President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son in the waning days of his presidency has inadvertently highlighted his failure to protect the rest of the American population from the MAGA threat we’ll all still be dealing with long after he’s left office. At a time when the Democrats should be aiming full-bore at the massive corruption and authoritarian designs of the incoming administration, Biden has delivered the GOP an easy way to push back and muddy the waters by issuing a pardon that would have attracted plenty of criticism even in the best of times. The Republican Party will not be letting go of this misbegotten act any time soon.
While there are plenty of persuasive arguments that Hunter Biden was unfairly targeted and harshly punished because of the spotlight on his father, these are simply overwhelmed by the context in which Biden has made this decision and the damage he has now done to Democratic efforts to defend the country against a second Trump term. While this pardon is objectively not as bad as Trump’s pardon of a war criminal or (to go back to the original odious pardon of the modern political era) Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, we are living in a time when every day brings fresh news of unfit Trump appointees and a general message that the new president is ready to double-down on his plans for retribution against his political enemies by corrupting the justice system. By pardoning his son for crimes for which he was legitimately convicted, Biden has provided fuel to Trump’s false arguments that the American justice system has already been subverted by Biden and so requires a countervailing burst of vengeful pseudo-justice. In particular, Biden’s pardon decision so close to Trump’s pick of the deranged Kash Patel to be the new FBI director is already being seized on by Republicans as both justification for this choice and for Patel’s vengeful and illicit brief.
While there is no real equivalence between Trump’s pardon of Charles Kushner and the pardon of Hunter Biden in terms of the crimes for which each was convicted, such special treatment of family members (with Trump pardoning the father of his son-in-law) inevitably carries an air of corruption, with suggestions of favoritism and self-dealing. Are we really to believe that Hunter Biden is more deserving of a pardon than hundreds of other worthy candidates who will remain behind bars once President Biden has left office? It is not crazy to conclude that the country has a two-tiered justice system, one for those with powerful connections and those without. The pardon also raises the question of why Biden is acting to protect his son against unfair prosecution, and not the hundreds of public servants now in the crosshairs of the Trump II administration for the “crime” of rightly seeking justice against Trump for his many transgressions of the law. This is not to say that Biden should preemptively pardon those federal employees (I do not think he should) but to emphasize that Biden is attempting to apply a child-size band-aid to a gaping wound in the body politic — a wound that he played a fundamental role in creating by failing to prevent Trump’s re-election and the MAGA-run-amok spectacle now before us.
It’s also worth noting that President Biden previously stated that he did not intend to pardon his son. But if Biden was moved by more recent developments to change his mind, such as Trump’s now-undeniable plans to use the Justice Department to seek vengeance against political enemies, it seems naive to think that a pardon will actually offer his family any relief against such truly corrupt intent. If nothing else, Biden has now provided the Trump Justice Department a new investigative opening: looking into the circumstances of this very pardon! Biden has still not grasped that you cannot try to legally outmaneuver a lawless movement — you must crush it wholesale, or be crushed by it in turn.
While a strong case can be made that Hunter Biden was unjustly treated, the political reality is that Democrats are in no position to win the fight to communicate such a case to the American people — not with the mainstream press primed to both-sides corruption issues, not with Biden having previously said he would not pardon his son, not with the GOP’s clear intent to treat the facts of this pardon in bad faith and a right-wing media apparatus ready to amplify this bad faith, and not with the public’s likely lack of attention beyond the headlines and the GOP’s condemnatory response.
As Vox’s Zach Beauchamp put it, “I don't think the Hunter Biden pardon will *cause* Trump to abuse power. He doesn't need any help in that regard. However, it will likely *enable* Trump's abuse of power by creating a ready-made excuse for other Republicans to dismiss any concerns about his behavior.” Biden just made a difficult challenge for Democrats that much harder, as many will now have to spend time defending the pardon, vainly trying to draw out the subtleties of why this act was not corrupt while Trump’s pardons were, and sacrificing valuable media time that would have been better spent describing the corruption of the incoming administration in clear, unvarnished terms. This also undercuts the proactive efforts the Biden administration itself should be undertaking to undercut Trump’s authoritarian intentions, whether it’s by making public incriminating intelligence about Trump’s dealings with foreign powers or issuing unambiguous reminders to the U.S. armed forces that their ultimate loyalty is to the Constitution, not to whomever the president happens to be.
But however much harder Biden has just made their job, Democrats have no choice but to lay out a case against MAGA corruption and abuse of power in the coming months and years. It should be obvious that there will not be much left of our democracy and our freedoms if Donald Trump and his allies can impugn or jail their opponents through misuse of their official powers. This requires Democrats to stick religiously to first principles — to be opposed to self-dealing, to fight for the rule of law, to talk clearly and tangibly about due process and justice. And the flip side of this is that our democracy and freedom are also under threat to the degree that Trump and his allies can act above the law, as a dictator and his minions would. Given the obvious ease of abuse contained within the presidential pardon power — including Trump’s ability to use it to clear himself and his henchmen of even the most horrific of future crimes against the United States — it seems that the Democrats will sooner or later find themselves on a collision course with the power of the pardon, and will need to find a way to limit it. Let’s hope they can put Biden’s mistake behind them so they can start to make this urgent case.