Split-screen tragedy
Two events underscore a nation at an inflection point.
Anyone still wondering how Donald Trump managed to win the presidential election—Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, just confessed to being “a little surprised” by the result—should look no further than two seemingly unrelated but deeply connected events.
A week ago, President Joe Biden pardoned his troubled son, Hunter, and the reaction was entirely predictable. In yet another exhibit for the bulging “one rule for us, something entirely different for everyone else” Museum of Hypocrisy, Republicans howled about abuse of power and Biden breaking promises. Just yesterday, the Financial Times declared the move “a big mistake: [Biden] handed a gift to Trump, shattering the moral high ground the Democrats had sought to occupy, and giving the president-elect cover for what promises to be a far greater assault on US judicial independence in his second term.”
Given they’re British, I’d like to think the editorial board’s tongue was firmly in its cheek but, alas, it was serious. Maybe they should assemble an investigative unit to find “the moral high ground” in the United States, because it’s today merely a place you can claim to sit as your opponents keep winning.
Back in 2016 when the Democrats lost to Trump the first time, Michelle Obama famously declared “when they go low, we go high.” It was nice in theory, presented at a moment when no one thought Hillary Clinton could lose to someone so manifestly unfit to be president.
“Going high only works if the bully has any sense of humanity within him,” one user posted on that fount of all wisdom, Reddit, during the most recent election campaign. “In this case, he doesn't and sometimes you have to punch the bully in the fucking mouth.”
For those who’ve forgotten, Trump in his first term—and in a flurry as he exited the White House—issued pardons, commutations, and clemency to a laundry list of low lifes, from Paul Manafort to Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, George Papadopoulos, Rob Blagojevich, Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D’Souza, Bernie Kerik, and Scooter Libby. He pardoned six Republican congressmen who committed crimes; at least ten doctors and healthcare executives convicted of large-scale Medicare fraud; and four Blackwater guards who killed Iraqi civilians. Oh, and he pardoned the father of his son-in-law, and then last week named him the US Ambassador to France.1
Trump may be inept and incompetent at almost everything, but he’s a master of shamelessness. Nothing would have changed had Biden not pardoned Hunter, other than Democrats being able to claim the moral high ground as Trump’s goons kept going after a son for crimes even the FT noted would have been misdemeanors for most Americans. As Biden said in issuing the pardon: “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.”
The next step here is obvious: Biden should preemptively pardon the long list of people Trump and his sycophants have promised to go after for no reason other than revenge.2 Memo to the FT: Trump plans to do that, and certainly doesn’t need “cover” provided by Biden moving to protect his surviving son.
“Biden can mute concerns about Hunter’s pardon by recognizing the real danger: Trump’s announced threats of vengeance against an array of Americans whose only ‘crime’ was seeking to hold Trump accountable,” Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Washington Post, urging blanket pardons. “Protecting the potential targets of a wrathful president would serve the interests of democracy, effectively short-circuiting Trump’s revenge agenda.”
It would also firmly place Democrats in the “no fucks left to give category,” which is where they should have been for a couple of decades. That’s at least how long this long march toward the seeming inevitability of a populist uprising has been under way, with liberals ceding ground in election after election and on issue after issue by not only being apologetic about fighting for what they believe in, but insisting on being solely responsible for holding onto an idea of America that’s long disappeared.
The issue of where that America has gone—the country that is a beacon of democracy, acting as an example to the rest of the world—came into sharp relief with the second recent event underlining Trump’s election victory: the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Thompson was gunned down in broad daylight in New York City in a crime that can only be condemned. Yet this act of violence laid bare the seething anger of Americans who are subjected daily to the vicissitudes of a healthcare system that is utterly broken, many of whom view the death of the person running a health insurer famous for denying claims as something less than tragic.
And when it comes to the real-world impact of gaping inequality in a country that’s increasingly third-world but stocked with billionaires, there’s no better example than healthcare, which employs more than 13% of the nation’s workers, makes up almost a fifth of its GDP, and spends more per person than any developed country, only to deliver worse outcomes on almost every metric that matters.
It’s particularly jarring as an Australian or, I’d suggest, anyone from a country providing healthcare as a right, not a privilege. Forget about handing over your Medicare card and barely seeing a bill—in the US, you could be bleeding out in an emergency room and the first question will be, “Do you have insurance?” Routine procedures are multiples more expensive than anywhere else in the world—the cost also varies dramatically within the US—and the industry spends more on administration than long-term care. You can’t turn on a TV without being assaulted by commercials for hospitals or pharmaceuticals, which will this year collectively spend around $30 billion on marketing. It’s no wonder prescription medicines are an average of three times the price of comparable countries.
So, it’s against this backdrop that Thompson’s death has become a lightning rod for the sector’s failures. The company he headed insures around 50 million Americans and denies about a third of claims, having recently introduced AI technology to do that even more efficiently. At the same time, UnitedHealthcare booked revenue of $281 billion last year while Thompson—its CEO since 2021—took home $10.2 million and sold stock options in February worth $15 million (just two weeks before it was publicly announced the company was under investigation).
As a contrast with the struggles of the vast majority of Americans, it’s tough to think of anything more direct. Social media was flooded with unsympathetic reactions to Thompson’s murder, with thousands detailing ways the healthcare sector had failed them, very often with tragic results. And it’s people in that position—who feel the system simply isn’t working for them and are one piece of bad luck from bankruptcy—who let out the collective primal scream that brought Trump back to the presidency.
The irony is, of course, that Trump will do nothing to help them. He’s far more likely to coddle healthcare executives than stand up for average Americans, just as he’s more likely to tank the economy than keep it as the best in the developed world. Yet the juxtaposition of the reaction to Thompson’s murder with the reaction to Biden’s pardon proves illustrative for where the nation’s at.
On the one hand, those with political and business power are getting a first-hand view into the lives of Americans who are almost always an abstraction to them. Their decisions have real-world ramifications—often unintended—that they are usually simply blind to or, less charitably, choose to ignore in the relentless pursuit of political donations or shareholder returns.
And, on the other hand, Democrats are getting a lesson from an outgoing president. While grounded in a father’s love for his son, Biden’s ruthlessness is an approach they should take far more often: not because liberals need to get into the gutter with their opponents, but because sometimes when you’re being mugged, it’s useful to pull a bigger knife. Maybe they can learn from a famous Aussie?
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful, all from the perspective of an Australian living in the United States.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.
What was Charles Kushner guilty of? He hired a prostitute to sleep with the husband of his sister, had the encounter recorded, and then sought to use that as leverage to stop the brother-in-law from cooperating with federal investigators. Nice guy.
Joseph Stalin’s chief of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, famously said: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Trump tried to set the justice department on people in his first term—most famously, it took two attorneys general to separately rebuff efforts to go after Hillary Clinton—and his pick for the head of the FBI, the execrable Kash Patel, talks openly about having an enemies list.