And amid fears of what he will do in his next term, he promised that there would be no retribution and his success would be the big retribution.Wednesday began with Hunter Biden’s surprise appearance in the US Congress in Washington DC. He faces a federal indictment for tax crimes related to foreign business dealings

Simultaneously, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis debated each other on CNN in the evening, as they compete hard for the second slot in Iowa. Haley is also hoping that a credible performance would give her a bump in the next caucus in New Hampshire where she has the support of the governor and is closing the gap with Trump. DeSantis attacked Haley for being a liberal and not true to Republican values; Haley accused DeSantis of lying. DeSantis accused her of caring more for Ukraine than the American border; Haley presented a classical Republican establishment (as opposed to the now more dominate isolationist strand) case on why Ukraine mattered.

Both tried to skirt the big elephant in the room — Trump — in a sign they didn’t want to antagonise his base too much while carving an independent space. However, Haley did reject Trump’s argument that his actions as president had full immunity — which is his defence in cases related to his rejection of the 2020 election results, efforts to subvert it and encourage a mob attack at the US Capitol to block the certification of the results. And DeSantis warned, while carefully rejecting the premise of the cases against Trump, that a convicted Republican candidate will give political ammunition to Democrats. The positions reflected the differing strategies at play. Haley’s more principled position is targeted at independents and moderates; DeSantis’s more instrumentalist position is targeted at the base by projecting himself as more winnable.

Hours earlier, the only candidate who really took on Trump in the primary, Republican presidential aspirant Chris Christie dropped out of the race, but not before warning the world of the perils of a Trump presidency again publicly and dismissing the prospects of the others in the race in an unguarded moment.

Meanwhile, back in the US Capitol, during the day, House Speaker Mike Johnson faced a revolt from the far-Right of his party that could lead to a shutdown of the US federal government. He was a part of the same far-right faction, which Biden likes to refer to as the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans, till not so long ago and participated in the plot to oust his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, for having sold out to Democrats on tax and spending proposals.

Johnson is now desperately trying to save more or less the same deal that McCarthy had struck, on the grounds that this was the best possible deal in a context where Republicans didn’t have the Senate and had a very narrow majority in the House. No incident perhaps provides a starker illustration of the tension between being an irresponsible dissident faction seeking all out war and responsibilities of political accommodation in a constitutionally designed divided government, a tension that has more broadly led to a civil war within the Republican Party in every state.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue in DC, Biden’s official calendar indicated he had a private lunch with Vice President Kamala Harris in White House. Their press officials, in the James Brady press briefing room, struggled to explain to a perplexed world how the President of the United States could not know that his secretary of defense had cancer for weeks or was in the hospital for days -- unusual under any circumstances, particularly unusual in the Biden administration otherwise known for its discipline, and perhaps unprecedented in the US governmental system and national security grid.

Indeed, Washington DC has been abuzz with the Lloyd Austin mystery for five days now. A Pentagon press release on January 5 had disclosed that he had been admitted to a hospital after complications following a procedure on January 1. It turned out that even the President and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan didn’t know that Austin was in hospital till January 4 in a pretty shocking institutional breakdown at the top levels of the American government. Austin, reported to be an intensely private person, took responsibility for the lack of transparency; Biden, who is legendary for being loyal to his team, wished Austin well and rejected calls for action. Even as White House was overcoming the mini-crisis, it turned out that Austin was suffering from prostate cancer and underwent a surgery for it in December. Biden didn’t know about his defense secretary’s condition till this Tuesday, with the entire episode prompting a White House memo to all cabinet departments to review protocols on delegation of authority and creating a political firestorm.

And remember, the lapse at Pentagon happened even as the US is closely involved in two major wars and a related security crisis on the Red Sea. Indeed, thousands of miles away, on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony J Blinken continued on a tour of West Asia on Wednesday managing the fallout of Israel’s brutal war, conducted with US support, against Gaza and investing diplomatic energy and military resources in securing shipping in the Red sea against Houthi attacks. The entire conflict has serious domestic dimensions in America, with US support for Israel fracturing Biden’s domestic coalition and alienating the young, people of colour, and minorities.

And so here is what we have in a single day in American politics.

A crowded Republican presidential field is becoming less crowded but remains one where Trump is the clear favourite for the nomination. Even as he is already focused on attacking Biden with the general election in mind, others in the Republican fray — Haley and DeSantis — are focused on attacking each other loudly and Trump not so loudly, while somehow hoping that Trump will fumble and they will emerge as the next viable candidate. All of this is happening even as the Republican House leadership faces an internal extremist challenge. But the divide within Republicans isn’t translating into good news for Democrats. Biden is struggling to project coherence within his government, deal with an external crisis, and navigate the blurring of the lines between the personal and political

As America gets more immersed in election mode, internal battles will intensify, fractures will deepen, electoral calculations will change, assessments will shift, public messaging will sharpen, and politicians will have their share of good and bad days. Wednesday illustrates what is to come.

.

-