The Biden mistake that blew up America | Will Bunch Newsletter

Happy New Year’s Eve from the Will Bunch Newsletter, which is marking the end of a momentous and possibly calamitous 2024 by not reviewing the last grim 12 months but simply plowing ahead with new topics. I do have big plans for 2025, both personally and in the newsletter and my regular columns, where I hope to focus on some big picture topics — like the disturbing, unchecked rise of AI and (not unrelatedly) the war on knowledge, especially reading and writing — as well as resisting American dictatorship. I hope you’ll stay with me for another wild ride.

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“Justice too long delayed is justice denied...” — the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

It would have been the worst that could happen for America. But it arguably also would have been a fitting tribute to a disastrous four years as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer if Merrick Garland had been succeeded as attorney general by an accused teen-lusting sex fiend and drug user that his Justice Department had declined to prosecute.

Thankfully for the United States as a whole, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz — subject of a hugely damning House Ethics Committee report accusing him of paying a 17-year-old girl for sex after he was cleared by Team Garland’s probe into the matter — ended his bid to succeed Garland in the incoming Trump 47 administration.

That small victory won’t be nearly enough to salvage the legacy of a 72-year-old icon of old-fashioned jurisprudence who won’t only be remembered by the history books — at least the ones that haven’t been burned by his successors — as President Joe Biden’s worst cabinet pick or even his biggest mistake, period, but as someone whose fecklessness and failure to meet the moment may prove the spark that blew up the American Experiment.

True, the world will never know how things would have played out if Garland had named a pit bull like the eventual Trump special prosecutor Jack Smith to immediately begin the work of pursuing high-level justice for the attempted coup that culminated in the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Perhaps the elite-hating, change-seeking U.S. electorate would have elected Trump from his cell at Leavenworth.

I’d pretty much believe anything at this point, nearly a decade after Trump descended that Trump Tower escalator.

But Garland, in dithering like a deer in the F-150 headlights of the American Taliban for 20 months on even investigating Trump’s Jan. 6 involvement until that House select committee laid out his case, seemed to misunderstand something fundamental about the American Experiment. That a democracy capable of embracing a demagogue isn’t truly free without the companion of justice. And the justice too long delayed by Garland and his failures was a terminal case of justice denied.

But don’t believe me. Listen to the man who misread the room four years ago and tapped Garland for the job. The Washington Post reported this weekend the lame-duck, one-term president “complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump” even as his team pressed forward in a questionable case against the presidential son, Hunter Biden.

This now-he-tells-us nugget is planted smack in the middle of a revealing piece about how badly Biden and, more broadly, the Democratic Party misread the American zeitgeist of the 2020s, thinking that voters wanted a quietly competent government and not a leader who looked and talked like a loose cannon of radical change. And yet delusional thinking still persists at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where Biden himself and perhaps some of his inner circle still think the 82-year-old incumbent could have beaten Trump if he stayed in the race — utterly contrary to all known evidence.

That said, the Post article is largely sympathetic toward the outgoing president and his top aides in describing how his 2020 COVID-year victory over Trump fueled a mistaken belief that Americans wanted a return to a traditional democracy that reeked of institutional authority and the status quo — missing the undercurrent of deep distrust that would sweep POTUS 45 back into office.

In that context, Exhibit A of Team Biden’s magical thinking was its decision to pick Garland — a milquetoast ex-prosecutor-turned-judge whose brand was fairness and middle-of-the-road moderation — over runner-up Doug Jones, the former Alabama senator with both shrewder political instincts and a reputation for courage in prosecuting the last KKK bombers who killed four Black girls in a Birmingham church in 1963.

The Post said the faction led by then-Biden incoming chief of staff Ron Klain won the argument that a Garland pick would “show Americans that Biden was rebuilding a department badly shaken by Trump’s political attacks.”

