After a chaotic start, the 118th Congress is now in full swing and Speaker Kevin McCarthy is reaping what he sowed after a protracted battle with a rogue faction of the Republican caucus. But with a razor-thin GOP majority in the House, Democrats in control of the Senate, and Joe Biden in the White House, expectations are low in the Beltway that any real governance will happen over the next two years. What is to be expected are investigations—a lot of them.
In this episode of Inside the Hive, Vanity Fair’s politics correspondent Bess Levin and national political reporter Abigail Tracy break down committee shenanigans (they’re poised to probe everything from Hunter Biden to the origins of the COVID pandemic), the “gift that keeps on giving” that is George Santos, and the dangers of a Ron DeSantis presidency—would you rather, him or Donald Trump?
On the eve of President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address, Inside the Hive’s Joe Hagan talks to Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, which takes us inside the last two years of his presidency—from January 6 to the pandemic, Afghanistan to Ukraine—and offers insight into his future.
Biden, Whipple says, is running for president again, age and document investigations be damned. For Biden’s new chief of staff, Jeff Zients, however, Whipple has some stern advice on managing Biden’s age: “He’s an octogenarian, he’s running for reelection. Zients has got to make sure that he’s rested enough to do it.”
Biden was surprised, Whipple says, at the staying power of MAGA after the 2020 election and he is taking no chances, gearing up for the inevitable wave of Trumpism in 2024. “They believe that democracy is very much on the ballot in 2024,” Whipple says.
The following transcript excerpt has been edited for clarity and length.
Vanity Fair:Biden has succeeded on so many levels, and yet his image remains somewhat muted, you know?
Chris Whipple: Joe Biden is not gonna electrify the populace. He’s not Ronald Reagan, he’s not JFK. But this guy has been underestimated time and time and time again in his political career, most recently during the midterms, as we all know.
To bring the progressive wing of his party to the table, to keep them coherent, especially as we came into the midterms. How did that happen? He had Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the one hand, but he was also stuck with the other side, a very loud and very demanding progressive wing.
I think the answer is a twist on the old expression. “Republicans don’t belong to any organized political party.” Those are the Democrats. They’re now an organized, disciplined party. And you have to give a lot of credit to Biden, but also to Ron Klain, who has all of the attributes of some of the great chiefs of staff, the Jim Bakers and the Leon Panettas.
Biden has a new chief of staff, Jeff Zients, without that deep personal relationship that Klain had. I wonder what you think that might mean for the White House?
He has a world-class temperament just like Klain, which is one of the attributes of the great chiefs like Baker and Panetta. He’s got all of that. What he lacks is political savvy and knowledge of Capitol Hill and those relationships, and this long relationship with the boss. He has a good relationship with Biden, but, you know, we’ll see whether he has the kind of relationship where he can sit down and second-guess Joe Biden’s political instincts. That’s a tough one, I think. There’s been much speculation that Biden will therefore now rely more heavily on Steve Ricchetti and Jen O’Malley Dillon and Mike Donlan and Anita Dunn for political advice. But I think it would be a real mistake to go that route because I think that yes, of course you can get their advice, but presidents learn, often the hard way, that you cannot govern effectively without empowering your chief of staff as first among equals.
Regarding Jill Biden, what do you think the conversation is between her and the president right now?
Well, she’s the only person who could talk him out of it. He’s running, there’s just almost no doubt in my mind. And I haven’t heard anybody suggest that Jill Biden is against it. If she is, then he may not go there, but I don’t think there’s any evidence that she is, and I think they’re talking about it. I suspect she’s saying that “if you feel you want to do it, you should go for it,” is my guess.
The Democratic strategist was right about George Santos. He just didn’t realize how right. Back in early November, one week before the midterms, I asked him to assess the contest between Santos, the Republican nominee, and Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat, in New York’s Third Congressional District. “It’s a race where the national Republican Party should be investing, and it isn’t,” he said, sounding puzzled. “The only thing I can determine is that Santos is truly a nut.”
