Gaffe or Churchill? History will judge Biden | Will Bunch Newsletter

I know we’re only doing Will Smith/Chris Rock hot takes this week. Here’s mine in two sentences: I think the West-Philadelphia-born-and-raised Smith should be glad he chose the undefended Academy stage for an assault, and didn’t have to leap an NYC subway turnstile where a dozen cops would have been waiting. What we saw Sunday was an Oscar-worthy short documentary on American justice.

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Right up until the moment the president delivered his speech — in a stunning and historic setting, in one of Europe’s great capitals — some of his top aides from the National Security Council and the State Department begged him to leave out the incendiary rhetoric. His words, they warned, might needlessly antagonize the Kremlin, and jeopardize the prospects for peace.

But the so-called leader of the free world went ahead and said it anyway.

“There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace,” Ronald Reagan declared on June 12, 1987, in a made-for-TV setting in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, concluding with a flourish, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Those six words — although they weren’t front-page news when they were spoken — would become the most famous utterance of the Gipper’s presidency.

Never mind that the actual purpose of that Berlin speech — convincing U.S. conservatives at home he was still a Cold Warrior, even as he was moving left and hoping to strike a deal with the USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev to end nuclear war — is wildly misunderstood today. What matters is that the 40th president is remembered for the thing Americans want in a leader — boldness and moral clarity — and, even more important, he was validated by the final verdict of history. The Berlin Wall did, after all, come down — making Reagan look prescient, not bellicose.

That history loomed large this weekend as President Biden spoke in front of Warsaw’s Royal Temple, just a few hundred miles from war-torn Ukraine. Like Reagan, Biden had tough words for the current occupant of the Kremlin — Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — and he went even farther than his advisers would have liked.

In the address, Biden was clearly reaching for his inner Winston Churchill as he promised his audience in Poland and around the world that democracy was gearing up to win the fight against rising autocracy, however long that takes. Then, the 46th president — as he is wont to do — veered sharply off script. “For God’s sake,” Biden said, his voice raw and passionate, “this man cannot remain in power!”

In the world of political journalism, there is a big-time obsession with the presidential “gaffe.” So much so that one top pundit, the former Slate editor Michael Kinsley, famously pointed out that a “gaffe” most often isn’t what people assume, someone saying something wrong. To the contrary, a so-called “Kinsley gaffe” is when a politician utters the truth, or at least what they truly believe, in a setting where they weren’t supposed to do that.

What Biden said on Saturday may have been the ultimate Kinsley gaffe. Is there anyone in the world who believes in liberty or democracy and has watched Putin send his tanks and troops, unprovoked, into Ukraine, while raining down cruise missiles or dumb bombs on apartment complexes and hospitals, and not wished for this 21st century czar to be ousted from power ... for the sake of humanity?

And yet you can understand the speed with which Biden’s State Department raced to clarify that the official U.S. policy is not to call for regime change, a matter for the citizens of Russia to handle on their own terms. Biden’s words didn’t alter that — even if it sure sounded like he was calling for regime change. And it’s not hard to understand the fuss. The only realistic way to end the war quickly and with as few additional casualties as possible is to give Putin an off-ramp. If the Russian dictator thinks NATO and the U.S. won’t stop fighting until the end of his rule, and quite possibly his life, then he might fight to the death — even with nuclear missiles.

Two things from the Reagan comparison are instructive.

Under the wrong circumstances, fiery rhetoric can risk extreme danger. In 1983, Reagan had famously called the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” and so months later when America and its NATO allies conducted a training exercise called Able Archer, the Kremlin thought it was an attack and started loading nuclear missiles onto its warplanes. World War III was narrowly averted.

But things had changed dramatically by 1987. Reagan’s “tear down this wall!” may have sounded inflammatory, but the U.S. president was really urging Gorbachev to speed up liberal reforms, during a time when the two superpowers had veered from confrontation into an era of negotiation. In other words, the rhetoric was important — it always is — but it is now understood as one part of a broader strategy that was much less provocative.

Some 35 years later, Biden is performing a similar high-wire act. His carefully balanced strategy — economic pressure on Putin’s regime, diplomacy to bring all of NATO and other developed nations on the same page, military hardware for Ukraine but stopping short of overtly triggering World War III — has been brilliant so far, thwarting Putin’s fantasy of a swift victory. But the plan depends on convincing Americans as well as Europeans that this isn’t just geopolitics, and that the cause of Ukraine is moral and just. That’s not going to happen with mush-mouthed caution.

In Biden’s gamble, the risk of World War III is real, but the risk of not rallying the world community against Putin is seen as even greater. Seeing the monstrosity of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, I think the president’s bet on tough talk is a winner. However, that won’t be decided by me, but by history. And history is written by the winners.

Question: Have we now reached the point where it will be impossible for a President to fill a SCOTUS seat if the Senate majority is held by the opposing party? — Via Andrew Benowitz (@abbenowitz) on Twitter

Answer: Andrew, I’m sad to say the answer appears to be yes. It blows my mind that as recently as the 1980s and ‘90s, some of the most notable, firebrand jurists like the conservative icon Antonin Scalia and his opera pal, the trail-blazing feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, were confirmed with near-unanimous Senate votes. They had strong and sometimes controversial judicial philosophies, yet both were highly ethical and highly qualified. So is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, yet she will be confirmed on close to a party-line vote, with maybe one or two Republicans. The GOP blames the 1987 rejection of right-wing Judge Robert Bork as starting this war, while Democrats will never forget Mitch McConnell stealing a pick from Barack Obama in 2016. The real issue is the rise of talk radio, social media, and the rabidly partisan base of both parties, in which a vote for a decent person on the other side will be used against a senator in their next primary.

I get several emails a day asking when I’m going to write something about Hunter Biden’s laptop — so here goes! But first I want to remind folks of some other names in modern American history. Donald Nixon. Billy Carter. Neil Bush. Roger Clinton. Jared Kushner. It seems like as long as we’ve had presidents, we’ve had presidential siblings or offspring who’ve skirted the law, or just been embarrassing, or both. Sadly, President Biden’s son Hunter — scarred by a life of tragedy, struggling with addiction and other problems — is the latest name on that list. Hunter Biden’s willingness to work for rich foreign clients who might have interests with the U.S. government — the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, or Chinese investors — reflects horribly, in my opinion, on the ethics of the president’s only surviving son. Federal prosecutors in Delaware are investigating whether the junior Biden broke the law on foreign lobbying or committed income tax fraud. If the justice system finds President Biden’s son broke the law, he should be punished as any other citizen.

Some of the Hunter Biden probe hangs on the bizarre discovery of his laptop in an off-the-beaten-track Delaware repair shop and emails that were supposedly found on that laptop and provided to Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Given both the weirdness of the story and memories of the Russian hacking operation in 2016, the media greeted the laptop story — leaked in the 2020 election’s final days — with extreme skepticism. Too much skepticism, it turns out; the laptop and at least some of the emails are now acknowledged as real (although major unanswered questions remain).

To the “Let’s Go Brandon” crowd, the media’s 2020 errors (compounded by over-the-top restrictions on Facebook and Twitter) are proof that the laptop is the scandal of the 21st century. And it would be ... if there was even one iota of evidence of corruption by Joe Biden. Instead, Hunter only pulled off a brief, inconsequential restaurant meet-and-greet for the Ukrainians, while rumors of a Chinese business share for the senior Biden in 2017 (when he was a private citizen and not a government official) proved to be just talk. So all we’re left with is Hunter Biden’s artwork — Billy Beer for a new millennium.