It was supposed to be a laptop that would save them, again.
Trying to determine the definitive clinching event in a close election is perhaps a fool’s errand. However, for the 2016 presidential contest, one event loomed large over the final days of the campaign: the discovery of Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
After the FBI found the device, Director Jim Comey decided to send a letter to Congress making it known that it was tangentially involved in the Hillary Clinton private email server saga. Of course, the public would later find out that the laptop contained no new evidence of anything really—something that was probably pretty clear at the time.
Yet, Comey sent the letter anyway, the media pounced on the story, the race was shaken up, and the rest is seared in our collective cortices as the Last Four Years.
This time around, the Republican apparatus saw the same opportunity to shake up the presidential race in closing days—and by the very same mechanism too. A laptop, allegedly left by Joe Biden’s son Hunter at a repair shop in Delaware made its way into the hands of none other than Rudolph Giuliani. From there, Rudy claimed that it held all sorts of evidence of corruption and wrongdoing, not just on the part of Hunter Biden, but by his father as well. We got screenshots of emails, pictures of text messages adorning the cracked phone screens of Blackberrys past, even the damning evidence that Joe Biden might have once hugged his son. Scathing.
To the right, this was explosive news, the kind that could not be ignored by the mainstream media or the voting public. It was surely going to lead to seismic shifts in the presidential race.
And yet, it didn’t.
As a morbidly curious observer of the other side and their information consumption habits, it was fascinating to watch the right-wing internet’s reaction to this story as it peaked and then petered out, all within a relatively short period of time and without any major implications for the political landscape at large. There was such certainty about its importance and legitimacy, such hostility toward those who weren’t taking it seriously enough, and such desperation in the need to make it play that you couldn’t blame someone for thinking they might be able to will a scandal into existence. But it didn’t work and the episode ended up being a fascinating unraveling taking place in the following steps.
