Joe Biden framed his decision to pardon his son as something any parent would do—if they happened to be the most powerful person in the country. “I hope Americans will understand,” he said in a statement announcing his pardon of Hunter Biden, “why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
That decision—a direct reversal of his many explicit promises not to intervene in his son’s legal proceedings—came weeks before his son was to face sentencing for his felony tax and gun convictions, and in the final stretch of a presidency that was premised, initially, on the restoration of democratic norms that had been eroded by predecessor Donald Trump. In a statement announcing the pardon Sunday night, Biden suggested Hunter’s prosecution was part of that attack on convention. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son,” Biden wrote, “and that is wrong.”
But while it is true that Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill targeted Hunter Biden for political gain—investigating him relentlessly in bad faith—the actual charges against the president’s son were brought by his very own Justice Department. Hunter Biden entered a guilty plea, and, after it fell apart, he was convicted by a jury of his peers. Joe Biden said, over and over again, that he had faith in the legal process and that he would respect its results. So did his surrogates. “Our answer stands,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said just last month, when asked if Trump’s election would change Biden’s decision around a pardon. “No.”
In now attacking the legal system, and shielding his son from its consequences, the president hasn’t just gone back on his “word as a Biden”—he’s betrayed the very principles he ran on. Biden entered office talking about respecting norms, institutions, and the public trust; he’s on his way out echoing Trump’s complaints about a weaponized legal system and issuing a “full and unconditional pardon” to his son for any crimes he may have committed in the last decade.
He tried to justify this obvious hypocrisy by emphasizing Hunter’s personal troubles, by suggesting his own stature made his son a victim of “selective” prosecution, and by noting Republicans have long been trying to capitalize on his son’s malfeasance to advance their political prospects. “I believe in the justice system,” he wrote, “but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
“It is clear,” Biden said, “that Hunter was treated differently.”
That much is true—just not in the way that Biden meant.
The personal has always been political for Joe Biden. The tragedies that marked his private life have formed the core of his public identity, and not so long ago made him seem the man for a moment of national grief: Amid a raging pandemic and civil unrest, here was a “consoler-in-chief” whose pain was supposed to make him uniquely capable of empathizing with the pain of the country. But the flip side of empathy, in Biden’s case, has been hubris. Over the past year, Biden seemed to be a man increasingly unable to distinguish his own interests from those of the nation—even to the detriment of his own stated project of protecting of American democracy.
Democracy is, in fact, under threat from Trump. But warnings of the danger Trump poses were undermined by Biden’s ill-advised, vainglorious reelection bid, and are now further cheapened by his use of the office to insulate his son from the legal consequences other Americans might face for similar transgressions. “While as a father I certainly understand [Biden’s] natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” as Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis wrote. “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
Of course, there is already some bad precedent here: Bill Clinton pardoned his brother on drug charges; Trump pardoned son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father of tax evasion, as well as his own henchmen Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. Trump—whose business and political careers have been defined by wanton corruption—had even openly mused about pardoning himself. It turns out he won’t have to, though: His election over Kamala Harris last month acts as a kind of quasi-pardon by the public, allowing him to elude accountability in the four felony cases he had been facing.
That invincibility appears to be attractive even to some Democrats: “At this point, we are sissies compared to Trump and everyone around him,” one Democratic lawmaker told Axios. But such reciprocation comes with a price. Indeed, Biden is feeding into the very cynicism that powers Trump’s movement—the idea that power is all that matters, that the principles his opponents espouse are just empty words, and that all politicians are the same.
“In trying to break Hunter,” Biden wrote Sunday, announcing the pardon, “they’ve tried to break me.” They seem to have succeeded: Not only has he been defeated politically—he sold out the ideals he was elected on in the first place.
