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This is Fighting Words, a weekly newsletter about what got me steamed this week. Let’s dive in.

Item one: Yes, pray for regime change in Russia!

 

Joe Biden has been both strongly criticized and defended over his gaffe in that speech in Warsaw last Saturday. By the way: Despite the political commentariat’s widespread consensus, Biden’s ad-libbed “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” was not a Kinsley Gaffe. A Kinsley gaffe happens when a politician accidentally blurts out the truth, as in for example a Republican legislator saying, “Yes, the idea is for fewer Black people to vote.” Biden didn’t do that. Regime change in Russia is not some secret U.S. policy that he revealed. He was just expressing a personal view that the country would be so much better off without Vladimir Putin. The problem is that presidents aren’t entitled to personal views. But it wasn’t a classic Kinsley gaffe. It was a, well, Biden gaffe.

 

Anyway. I lean toward the forgiving side. I understand the ways the comment complicates things, which Michael Cohen laid out well at NewRepublic.com the other day, but on balance I think it’s fine to put the idea of a post-Putin Russia out there as an alternate reality for people, especially small-d democratic Russian people, to contemplate and imagine.

 

We in the West have no idea of Putin’s internal domestic situation right now. One poll that received a lot of press this week has Putin’s approval number at 83 percent, up from 69. Maybe so; who knows how accurate this polling is. But the truth surely is getting through to some people. The mere fact that the war isn’t over tells the Russian people something. We see many reports that young, educated people are leaving Russia in droves. People have the sense to know what they have to tell a pollster. What they actually feel might be something very different.

 

Regimes fall when that feeling becomes insuppressible and when some event happens that triggers a chain reaction. No one ever sees it coming. The odds always favor the strongman. This Sunday in Hungary, Viktor Orbán appears likely to be “reelected,” in part because of the way his Fidesz Party has rigged the machinery of the state over the last decade. But he, too, will slip up someday.

 

As for Putin, let us hope that his monstrous crime can somehow lead to his downfall. And if Biden’s gaffe helped in any way to hasten that day, I’d judge that more important in the long run than the ruffled feathers at the State Department or in EU capitals.

 

Item two: Trump inches closer to actual treason

 

As a wild animal may be conditioned by a certain noise or smell to know that an unsuspecting dinner could be grazing on the next savannah, so Donald Trump is a creature of similarly coarse instinct. This week, he picked up the scent of Hunter Biden, whose name has reappeared in the media, and did something stunning even by the standards to which we’ve grown accustomed.

 

Biden fils’s name popped up last week when the mainstream media began confirming that, in fact, that had been Hunter’s laptop dropped off in that Delaware computer store. Questions about the laptop had led to an eleventh-hour feeding frenzy in which Rudy Giuliani and others tried to make Hunter the driving story of the 2020 election campaign’s final weeks. The New York Post, which broke the laptop story in October 2020, crowed mightily, because now the hated liberal media was confirming the Murdoch media’s take.

 

What this ultimately proves is another matter, and we’ll get to that. But first, Trump. In an interview with a website run by a journalist who got bounced by Fox News as an unreliable “disinformation” peddler, the former president, seeing that Hunter was back in the news, raised an old and unsubstantiated right-wing allegation that the wife of a former mayor of Moscow had given Hunter a few billion dollars. Trump complained that Ukraine wouldn’t cooperate on this matter but speculated that Russia might. “She gave him $3.5 million, so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it,” Trump told John Solomon and Amanda Head of Real America’s News. “I think we should know that answer.”

 

We are not at war with Russia, so technically this is not treason, but it’s getting close. Vladimir Putin has been officially designated a war criminal by both the president of the United States and the Senate, in a unanimous vote, and here is a former president seeking his cooperation against a fellow American. The sitting president, no less, against whom Trump expects to be running in 2024.

 

Charlie Sykes does call it treason, citing Trump’s line in the interview when he said, “As long as Putin is not exactly a fan of our country.…” In other words, Trump is saying here, if I’m understanding him right (which, of course, is often hard to do), that he is relying on Putin’s dislike of not just Biden but of America, so that Putin might do Trump’s bidding. Kind of hard to read it any other way.

 

As for Hunter, he’s a topic for another day, but for now I’ll make two points. First, Giuliani had the laptop before the 2020 election. If there were something superincriminating on that hard drive, I suspect we would have heard about it. And second, I’ll offer you this little piece of guidance: Imagine, every time you read a Hunter Biden story, what the hearings into his business dealings are going to be like if the Republicans take over the House. This will be Benghazi times 50.

Item three: Madison Cawthorn just says shit … or does he?

 

Cawthorn (R-Sudetenland) got himself in trouble again this week when he said: “I look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics. Then all of the sudden you get invited to, ‘Well hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes, you should come.’ I’m like, ‘What did you just ask me to come to do?’ And then you realize they are asking you to come to an orgy.” He added that he had seen some members of Congress do “key bumps” of cocaine.

 

Well. This set off the expected tizzy—in both parties, but much more so among Republicans, because given the almost certain likelihood that Cawthorn has zero Democratic friends, he was talking about fellow Republicans.

 

And we can see that he struck an exposed nerve. The Freedom Caucus may give him the boot. Kevin McCarthy, who rarely rouses himself to criticize Republican House members for saying white supremacist things or posting anime videos of avatars of themselves killing the president and vice president (it took him nine days to rap Representative Paul Gosar gently on the knuckles for that one), actually not only criticized Cawthorn but let it be known that he had reprimanded him and forced him to backtrack: “In the interview, he claims he watched people do cocaine. Then when he comes in he tells me, he says he thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage from 100 yards away,” McCarthy said publicly.

 

The racier possibility, of course, is that Cawthorn isn’t lying. I mean, let’s face it, the halls of power, historically speaking, from ancient Rome to Versailles to the Berlin of the 1930s that Cawthorn so reveres to the self-same Washington of which the congressman speaks, are hardly strangers to sexual adventurism and recreational psychic alteration. Cawthorn is a fabulist and an attention-seeker, in addition to his other dubious qualities. But I would hardly be shocked if there’s a grain of truth to his allegations. It would help explain why McCarthy took the rare step of a public reprimand days faster than he did when one of his members joked about shooting the president of the United States. Tread lightly, Freedom Caucus! He may have been recording you.

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