By Mark Leibovich
Monday, December 09, 2024
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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