The setting was inevitable, and the personalities predictable.
On a Fox News interview (where else?) conducted by Sean Hannity (who else?), the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, floated the idea on Monday that House Republicans should move toward impeaching President Biden.
Unhampered by the lack of evidence of presidential malfeasance, McCarthy took the leap that the Republican party’s right wing has long been craving.
“This is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry,” he told his eager media helper, one of Donald Trump’s staunchest allies.
So what are the purported reasons for an impeachment inquiry? Both involve Hunter Biden, the president’s undoubtedly troubled and troubling son.
The first claim is that Joe Biden, while vice-president, participated in his son’s influence peddling. That Hunter did engage in influence peddling for personal profit is a fair claim. Did he suggest that his father, the veep, was willing to go to bat for foreign companies or governments? Not proven but not hard to believe. But that is a far cry from impeachable wrongdoing by Biden himself. (Hunter Biden never worked in the White House, let’s recall, unlike certain opportunistic Trump family members.)
Trump’s more incendiary claims that Joe Biden “received millions of dollars” from foreign sources appears to be made up out of whole cloth; the House oversight committee has been investigating Biden for months with little to show for it.
The second claim is that Hunter Biden got a sweetheart deal from the current justice department, resulting in his recent guilty pleas on misdemeanor charges of tax evasion. Although two former Internal Revenue Service representatives told the House committee that they thought a justice department investigation was hamstrung because of political interference, and that Hunter Biden committed felony-level offenses, no evidence of Joe Biden’s malfeasance has emerged. In fact, in an unusual move, the justice department is allowing David Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney who led the Hunter Biden investigation, to testify – presumably to counter the notion that the Biden administration hobbled his investigation.
As for the Republicans’ excited touting of a potential witness who would somehow produce proof of the president’s corruption, that went up in flames when it was revealed that the would-be witness himself was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2022 (long before his present accusations surfaced) of brokering arms deals with China and Iran. Oh, yes, and he’s a fugitive from justice.
In the wake of that mess, the Maryland Democrat and committee member Jamie Raskin was blunt: “This Inspector Clouseau-style quest for something that doesn’t exist has turned our committee into a theater of the absurd, an exercise in futility and embarrassment.”
Even the former Trump insider, the Ukrainian-born American businessman Lev Parnas, once assigned to find wrongdoing by the Bidens in Ukraine, agreed. In a letter to the chairman of the House committee, Parnas wrote that “there has never been any factual evidence, only conspiracy theories” about such claims.
Stop the charade, he urged. “The narrative you are seeking for this investigation has been proven false many times over by a wide array of respected sources. There is simply no merit to investigating this matter any further.”
But McCarthy and company have no intention of taking that advice. They are, after all, playing to the Trump-controlled base of a Republican party that has gone off the rails – with the dedicated help of the rightwing media and the incessant normalization of the mainstream press.
And they are playing to a powerful audience of one: the twice-impeached Trump himself, frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.
Meanwhile, things are – from the perspective of their boss – going a little too well for incumbent Biden.
Inflation is under control. Unemployment is extremely low. Real wages are up.
“Doesn’t it seem like everything’s breaking Biden’s way lately?” Nate Cohn of the New York Times asked recently, even while noting that Biden’s approval numbers remain low. They have ticked up recently and they may rise more as the reality of an improved economy penetrates public opinion.
Such good news for Trump’s biggest political adversary is unacceptable. Thus, the desperate measure.
The “impeach Biden” movement should be seen for what it is: a maneuver to distract from Trump’s own legal troubles, as investigations mount over election meddling, misuse of classified documents and his role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection.
It’s also an effort to confuse those Americans who have trouble sorting fact from fiction.
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” the great social critic, Hannah Arendt, warned in the 1950s.
“And with such a people,” she added ominously, “you can then do what you please.”
That’s what is scary about McCarthy’s move this week. The Republican effort to impeach Biden is desperate and misguided – but that doesn’t mean it won’t be politically effective.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
