Last week, President Biden served up a Thanksgiving leftover that no one wanted: a “full and unconditional pardon” of his son Hunter.
Among Democrats, full and unconditional heartburn has ensued. This, to go along with the Democrats’ preexisting agita set off by last month’s election defeat, their circular blame-gaming, Donald Trump’s ruffian roster of Cabinet picks, and Kamala Harris’s continuing onslaught of post-debacle fundraising emails (unsubscribe, please!). Now already despondent Democrats have been left trying to explain away the rank hypocrisy of the outgoing octogenarian in the White House.
As soon as the pardon news dropped, I thought of that metaphor that people still toss around to explain Trump’s appeal: He’s a “big middle finger” to the priggish pieties of the political establishment. It is not that Trump’s supporters admire everything about him. They just appreciate that his impolitic language and crude style are a rebuke to the self-serving hypocrites in charge.
Turns out that Biden can wield a big middle finger himself. And straight at the dwindling ranks of his own defenders. Several of them had gone on TV in the past and echoed Biden’s promise that he would never pardon Hunter. They’d said that Biden would not resort to the kind of naked self-dealing that Trump so breezily engaged in; that Democrats—unlike Republicans—remain “committed to the rule of law,” that Biden was “a man of his word.”
[Read: Biden’s unpardonable hypocrisy]
And now they’ve gotten to see those clips played back over and over again.
As Biden himself said when he ended his reelection campaign, “The truth, the sacred cause of this country, is larger than any one of us.”
Well, at least until after Election Day. At which point, all bets are off.
The moral high ground can be overrated real estate. Especially for an ornery short-timer, whose understudy lost to a felon, and whose own son was facing jail time.
“This sacred task of perfecting our union is not about me,” Biden also said this past summer. “It’s about you.”
Okay, great. But here’s the deal, as the president would say: This is not the first time Biden has made liars out of his legions of loyalists. In fact, Biden spent a good portion of his presidency perpetuating his own big lie: that the downturns of age somehow did not apply to him, that he could continue to perform the most stressful job in the world deep into his 80s. He kept insisting as much even when his decline had become plainly evident.
Worse, Biden implicated a party full of proxies in his delusion. With few exceptions, they defended his diminished capacity even as it became clear that he was well past his freshness date. Biden exhausted a great deal of goodwill with this charade.
As brazen as Biden’s pardon reversal was, it was not surprising. Biden is a politician, after all. He has been one for his entire adult life. Sometimes politicians will shift positions. Also known as “lie.” They can be slippery, selfish, opportunistic, and calculating.
[Read: Hunter Biden was unfairly prosecuted]
But eventually, they have nothing left to lose. They might as well grab what they can. It might not make for the cleanest of rides into the sunset, but it can save a world of hassle in retirement.
Biden was shunted aside by his own team. When Trump won anyway, Biden still caught a great deal of the blame. He obviously feels much less indebted to the Democratic Party than he once did.
It is easy to sympathize with Biden’s paternal concern and self-interest. Hunter Biden has suffered immense loss, has struggled with addiction, and was almost certainly targeted because of his family’s position. Joe Biden has expressed guilt that his own hyper-public role has made things harder on his only surviving son. He understandably feels protective, especially during these last weeks in power when he can still help Hunter. It’s not as if Trump has been shy, either, in expressing his intent to punish his political enemies.
[Read: Any parent would have done the same]
But the decision will leave Americans even more jaded than they already were. And that’s just what Trump wants. He never tried to convince anyone that he was pure, only that everyone else was dirty. He had no interest in claiming to be righteous. Power was the only currency he wanted.
It is telling that one of the most popular defenses for Biden’s pardon is that he had every right to do it. And no doubt Trump would do the same. Only losers get hung up on norms and unspoken rules.
“If a manifestly unfit Barnum & Bailey confidence man like Trump could become president, then why are the rest of us out here minding our p’s and q’s?” is how Tim Miller, writing in The Bulwark, summarized the rationale. Miller went on to fiercely reject this position. He described the “LOL nothing matters” attitude of the Trump era as “morally bankrupt and childish.”
Trump assumed the worst of politicians. He then lowered the bar accordingly. For the most part, Biden adhered to a much nobler and more honorable standard of the presidency. That’s what made this final act so painful: He proved the cynics right.