President Joe Biden sent shockwaves on Sunday evening when he announced that he would pardon Hunter, his often-beleaguered son who was found guilty on three counts related to possession of a firearm. The younger Biden was set to be sentenced in two weeks for those crimes, and also faced sentencing after he pled guilty for federal tax evasion charges. Accordingly, his father’s pardon will account for all of these misdeeds.
The move is particularly surprising and — let’s not mince words here — fundamentally dishonest because of the fact that the president explicitly ruled out pardoning his son on a number of occasions. Democrats ran on being the party that respects the courts in order to create a contrast with Donald Trump, so it smells of rank hypocrisy.
Biden delivered an anguished explanation, saying that Hunter was “treated differently” because he is his son. But the fact of the matter is that not many recovering addicts have the benefit of their father being president of the United States.
The move has also reminded many that Biden was the architect of the the 1994 Crime Bill, a piece of legislation that led to the mass incarceration of Black and brown people.
Biden has so far refused to commute the sentences of 40 federal Death Row inmates — even though he must know Trump is almost certain to resume federal executions when he returns to office in a month and a half. Biden, a devout Catholic, has the opportunity to offer some restitution here. The pardon for his son sits uneasily against this backdrop.
On top of that, Biden’s decision to do this has now saddled Democrats with the uncomfortable task of either distancing themselves from the leader of their party’s decision or defending it.
It also came at the worst possible time. On Friday evening, Trump announced that he would nominate Kash Patel, a wholly unqualified conspiracy theorist, to be his FBI director. And he continued his spree of nominating loyalists when he announced his nomination of Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, to be ambassador to France. Keep in mind that Trump pardoned the elder Kushner after Charles hired a sex worker to seduce his brother-in-law and videotape the encounter in order to send it to his sister. It was a wholly despicable act, but Trump rewarded it with nepotism.
To boot, Trump announced that he would pick Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, Massad Boulus, to be his senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Again, there is little indication that Boulus has any credentials appropriate for the role, save for the fact his son married the right woman to get him a job.
This all should have allowed Democrats to turn up the heat on Trump’s nominations. After all, the president-elect’s nomination of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general fell flat and his nominee for defense secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be on the ropes. His cabinet picks have been causing PR problems for him for quite some time.
But Biden killed that momentum with his decision to pardon his son. Now, instead of focusing exclusively on Trump’s bad nominations, Democrats are once again put on the back foot.
It’s a consistent pattern for Joe Biden; at every thinkable moment, he made his party defend the indefensible. He did so when he chose to run for president again, despite dismal ratings. He did so when he forced his compatriots to publicly support his awful debate performance — or at the very least to claim it was just as bad as Trump’s — while he refused to immediately drop out. He did so as Israel’s war in Gaza became more alarming and wide-ranging. Forcing Democrats to take their eye off the ball of attacking Trump to run interference for him is not good politics, but it is the politics he’s been engaging in for a while.
And Democrats have reaped the bitter harvest that Biden sowed: a calamitous election performance that wiped out three Democratic senators, a failure to flip the House of Representatives, and an impossible electoral task for his vice president, where she closed some of the gap but couldn’t entirely make up the deficit.
Biden’s pardon of Hunter is just the latest example. And it will be another millstone around his party’s neck.