Whatever's Become Of Hunter?

In recent weeks, both Joe Biden's son Hunter and his brother James have given closed-door depositions to the Comer Committee, and the transcripts have been released. On Thursday, the New York Post ran the headline, After years of denials, Hunter Biden FINALLY acknowledged Joe was ‘the big guy’ in $5M China deal. The next day, it had the story Joe Biden got $40K from China funds, brother James admits in bombshell impeachment interview.

Nobody noticed. Last fall, this would have been much bigger news. I think there are several reasons. One is that by this point, the whole Biden family boodle has been factored in; the part of the public that follows the news has inferred everything there is to infer, and it's moved on. Second, while there's a there there, it's never turned into anything big. Joe got $40K from China? Heck, Nathan Wade go $600K from Fani, and that was for piddling stuff like wine tasting tours.

Third, the Hunter-Joe-James story had nothing to do with Trump, and that may be the secret. Trump's steady rise in the polls began with the federal and Fulton County indictments and the New York joke civil cases in the middle of last year, and those all had to do with Trump. Trump is an interesting guy, Joe Biden is a nebbish. Former Clinton intimate Dick Morris says at 2:00:

[T]he charges against Trump are so noisy and so all-encompassing that they eat up all the room in the election and suck all the oxygen out of the room. After you finish debating whether Trump led a revolution or not, and after you finish debating whether Trump intimidated a woman who he raped or not, what are you gonna do, talk about his stand on Social Security, talk about his stand on dealing with China? There's no place for the other issues in the dialogue.

In other words, it's all about Trump, plus the comic-book villains who're made to order to serve as his foils: Judge Engoron, Fani Willis, Nathan Wade -- and the problem is that more are lined up like Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Jack Smith. Trump may as well be campaigning against the Joker.

As the famous statement attributed to Clausewitz and others goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Republican strategists came up with a perfectly reasonable idea that dated back to 2020 and the first reports of the Hunter laptop: hit Joe with all the Biden family scandals. The good part of that plan was that it could attach to any generic Republican candidate, and it's actually been a rationale for the Haley campaign: Biden and Trump are equally awful, and Haley is the one remaining alternative.

The problem the get-Hunter strategy has had to confront, though, is that Joe is a nebbish, so is Hunter, so is James, and so is Hunter's BFF Kevin Morris. These guys aren't worth Trump's time; he's got more interesting things to do, and that's what the YouTubers and others, up to and including Alan Dershowitz, are gleefully following. Hunter has been overtaken by events; the generic Republican strategy of going after Hunter was never more than so-so, and as Trump moves steadily closer to the nomination, he isn't going to need it. That's for Nikki to try to salvage.

The Hunter strategy may in fact, though, have had some secondary effect. From the little we hear, Joe has been at least in part preoccupied with Hunter's legal problems, and the baggie-near-the-Sit-Room scandal appears to have forced Joe to move Hunter out of the White House -- for whatever he was worth, Joe seems to have needed Hunter as an important adviser/enabler. If that had even a minimal effect in distracting Joe from better uses for his time, it served its purpose, but the focus now is on Joe himself. The Hunter strategy for generic Republcans was never going to be a winner, and now it's beside the point.