Fox News Calls Joe Biden “Wannabe Dictator” After Trump Arrested for Hoarding Nuclear Secrets

Donald Trump has been indicted, but all Fox News wants to talk about is Joe Biden.

Trump was arraigned Tuesday for allegedly mishandling classified documents. The investigation revealed that Trump hid hundreds of documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, despite multiple federal subpoenas requesting he return them. Biden has mostly avoided commenting on his predecessor’s indictment and has kept his distance from the months-long investigation.

But on Tuesday night, just hours after Trump was arraigned, Fox News brazenly labeled Biden a “wannabe dictator” who had his political rival arrested.

Meanwhile, the network was one of the few to air live coverage of Trump whining about being charged for hoarding national security documents.

Trump was charged with a total of 37 counts for keeping national defense information without authorization, making false statements, and conspiring to obstruct justice. He also reportedly showed the documents off to people who did not have security clearance, such as a representative of his PAC and members of staff, potentially putting U.S. national security at risk.

Trump is also under investigation in both Washington, D.C., and Georgia for his alleged role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He has repeatedly falsely insisted that the election was rigged against him, and he should have stayed in power.

Someone’s actions definitely smack of political overreach and even authoritarianism. But it’s not Biden.

Seven years ago, Marco Rubio was sounding the alarm to warn America that Donald Trump couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. But today, in the wake of Trump being indicted for taking and mishandling secret CIA, NSA, and Defense Department documents, Rubio is screaming at us all for even imagining Trump should be held responsible.

Rubio also appeared on Fox on Tuesday to argue that we don’t actually know if Trump has caused damage by hoarding national security secrets.

It’s notable that Rubio has such strong words about Trump being held responsible, given that just a few years ago, he warned about this very misdeed.

“We’re about to turn over … the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual, and the conservative movement to someone who has spent a career sticking it to working people.… I would much more prefer not to turn the party over to a con artist like Donald Trump,” Rubio said in February 2016.

Rubio even doubled down on his mistrust weeks before Election Day in 2016. “I have deep reservations about the nominee of my party,” Rubio said at a Florida Senate debate.

Meanwhile, in July 2016, Rubio tweeted that Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails “DQ’d [her] from being Commander in Chief.” As a reminder, Clinton’s mishandling involved using a private email server for official communications. But under the Espionage Act, which Trump is charged under, the mishandling of national security documents must be willful. There has been scant evidence of her actively using the server for nefarious purposes, and James Comey, then the Republican head of the FBI, admitted as much. Meanwhile, Trump’s indictment exhibits the former president being actively involved in taking the secret documents out of the White House and flaunting them to numerous individuals without security clearance.

In September 2020, at an Intelligence Committee hearing, Rubio condemned the irresponsible declassification of classified information, saying it “endangers lives and our national security.”

Nevertheless, Rubio’s sanctimoniousness continues when it comes to Trump. His new argument? The indictment—not the crime, nor the relentless and hollow defenses of the crime—is “putting our country … in a really dangerous place.”

No one wrote like Cormac McCarthy, who died on Tuesday in New Mexico at the age of 89. In the tributes and appreciations that will be published in the coming days, there will be mentions of Melville and Faulkner and maybe Twain. But McCarthy was an utterly singular and manifestly American writer, and a more than worthy heir to that triumvirate.

Much of that singularity was centered in McCarthy’s prose, which ricocheted—sometimes gracefully, sometimes jarringly—between gruff matter-of-factness and soaring, biblical grandiloquence. His style married Hemingwayean bluntness with the transcendent beauty (and sometimes ridiculousness) of the King James Bible. McCarthy’s passages—and his sentences, sometimes—merged the ordinary and the sublime. His novels frequently contained descriptions of extraordinary violence and gore, but they were rarely cartoonish, in part because of this ability to imbue the mundane with a prevailing, sometimes overwhelming sense of mystery.

McCarthy’s great theme was the frontier—a theme that was, arguably, the great theme of American culture for over a century. McCarthy wrote about the West, certainly, but also about life on the outskirts—my favorite novel of his is the hilarious, sad, autobiographical Suttree, which tracks life among vagrants and weirdos in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy’s career began as the frontier’s central place in American culture was rapidly diminishing, and yet it’s notable in part because his work is strong argument for its continued relevance. For McCarthy, the frontier is where you go to understand America. Many of his best novels—Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses—double as arguments for its continued relevance in American art.

McCarthy’s frontier was frequently a place of extreme violence and often evil, but it was also a place containing grand, if often inscrutable, truth and beauty. Much of McCarthy’s writing revolves around relatively straightforward themes—the nature of evil, the existence of God, the violence at the heart of America—but his characters frequently find themselves facing questions about the nature of existence itself.

Take the ending of The Road, McCarthy’s late-career postapocalyptic masterpiece:

Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Or this, from Blood Meridian:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

At its best, McCarthy’s fiction could compass the strange and often violent order of existence. It is not at all clear that that order will ever find a chronicler of his manifold talents and complexity again.

On the very day that Trump was arrested and became the first former president to face a federal indictment, his legal troubles somehow got even worse.

A judge on Tuesday granted E. Jean Carroll permission to amend her defamation lawsuit against Trump to include comments he made about her during a CNN town hall.

