Dominic Green

Biden is dishonest. His memory is shot. He’s an influence-peddler pretending to be a victim, a lifelong exploiter of his public position who hides behind the lowest forms of sentimentality. Hunter Biden, of course. You’d have to be on the wrong end of a three-day crack binge to confuse Hunter Biden with the impeccably honest, mentally agile and profoundly principled multimillionaire career politician Joe Biden. Hunter has written an autobiography. Or rather, some desperate and shameless mercenary has ghosted it for him. It belongs to the most execrable category of literature, the political memoir — the sort of book written to launch a political career (Dreams From My Father) or, as in this case, to end one (Ten Percent for the Big Guy).

The dim reaper is at it again. We need, President Biden tells us, to wear masks forever, to avoid ‘more cases and more desks...deaths...look...’ Look, fat: the number of desks has fallen in Texas and Florida, where mask-wearing in public is optional, while desks are rising in New York and New Jersey, where mask-wearing in public is required. It looks like COVID-19 works just like public-school teachers: differently in red states and blue ones. Biden uses the phrase ‘mask mandate’ like it’s already been approved, in the way that voters grant a mandate to an elected authority. But it hasn’t been voted for or approved. It’s a proposal from a president who parrots whatever the CDC tell him. It’s up to the state governors to approve or disapprove his suggestion.

Joe Biden is the face of the United States. But Joe Biden no longer looks like Joe Biden. And he no longer sounds like Joe Biden — especially in the long and excruciating silences when he forgets what he’s saying or fumbles for his cue cards. The United States no longer looks like itself either. The sorry theatrical display of Biden’s first press conference is an accurate image of what has happened to American democracy. A carefully limited number of carefully selected journalists asked carefully vetted questions. A carefully chosen president read carefully written answers off his cue cards, and carefully avoided taking any questions from Fox or Newsmax. The White House is no longer the home of democracy. It’s a reality TV series in a care home.

Joe Biden won’t go to the border, but the border is coming to him. The Northern Irish border, that is. On Wednesday, Biden, Kamala Harris (pronouns: she/her) and Nancy Pelosi marked St Patrick’s Day by talking with Irish politicians from both sides of their border. Afterwards, the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, thanked Pelosi for her ‘continued support’ on Brexit. It’s bordering on the ridiculous. Biden’s administration refuses to admit that it has a moral and humanitarian crisis on its southern border, but it makes time to create problems on the border between two close allies, Britain and the Republic of Ireland. The administration insists it isn’t taking sides on Brexit, but the truth is that it already has.

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable. He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

‘I’m actually frightened,’ says Morton Klein. This is surprising: Morton Klein is supposed to be fearless. He’s the president of the Zionist Organization of America, the largest conservative Jewish lobby group in the country. He’s an outspoken defender of Israel and the Jews. He’s a scourge of his enemies — and sometimes his friends too. The Biden administration, Klein says, has made ‘the worst group of appointments to cabinet positions with respect to US-Israel relations ever’ and is ‘mainstreaming Jew-hatred’ at home. The goal, he contends, is to revive the Iran Deal despite the concerns of allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and radicalize the Democratic party through ‘Corbynization’. So why aren’t the other major Jewish organizations also speaking out?

The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning. Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties.

Congratulations, President Harris (pronouns: she/her)! At last, the United States of Mutual Loathing will lead the world by having a female president, just like lots of other countries managed decades ago, and without making a dumb fuss or giving a patronizing lecture. And thank you, Joe Biden (pronouns: he/c’mon man), for accepting the presidency on Kamala’s behalf on the kind of raw day when you should be indoors with a tartan blanket on your legs and the remote in your hand. And thank you to our new surgeon-general, Dr Jill, for propping him up, making sure he stayed awake, and reminding him not to sniff Lady Gaga’s hair. This inauguration looked less like Joe Biden’s big day than a dress rehearsal for his state funeral.

This is the house that Trump trashed. The President claimed that the election had been stolen. He pressed elected officials from Mike Pence down to break the law. Hours before, he rallied his supporters with promises of ‘a wild one’. His lawyer Rudy Giuliani called for ‘trial by combat’. The assault on the Capitol is the result, a mob trying to ‘stop the steal’ by force. The riot at the Capitol throws a brick through the Overton window of acceptable behavior. The Senate hid from the mob, police shot at least one person inside the building with three others dead nearby, and the National Guard were called out.

It’s been a month since the President pardoned a turkey, so why pardon a flock of them now? Presidential pardons and commutations may be lawful and traditional, and the conduct of government agencies in the Trump years has certainly confirmed that presidential fiat might be fairer than the Justice Department. But some of the names in Trump’s flurry of pre-Christmas pardons smack of the Washington insider-trading that Trump has decried — and suggest we might be better off with no pardons at all.There are exceptional cases, of course, but they are rare. The necessity of Andrew Johnson pardoning Confederate combatants after the Civil War is obvious.