The truth is that any federal effort to prosecute Trump for his role in fomenting the mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021 — whether it had been launched in the March 2021 echoes of the insurrection, or when it actually did start in November 2022 — was going to be attacked as an arrest-the-election loser politization of justice. The problem is that conspiring to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power through threats to Georgia election officials or Justice Department lawyers before finally summoning the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol is actually criminal, as a grand jury would eventually find when the case went before them.

In those first heady days after Biden actually took office, a craven Garland clearly hoped to burnish his reputation for nonpartisan, down-the-middle fairness by assuming that the twice-impeached, election-losing Trump would fade into political oblivion. He wasn’t alone in that wildly wrongheaded calculation, as other cowards like then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — who declined to vote or sway others to convict Trump in his post-Jan. 6 impeachment — made the same terrible bet.

A year and a half later, after the House Jan. 6 probers laid out the evidence that Team Garland had ignored, and after top secret documents turned up at Mar-a-Lago, the naming of Smith as special counsel was long overdue — too long, it turned out. You probably know the rest of the story, as Trump’s relentless deny-and-delay tactics learned as an “apprentice” to hardball lawyer Roy Cohn gummed up the cases and bought time for a Supreme Court with three Trump-appointed justices to rule that a president has king-like power to avoid criminal prosecution for “official acts.”

The clock has run out on Smith as Trump prepares to return to the White House. On Monday, the special counsel’s office moved to hand its appeal of a Trump-appointed federal judge’s dismissal of the Mar-a-Lago charges against the president-elect and ongoing charges against two aides to federal prosecutors in Florida, who’ll soon be under a new AG, presumably Trump pick Pam Bondi. This on the heels of his dismissal his dismissal motion in the Jan. 6 case. The Justice Department has a long-standing — if hard to justify — policy of not prosecuting a sitting president. In a nation of nearly 335 million people that finds it pretty easy to throw other folks behind bars, one man now sits above the law, with an own-goal assist from Garland.

America’s Founders didn’t want this. They also wanted a democracy of leaders chosen by the citizenry, but not a scenario where the people could elect a demagogue who could ignore the law or take away fundamental rights, especially the right to have your vote counted. The notion of justice-for-all is one of those “checks and balances” they buried in the tubing of the American Experiment to keep it from overheating.

Biden has every right to be bitter that Garland’s noble-sounding mantra of fairness allowed, in reality, for Trump to freely run against him while his son was convicted of a stand-alone gun crime not typically prosecuted. But in the end, Garland was just the leading edge of a cadre of Congress members, elite newsroom editors and publishers, and others who believed that the magic of democracy could fix everything without having to take a stand. He will be remembered as the worst Neville Chamberlain-level of appeaser in a nation that turned out to be chock full of them.

Question: What bad scenario in the next 4 years do you see spinning out of control, due to unqualified Trump lackeys being put in place and they don’t have any idea what to do? — Sarah Huckabee Blutarsky (@shuckabeeblutarsky.bsky.social) via Bluesky.

Answer: Sarah, I hate to be Captain Obvious on this one but — while I’m not normally a big public-health guy — I am terrified over how the new Trump administration will handle any major risk of an epidemic, let alone a global COVID-19-variety pandemic, in the coming four years. With the strong likelihood of anti-vaxx loose cannon Robert Kennedy Jr. at the helm at Health and Human Services, working with a web of contrarian scientists, it’s easy to imagine the federal government essentially doing nothing as the next dangerous infectious disease festers. On Monday, I made the mistake of checking in over at Elon Musk’s X/Twitter, which was awash in vows not to comply with any governmental action over growing bird flu concerns. It’s going to be critical for sensible state and local officials to protect us, because RFK Jr.’s Washington clearly won’t.

