The State Of Play

It seems to me that the visuals from the big guy's family vacay to Kiawah Island are an indication of where his handlers expected things to be: First Crackhead Hunter was along with his wife and the kid in what looks to be an utterly contrived tableau of family harmony. The real situation is reflected in reports last month that Hunter has called his stepmom a “vindictive moron” and “entitled [redacted]”, while his wife Melissa appears to be a jetsetting do-gooder who likely spends little time with either the kid or the crackhead dad.

Can you imagine what the real atmosphere in that dysfunctional pseudo-family must be like? What are they paying Melissa to stick around? Hunter's broke, and her meter's running. Where does that money come from? Nevertheless, the visuals say the big agenda for Brandon's handlers last week was to rehabilitate Hunter in the runup to 2024. By then, the grand jury investigation will have gone away, and the First Crackhead will be the picture of filial probity. Every indication has been that this was a fantasy; right now nobody gives a flip about Hunter or the laptop, but that's always subject to change.

The reason Hunter has faded from the picture is his dad, but his dad is important only as he relates to Trump. Never Trumper Maryland Gov Larry Hogan said yesterday,

This week, it was actually a win for Donald Trump. It seemed to motivate his base, people rushing to his defense, people feeling as if he had been picked on and martyred, but I don’t think we have seen the end of the story yet.

Hogan may be indulging in wishful thinking if he expects the pendulum to swing back against Trump. Let's revisit the Deep Throats' leak last week to Newsweek:

The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI's deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump's Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur when the former president was away.

In other words, everyone was supposed to be going goopy over little Beau's channeling of John-John Kennedy while the FBI did its dirty work on the QT, but that didn't work out.

"What a spectacular backfire," says [Deep Throat B].

"I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action," the official says. "They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite."

Merrick Garland was caught completely on the wrong foot. Opinion over the weekend centered on his need belatedly to come out and say he'd approved the raid, even though the officials who had "direct knowledge of the FBI's deliberations" had said he hadn't. Presumably this was because the handlers assumed nobody'd pay attention, huh? As Michael Goodwin put it in the New York Post,

Whether he volunteered or was pushed into authorizing the unprecedented FBI raid on the home of former President Donald Trump, he was woefully unprepared for the entirely predictable fallout.

It should not have been a surprise to him that about half the country believes the raid was motivated by politics. Or that Trump’s support, which had been slipping, instantly started rising among Republicans and some independents.

Earlier, Goodwin wrote,

Whatever the FBI was looking for in its raid of Donald Trump’s home, it better be big. Really, really big, and important enough to justify this radical and unprecedented action against a former president.

If this were a murder case, even a smoking gun wouldn’t be enough. There would also need to be a corpse.

Because if Democrats didn’t find enough evidence to send Trump to jail, they’ve probably handed him a return trip to the Oval Office.

Actually, I think Goodwin is a little mild here; there are going to be presidential repercussions before 2024. There are too many unanswered questions:

• What was the FBI actually looking for? That had to be specified to get the warrant.
• So we need to see the affadavit that supported the warrant, which wasn't unsealed last Friday.
• If the National Archives wanted more material from the Mar-a-Lago storage room, why didn't they continue their negotiations without the need for an FBI raid?
• If the FBI was concerned that important classified materials were in the storage room, why did they wait so long to raid it?
• Why did the FBI under James Comey give Hillary Clinton a complete pass on mishandling classified material, but now they're raiding Trump for the same thing?
• By the way, what's the status of Hunter's grand jury case?

Right now, the White House and the Justice Department are doing all they can to make no further comment, but these are questions that won't go away. The longer they take to give credible answers, or indeed if they instead tell untruths, the greater the likelihood that there will be resignations at progressively higher levels. My guess is that the most likely minimum consequence will be that Brandon is forced to announce he won't run in 2024 "for reasons of health", but things may well not stop there.