That has hardly been disqualifying in recent American politics—and Santos went on to beat Zimmerman by eight points. It wasn’t until a mid-December New York Times story, however, that Santos’s nuttiness and lies were extensively documented. Since then, the revelations and allegations have unspooled almost daily: from the Seinfeld-ian (“I never claimed to be Jewish.… I said I was ‘Jew-ish,’” he told the New York Post) to the academic and athletic (Santos lied about graduating from Baruch College and starring on its volleyball team) to his employment history (Santos never worked, as he claimed, for either Goldman Sachs or Citigroup) to the possibly criminal (a 2008 fraud charge in Brazil, a multitude of $199.99 charges to his congressional campaign account) to the highly offensive (asserting, falsely, that his mother was in the 9/11 attacks and that his grandparents fled the Holocaust). Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who is the Nassau County executive, has gone from being somewhat wary of Santos last year to being appalled now. “He came out of nowhere, and he had this story about his life,” Blakeman says. “To conjure up a tale about his family and the Holocaust, to me, is diabolical. We’re talking about somebody who needs professional help. He’s not normal.” Santos has admitted only to “embellishing” his résumé, and his congressional office says it does not comment on campaign or personal matters.
Now, though, federal and local prosecutors are circling Santos. The state’s mainstream Republicans continue to try to isolate him, with the latest salvo a Times op-ed by former congressman Peter King, who is calling on Republicans to make clear they want Santos gone. A close ally of Kevin McCarthy is said to have been worried that Santos would be exposed as a fraud during the 2022 campaign, and the House Speaker has recently claimed that he “always had a few questions” about Santos’s résumé, but McCarthy has refused to call for Santos’s ouster. Next week a progressive Democratic group, Courage for America, will try to turn up the heat by distributing, in the congressional district and on Capitol Hill, an “annotated résumé” detailing Santos’s falsehoods. The congressman has insisted he won’t resign, but New York pols in both parties talk as if Santos is already gone. The maneuvering to prepare for another battle over the seat—either in a special election later this year or in 2024, on the standard cycle—is well underway. “There will be a long line of qualified and competent and trustworthy candidates we will have to run,” says Blakeman, the Long Island Republican leader. “I’m not concerned about holding the seat.” Among the names in the mix are Jack Martins, a state senator, and Alison Esposito, a former Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.
“We are getting into position,” says Jay Jacobs, the chairman of New York’s Democratic Party. “There’s talk, but we’re not ready to begin vetting candidates.” Zimmerman says his focus is only on assembling a bipartisan coalition to remove Santos. Other players aren’t waiting. David Greenfield, a former New York City councilman, has tried to stake out some early ground for an ally, Dan Rosenthal, by floating the 31-year-old state assemblyman’s name on Twitter. “He is a true moderate who voted against bail reform and congestion pricing, which polling shows are two of the most critical issues on Long Island,” Greenfield tells me. Tom Suozzi represented much of the district in Congress for three terms (and beat Santos soundly in 2020) before leaving to run for New York governor in 2022. “I think there will be a lot of pressure on Suozzi to run,” a Long Island Democratic consultant says, “especially if Santos resigns and there is a special.”
Special elections in New York play by peculiar rules. There are no primaries. Leaders of the two major parties each select a candidate. For the Democrats, Governor Kathy Hochul would essentially do the choosing; the governor also gets to pick the date of the election, with some restrictions. “It’s very strange because you’re running, essentially, an inside-outside race,” a New York Democratic hand says. “You’ve got to convince the insiders they should appoint you their party’s candidate, then win actual voters.” Special elections are typically low-turnout, weirdly unpredictable affairs. Local concerns like crime and tolls would still be issues, but the narrow partisan balance of the House would nationalize the dynamic, attracting massive amounts of outside campaign money. “Special elections are bad! We don’t want a special election!” a top New York Democratic strategist says. “We want an election on Election Day in a presidential year. That’s easier to win. I hope Santos doesn’t quit.”
Joe Biden is, in several respects, far better positioned for a presidential reelection campaign than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were at similar points in their first terms. Unlike those two, Biden isn’t coming off a midterm thrashing; Republicans continue to marginalize themselves by playing to the right-wing fringe; and the economy, while uneven, seems poised for a rebound just as the 2024 campaign ramps up.
Yet probably the greatest challenge—and achievement—of Biden’s first term has gone underappreciated: the president’s success in helping Ukraine fight off Russia. The one-year anniversary of the war’s start is nearing; for all the tragic losses on the ground in Ukraine, the American response should be recognized as a highlight of Biden’s presidency so far. But the dynamics at home surrounding American involvement in the war are about to grow even more complicated, just as Biden launches a likely bid for a second term.