Trump was unanimously found liable on May 9 for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. He was ordered to pay her about $5 million in damages. Just one day later, Trump bashed her during a CNN town hall, prompting Carroll to file for new damages from him.

Carroll also sued Trump for defamation in 2019. Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the original trial, allowed Carroll to add the damages for the CNN comments to the 2019 lawsuit. She is seeking at least $10 million in damages.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media.

Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her case was the first to make it to a courtroom. Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations and launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall last month.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly tried to thwart Carroll’s various lawsuits. Two weeks ago, a judge denied an attempt to throw out the 2019 defamation suit by Trump ally James H. Brady, who argued that the former president was being unfairly treated because he is a “white Christian.”

Last week, Trump and his legal team also requested that the 2019 suit be dismissed, arguing that he couldn’t have defamed Carroll then because he was technically telling the truth when he denied raping her. When that didn’t work, he begged for a new trial altogether, arguing that the $5 million in damages he was ordered to pay was too much.

Just a handful of Republicans have spoken out against Donald Trump after he was indicted once again, this time for taking and mishandling secret government documents, going as far hiding the documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and showing off the documents (from agencies like the CIA, Defense Department, and NSA) to a representative of his PAC as well as staff members.

In almost all the condemnations, Republicans still default to also criticizing Joe Biden or Mike Pence for having taken government documents after they left the White House (though both appear to have cooperated with government efforts to return said documents, while Trump actively did not).

Nevertheless, as the wider party remains silent, here’s the very small list of Republicans who have condemned Trump for mishandling top secret government information.

Presidential Candidates

Chris Christie went on a broadside against Trump, as well as his fellow candidates, in a CNN town hall Monday. “They’re playing political games with you,” Christie told the audience about Republicans who are attacking the Department of Justice but avoiding the specifics on Trump’s “indefensible” indictment. “The evidence is pretty damning,” he added.

Nikki Haley said if the indictment is true, “Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security.”

“My husband’s about to deploy this weekend. This puts all of our military men and women in danger,” Haley continued, while still tempering her condemnations by claiming that the Department of Justice and FBI have “lost all credibility with the American people.” (Haley tapped the brakes even further on Tuesday, saying she “would be inclined in favor of a pardon” for Trump if she became president and he was convicted.)

Tim Scott said it was a “serious case with serious allegations,” according to The Post and Courier. Still, he couldn’t help himself either, adding that “what we see today across this administration of President Joe Biden is a double standard. That double standard is both un-American and unacceptable. You can’t protect Democrats while targeting and hunting Republicans.”

Mike Pence said he “cannot defend what is alleged,” while also hedging, claiming there had to have been a degree of politicization involved, and that he reserves full judgment, as Trump “has a right to his day in court.” Pence echoed Haley in citing familial concerns. “My son’s a Marine, my son-in-law is a Navy lieutenant. I mean, the very prospect that … highly sensitive classified material could have fallen into the wrong hands—even inadvertently—that jeopardizes our national security, it puts at risk the men and women of our armed forces.”

Asa Hutchinson was the first candidate to have taken a firm stance upon the indictment’s release last Thursday. “With the news that Donald Trump has been indicted for the second time, our country finds itself in a position that weakens our democracy,” the former Arkansas governor said in a statement. “Donald Trump’s actions—from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law—should not define our nation or the Republican Party.”

Senators

Senator Lisa Murkowski said the indictment is “a pretty comprehensive condemnation of the president’s actions,” also criticizing Republican efforts to target investigators. “We cannot take this lightly, so to kill the messenger does not account for the gravity of the indictment that is out there,” she said. “I don’t care whether you’re a Trump supporter or a Trump opposer, you have  to take this seriously.”

Senator John Cornyn simply said the Trump indictment is “not good,” while Senator John Thune called it “very serious,” echoing his endorsee Scott. He too added the same caveat: “What I would hope is what others have done, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or anybody else, wouldn’t become the standard of behavior for Republican leaders.”

Senator Mitt Romney said, “I’m increasingly angry the more I think about it. The country is going through angst and turmoil, and that could have been avoided if President Trump had just turned in the documents; he wouldn’t have been indicted.”

He added, “Why? What purpose would you have for doing that?” 

House Members

On CNN, Representative Ken Buck said he “would not feel comfortable with a convicted felon in the White House,” saying that Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016 “set the standard.”

“It’s very problematic. There’s a reason I’m not defending it,” Representative Dan Crenshaw said.

“I just think it’s obvious what the president did was wrong,” said Representative Don Bacon. “I just think the emperor has no clothes, and we need to have Republicans stand up and say that, because come around after the primary … the other party’s going to be saying this.”

When asked if he would be okay with a convicted felon being the party’s nominee, Representative Tim Burchett said “honestly on the surface, I wouldn’t. That doesn’t look good.”

Representative Steve Womack said that he has “serious concerns about anybody that has a reckless disregard for the handling of classified documents.”

All that to say: nothing too stellar from the party that purports to care about our “men and women in uniform.” It was already known how much they actually do, based on how often they jostle to send them to war or how little they care for them once they return. But now Republicans aren’t even bothered to express concern for national security interests.

This article has been updated.