Last week I asked if Elon Musk and his growing influence on American politics is a major threat to our stability, or a ticking time bomb that might helpfully undermine any MAGA efforts to remake the nation. Most agreed that he’s a quite serious problem, although frequent contributor Daniel Hoffman noted “whether the plutocrats were John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, J.P Morgan or others, American politicians have always been for sale and the influence of the rich has always been pernicious.” Reader Thomas Desmond had the best practical advice to stop buying Musk’s Teslas and stop posting on his X/Twitter, “because we give him less power by not supporting the platform that he is using to push his far-right viewpoints.”

📮 This week’s question: I won’t go all-out tacky and ask for your New Year’s resolutions but I am curious what readers plan to do that’s new or different in 2025. Please email me your answer and put “Different in 2025” in the subject line.

Jimmy Carter, whose remarkable 100-year life touched on everything from the death of the guinea worm to the birth of craft beer, always had an exquisite sense of timing. The death on Sunday of America’s longest-living POTUS instantly triggered the launch of 1,000 opinion essays, not just because of any nostalgia for his post-Watergate 39th presidency but because his life of moral imperative cuts such an obvious contrast with the corrupt narcissism of the man who’ll become the 47th U.S. president just a mere 11 days after Carter’s Jan. 9 state funeral.

Indeed, as I type this just 36 hours after Carter’s passing in his home state of Georgia was announced, it’s hard to know what to add to this conversation. I do want to recommend a couple of excellent essays — by the New York Times' Ron Lieber and writer Craig Calcaterra — that both addressed Carter’s famed 1979 “crisis of confidence speech” (also dubbed, unfairly, “the malaise speech”). They wrote about how it both showed the Georgian’s keen understanding of a deep, moral rot of empty consumerism that threatened America, but also a cluelessness that voters were eager instead for the see-no-evil optimistic bravado of a Ronald Reagan. The comparison between how Carter misread the national mood and the ways that Joe Biden would repeat that, more than 40 years later, is revealing.

Even though his perceptive yet politically ineffective years in the White House seemed to come and go in a flash, Carter managed to teach me, and us, some things about life, perhaps unintentionally. He was running for reelection the first time I voted in a presidential contest, in 1980 when I was 21, and yet this child of Watergate refused to pull the trigger and vote for him. Born too late to protest the Vietnam War, my stubborn college self desperately wanted to protest something. So I blamed Carter’s late-presidency right swerve — a hike in Pentagon spending and the return of draft registration — as an excuse to cast a protest vote, for a liberal Republican (yes, that was a thing) named John Anderson on a third-party ballot. That was stupid. It took eight years of seeing what a real conservative in Reagan could do to America to change me into what I hope I’ve become, a progressive writer who can be pragmatic when that’s what’s called for.

But the biggest lesson from Carter’s incredible narrative arc is that one that all Americas ought to heed in this dark hour for democracy: He never gave up. Booted from the White House at age 56, it would have been so easy for him to cash out on a few corporate boards and go fishing on an early retirement. Instead, he spent 44 years finding new ways to fight for the human rights he believed in, ultimately winning a Nobel Peace Prize less for what he’d done in the presidency than for what he’d done after losing it. In many ways, the 74 million of us who just voted to stop Trump’s assault on democracy and failed on Nov. 5 are facing our own “Jimmy Carter moment.” Let’s follow his example and make the most of it.

Unlike normal folks, I’ve worked a lot on New Year’s Eve over the years. In 2017, or nearly one year into what we can now call the last Trump presidency, I wrote about Trump 45’s year-end interview with the New York Times, and it’s fascinating/alarming to see all the foreshadowing of Trump 47, including an assertion that the president can use the Justice Department to his own ends. This struck me — from seven long years ago! “The flip side of the wide-open and unchallenged interview style was that Trump’s rambling answers, his rapid topic-jumping and his seeming disconnection from the realities of health care reform, the Russia probe, and other critical issues had some well-regarded political analysts openly questioning whether the president is suffering from dementia or some other impairment.” Read the rest: “The one half-true thing Trump said in Times interview was scarier than his two dozen lies.”

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