The president and Senate Democrats succeeded, at the end of 2022, in approving $45 billion in aid to Ukraine, money that should last through much of the New Year. Beyond that lies trouble. The new House Republican majority, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy, have been making noises about cutting or blocking American aid. “It would be an all-around disaster if that happens,” says Rhode Island Democratic senator Jack Reed, who traveled to Kyiv last week and met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “It would be a signal to our allies saying, ‘Hey, we’re disengaging, so we can’t call you to task,’ and on the ground it would deny the Ukrainians the equipment they need. The Ukrainians would continue to resist, I’m sure, but the Russians would feel emboldened to slaughter even more people.”
As the war drags into a second year and the battlefield remains unsettled, other pressures will grow on the president. Around the corner are perilous decisions about how to handle Ukraine’s push to join NATO and to reclaim Crimea. “This is a big year,” says Michael Allen, a White House national security specialist under former president George W. Bush. “Escalation management is important, but it feels like Biden talks himself out of stuff that they end up doing anyway, starting with fighter jets at the beginning of the war to not sending Abrams tanks now.”
The administration will need to extend the deftness with which it handled the first year of the war. Not only did Biden convince Congress to send Ukraine roughly $70 billion in aid, much of it in weaponry, but his team supplied Zelenskyy’s government with invaluable military intelligence. Perhaps most impressive, though, is that the president assembled and has held together an international coalition that has delivered everything from howitzers to economic sanctions, an effort that required Biden to rebuild the trust of allies that had been destroyed in the Trump years. “In some ways this crisis is uniquely suited to this president,” says Ivo Daalder, an expert in European security who was a top foreign policy adviser to Clinton and Obama. “It’s hard to see how anybody else could have done this, or could have done it better. Who would have thought that the Germans were going to cut off their dependence on Russian energy after 45 years? Yet that’s what they’ve done.”
How deeply American voters care about all this remains to be seen. Biden’s policy accomplishments in Ukraine may end up mattering less, politically, than the symbolic platform the war provides, especially because he would be the oldest president to ever seek a second term. “Biden’s actions on the global stage are more important for him than they were for past presidents. I think they’re actually critical,” says Cornell Belcher, a strategist who worked on both of Obama’s presidential runs. “It’s a unique opportunity to show strength and vitality, to show that he’s up to the task. When you stand on a stage with world leaders looking to you, looking to America once again, that leadership can help inoculate the president against the issue that is at the forefront of many American minds.”
There are, unfortunately, plenty of examples of the United States pouring money and guns into propping up dubious foreign actors. Ukraine is one of the rare times we’ve done it on behalf of the good guys. But foreign affairs are usually a low priority for American voters, unless US troops are at risk, and funding for Ukraine has increasingly become a partisan issue. Republicans have alreadytried to exploit that parochialism, arguing the billions being sent to Ukraine would be better spent at, say, the US Southern border. The stakes of that argument are highest for Ukraine, of course. But its national security will become increasingly entwined with Biden’s domestic political fortunes.
For now, the president’s team believes Republican opposition on Ukraine could be perversely helpful to the president. “Kevin McCarthy has been saying things like he supports Ukraine but not a blank check,” a Biden adviser says. “If they start mucking around, there’s a real opportunity for Biden to make this about a bigger issue—about protecting democracy and caving to autocrats and dictators.” If Vladimir Putin’s friend Donald Trump were to emerge as the Republican presidential nominee, the contrast would become even starker.
Kevin McCarthy, despite all odds, and after a historic lapse in government function, has finally been elected House Speaker.
Following four days of voting, McCarthy won the speakership early Saturday morning with 215 votes on the 15th ballot. Six Republican holdouts ended up voting “present,” lowering the threshold McCarthy needed to meet to win. The resolution of this chaotic process, the first time in a century that the United States House of Representatives failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot, came after days of backdoor dealings and negotiations with a group of roughly 20 ultra-right-wing dissenters, who had been blocking his bid.
McCarthy’s detractors, among whom were firebrands like Lauren Boebert,Matt Gaetz,Scott Perry, and Andy Biggs, demanded a slate of concessions, including better committee assignments, the ability for one lawmaker to call a snap vote on McCarthy’s speakership at any time, pledges to bring forward specific pieces of legislation, and even, per one member, the promise to shut down the government over any attempt to increase the debt limit. They held steadfast in their opposition to McCarthy, despite the nominations of prominent ultraconservative colleagues like Jim Jordan, and even Donald Trump himself.
