Biden Gives Up On America

The emotional subtext of the president's nepotistic pardon

I completely understand why President Biden pardoned his son. He loves Hunter, wants to protect him, and feels he has only been pursued by the law because of his connection to his famous and powerful father. Moreover, I’m sure he feels not only compassion but profound guilt over his son’s transgressions, that they were, in some sense, caused by the fact that he was famous and powerful and thereby both cast a shadow that his son could not escape from behind and provided a temptation that his son was too weak to resist. As Richard Harris’s Marcus Aurelius said to his own son: “Your faults as a son is my failure as a father.” (Even the grammatical mistake sounds Biden-esque.)

But that speech from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator comes in the context of the Roman emperor telling his son that he will not be his heir, that he will be denying him the thing he wants most. Scott’s version of Marcus Aurelius chooses his country over his family, and pays for the choice by being murdered by his own son.

Biden made the opposite choice. He broke an explicit campaign promise not to pardon his son. He exonerated his son not only from the kind of wrongdoing that probably would not have been pursued against another malefactor, but the kind of wrongdoing that absolutely should be. He has accused his own justice department of trying to “break” his son in order to “break” him, thereby dignifying his successor’s routine trafficking in conspiracy theories anchored in self-pity. He not only said in so many words that there is nothing wrong with trying to peddle political influence for profit (since so long as you fail, you haven’t broken the law), but by issuing a blanket pardon for any crimes that may have been committed during an 11-year period has effectively demanded that the public simply trust that there are no consequential crimes yet to be discovered. And he could take this action only because he himself was immunized from prosecution by the Supreme Court, a decision decried by liberals for putting the president above the law and thereby vastly increasing the likelihood that the presidency’s power will be abused for personal interest. The first beneficiaries of Trump v. U.S. are Hunter and Joe Biden.

I don’t believe Biden is unaware of any of that. For that reason, I think it’s right to ask what the decision says about Biden’s feelings about his country, not just what it says about his feelings about his son.

Not long after the election, I had a conversation with a relative in which she said, in so many words, that she’d given up. She wasn’t worried for herself and her husband; they would be fine, financially and otherwise, whatever Trump did; they were safe within the bubble of professional-class privilege. Yes, she was sad that her children and grandchildren would inherit a worse world now—less-free, more violent, more subject to the ravages of climate change—than would have been the case, she believed, had Trump lost, but she couldn’t take responsibility for that. If the American people were stupid enough to vote for this guy, then they deserved whatever they got, and she wasn’t going to care anymore. She would look out for her own as best she could, and that’s it.

I’ve heard a lot of that kind of comment since, including in response to the Hunter Biden pardons, a lot of: well, Trump’s going to abuse the pardon power anyway. We’re in a new world, and you can’t expect one side to behave ethically when the other side laughs at the very idea. We couldn’t beat ‘em. We might as well join ‘em.

I think the Hunter Biden pardon is, itself, an expression of that kind of feeling on the president’s part, the same kind of feeling that animates comments of his to reporters like “do you think you can get hit in the head by the camera behind you?” It’s a feeling of contempt, of disdain, for those who believe they can judge or question the president when their own judgment is so manifestly inept. Normally, even if he wouldn’t face political consequences himself because of term limits, a president might feel constrained from doing something like issuing a blanket pardon for his son because of the negative political impact on his party, or on how his own legacy would be perceived. But Biden no longer cares what happens to his party, or what the people think of him, because they failed him.

I don’t think it’s incidental that Hunter Biden was part of the tight inner circle of advisors to the president when he was deluged with escalating demands that he withdraw from the presidential race after his disastrous debate performance, and that Hunter strongly urged him to stay in. He encouraged his father in a course that was obviously disastrous because that’s what his father wanted; he indulged his fantasies at a time when almost nobody else was willing to indulge him. His father gave in, ultimately, to his party’s demands—and what happened? They lost anyway. Why should he make any further sacrifices for the sake of an ungrateful and stupid party, an ungrateful and stupid nation? Why not stand by those who stood by him, and to heck with what anybody else thinks?

John Ganz is right that this pardon sets a clear precedent for Trump to do much worse, and he’s also right that standing on norms is genuinely difficult when the other side violates them with impunity since it gives the other side an important tactical advantage. But that’s not what strikes me as most important about it. This wasn’t the president breaking a norm for policy reasons or even for political reasons, playing hardball so as to win. This wasn’t #resistance and it wasn’t defiance and it wasn’t creative collaboration. This was taking his marbles and going home.

I think that desire is pretty widespread among normie Democrats right now. I don’t know precisely what it portends, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t anything good.