The gridlock appeared to loosen Thursday night, and by Friday afternoon McCarthy, though still losing, was flipping votes back to his side bypromising seats on preferred committees and a series of parliamentary changes, such as giving any individual lawmaker the power to call a no confidence vote against the speaker, giving lawmakers more time to read legislation, and making it easier to amend bills. That was apparently enough to sweeten the deal for most of the remaining holdouts. “What we’ve witnessed is monumental and a testament to how government should function in our Constitutional Republic,” Byron Donalds, one of them, said in a statement about flipping his vote in support of McCarthy, framing days of chaos as democracy in action. The anti-McCarthy faction had nominated Donalds as a possible speaker for several days.
“We’re at the stage right now where I’m running out of things to ask for,” Gaetz, one of the most outspoken members of the “Never Kevin” contingent, said Friday night on Fox News before voting resumed at 10 p.m. Gaetz, who did not vote when his name was initially called on the 14th ballot, stoked drama in Congress (and TV studios), as it became apparent that one more vote for McCarthy would have given him the gavel. Yet Gaetz voted “present,” prompting McCarthy to pay him a visit as tensions flared in the chamber, complete with Mike Rogersbeing restrained.
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It was a year of spectacular implosions, and it turns out 2022 had one more in store. Days after a New York Timesreport revealed major inconsistencies and falsehoods in his resume and purported backstory, Republican Representative-elect George Santos admitted to lying about his college and employment history—though he appeared to remain somewhat defiant and insisted that the revelations “will not deter me from having good legislative success.”
“I will be effective,” Santos told the New York Post on Monday. “I will be good.”
Santos, a New York Republican whose victory in the 2022 midterms helped give the GOP a narrow House majority in the next Congress, claimed, among other things, to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010 before going on to a career as a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” for firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. But those firms told the Times that they had no record of his employment there, and Baruch found no record of his enrollment; the Internal Revenue Service also told the Times that it found no record of the tax-exempt animal rescue group he claimed to have operated.
After about a week of silence, Santos emerged Monday, acknowledging in interviews with the Post and other outlets that he had made up some of his credentials. He had not graduated from any college, he had “never worked directly” for Goldman and Citigroup, and he is not a landlord, as he had claimed on the campaign trail to be.
“My sins here are embellishing my resume,” the incoming Republican said. “I’m sorry.”
Santos, who is openly gay, also acknowledged some recent reporting about aspects of his personal life, including his five-year marriage to a woman (“I’m very much gay…People change. I’m one of those people who change”), questions about his purported Jewish ancestry (“I never claimed to be Jewish…I said I was ‘Jew-ish’”), and some of his financial troubles (“I am not embarrassed by it”). But Santos still seemed defensive, dismissing some of his lies as stemming from a “poor choice of words” rather than an intent to mislead voters, and appeared to brush off any suggestion that he was unfit to serve. “The people elected me to fight for them,” Santos told the Post.
But major questions linger, including details around a past criminal charge reported by the Times that Santos denied, and especially about the abrupt change in his financial circumstances. After reporting a $55,000 salary in 2020, in September the incoming congressman reported a salary of $750,000 and dividends of over a million dollars from his company, according to the Times. The company, according to the filings, has no public-facing assets and no reported clients. “I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money,” Santos toldCity & State Monday by way of explanation. “And I fundamentally started building wealth, and I decided I’d invest in my race for Congress.”
That explanation leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s unclear whether the puzzling disclosures will lead to any investigation or consequences. As the Timesnotes, omissions on his financial disclosure forms could leave him legally vulnerable. But he seems unlikely to face political consequences from the incoming Republican majority. A senior House Republican aide indicated to the Post that party brass was aware of the inconsistencies in Santos’ resume and personal life, and considered it a “running joke.” Republican officials—including Kevin McCarthy, who hopes to assume the speakership next month—have mostly remained mum, and have shown little willingness to discipline loyal members in the past. And, it goes without saying, the party of Donald Trump is hardly one to turn its back on liars and scammers. In Santos, the GOP may have found an even clumsier liar than the former president. “I intend to deliver on the promises I made during the campaign,” the fabulist Santos told the Post, citing issues like crime and inflation. “I came to D.C. to bring results on those issues and that’s what I’m going to do.”
