By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, December
03, 2024
Seeing the thesis of a piece you’ve written vindicated on
television is like going to the movies and spotting a friend in the background
of a scene. The flare of recognition is enough to jolt you physically. Heyyyyy,
I know that guy!
It happened to me after I filed yesterday’s
column and then stumbled across this
clip from The View. The topic in both cases was President Joe
Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, of course. In my piece I argued that whether
you favor or oppose clemency will track with how much idealism you retain about
traditional American norms following Donald Trump’s reelection.
Watching the exchange play out among the View panel
felt like laboratory confirmation of a hypothesis.
The harshest Biden critic on set was Alyssa Farah
Griffin, a Republican who served in the first Trump administration but resigned
in December 2020 when she realized where
the “rigged election” insanity was headed. She’s a belated convert to
Never-Trump-ism, and one thing about Never Trumpers is that we believe strongly
in norms. (Well, I did until
last month.) It’s no surprise that she took the president to task on
Monday’s panel, appalled by his remarkably brazen lying about his willingness
to pardon his son.
The other three panelists were partisan Democrats. (I
don’t know if Ana Navarro characterizes herself that way, actually, but
c’mon.) Partisans care more about their party’s interests than about norms,
so all three were fine with the pardon. Whoopi Goldberg went as far as to
question whether the president had truly lied at all. “I think Biden had no
intentions of pardoning Hunter,” she claimed, incorrectly, “and I think the
more stuff that went down … I think he said, ‘well, why am I busting my behind
to stay straight and do this when nobody is? When no one else is?’”
Griffin hasn’t yet thrown in the towel on liberal norms
following Trump’s victory. Goldberg has, whether or not she’s willing to cop to
it. Their disagreement is a premonition of a dispute that will trouble Trump’s
detractors chronically over the next four years: Should Democrats lean all the
way in on Trumpian postliberalism themselves or should they defend the liberal
order?
They keep trying to have it both ways, paying lip service
to norms while angling to overturn them in practice—agitating to end
the filibuster and pack
the Supreme Court, conniving to forgive
student debt without an act of Congress, pardoning cronies from federal
crimes after rivers of florid rhetoric about the greatness of the justice
system during Trump’s criminal travails. It hasn’t worked out for them legally
or electorally. American voters want to take their postliberalism pure, it
seems, without
the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Should Democrats now recommit to liberalism, a morally
superior political ethos that would constrain their own political tactics and
which, frankly, no longer has much of a public constituency? Or should they
emulate amoral Trumpism forthrightly by disdaining liberal norms as nuisances
that impede effective action?
In short, should they be “suckers” or should they be
“fighters”? How you answer that question will determine how you think Joe
Biden’s party should respond to his corrupt pardon.
Two defenses.
There are two defenses of the Hunter Biden pardon
circulating among Democrats, one of which is much harder to refute than the
other.
The easy one is what we might call the “retribution”
defense. Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware offered it in trying to explain why Joe
Biden had supposedly changed his mind about clemency for his son. “I think what
changed was that President-elect Trump put people in place who made it really
clear that they intended to go after, not just anybody, but in their campaign
activity, had talked about going after Hunter Biden directly,” Coons told CNN. “This was
a significant change from President Biden’s insistence he would not do it, and
as I’ve been turning it over in my mind today, the thing that changed was who
Trump nominated.”
Is that right? Joe Biden had fully intended to let Hunter
serve time in prison but reversed course once Trump started nominating vengeful
toadies like Matt Gaetz and Kash Patel for law enforcement leadership?
It is not right. It’s nonsense on stilts, and not just
because it was already very apparent when the president began promising
this past summer not to pardon his son that a second Trump administration would
be keen
on exacting “retribution” against political enemies.
One reason it’s nonsense is because, according to NBC
News, it’s literally untrue. “The president has discussed pardoning his son
with some of his closest aides at least since Hunter Biden’s conviction in
June, said two people with direct knowledge of the discussions about the
matter,” the outlet reported. “They said it was decided at the time that he
would publicly say he would not pardon his son even though doing so remained on
the table.”
Biden lied about his intentions from the jump, in other
words, knowingly and deliberately. Alyssa Farah Griffin was right to call him
out on it. And needless to say, the prospect of a second Trump administration
was already quite
real when the president began telling those lies. If Biden wanted to make a
Hunter pardon conditional on whether a “responsible person” would be leading
the Justice Department next year, he could have done that from the start. He
didn’t.
The “retribution” defense is also overinclusive and
underinclusive.
It’s overinclusive, as a colleague noted on Monday in a Dispatch
Slack discussion, because the terms of the pardon aren’t limited to uncharged
crimes that Hunter Biden might potentially be prosecuted for by the Trump
administration. It includes the gun and tax offenses of which Hunter was
convicted by his father’s own DOJ. Why does protecting him from Trump’s
“retribution” require letting him off scot-free in cases brought by a special
counsel who was appointed
by Merrick Garland, not by Gaetz or Pam Bondi?
It’s underinclusive, meanwhile, because there are many
other Trump enemies now facing persecution by a Patel-led FBI who
haven’t—yet?—received the same clemency bestowed upon the president’s lowlife
son. Kash Patel has a literal
enemies list, Andrew Egger noted today at The
Bulwark; our own Sarah Isgur appears on it, for God knows what reason.
If Biden’s defenders are serious about wanting to protect Trump antagonists
from unjust harassment by the Justice Department next year, the pardons
shielding them from “retribution” should have begun with the likes of Liz
Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Mitt Romney, not an influence-peddling crackhead.
The fact that they didn’t proves that there’s no
high-minded reason behind Joe Biden’s act of clemency. It’s a simple product of
fatherly “guilt”
over the fact that his ascendance to the presidency led to his son enduring a
yearslong political ordeal, never mind that a) Biden’s political career also
gave Hunter fabulous
advantages
in life, b) no one forced Hunter to commit the actual, honest-to-goodness
federal crimes he committed, and c) Joe Biden repeatedly “directed the
resources and stature of both the party and the government he headed to the
Save Hunter Project,” in Josh
Barro’s words, which made Hunter’s corruption a matter of public interest.
A father chose to place his crooked son above the law
because he could, full stop. There’s no “retribution” defense.
But maybe there’s a “suckers and fighters” defense?
“Suckers and Fighters” was the title of my
first newsletter for The Dispatch. Trump has concocted a sort of
populist anti-morality for the American right, I argued in that piece, in which
“ruthlessness in pursuit of cultural dominance” was the only true virtue.
According to that anti-morality, dishonorable behavior is a qualification for
political leadership rather than a disqualifier because it demonstrates a
ruthless willingness to ignore norms in pursuit of one’s interests. It’s the
hallmark of a “fighter,” whereas observance of norms is characteristic of a
“sucker” who prefers to lose honorably than win dirty.
That thesis has also held up
pretty well in the two years since.
Whoopi Goldberg’s argument for pardoning Hunter Biden,
that Joe Biden would be a fool to “bust his behind to stay straight … when no
one else is,” is a Democratic version of Trump’s populist anti-morality. If the
ruling class—now represented by Donald Trump and his postliberal
vandals—doesn’t care about norms, why should the Bidens? Why should they be
“suckers” who follow traditional pardon practices if it means leaving the
president’s son to rot in prison rather than “fighters” who emulate Trump’s
brand of cronyism by doing whatever they can to immunize Hunter from legal
consequences?
There’s no easy retort to that argument anymore. The
obvious one, that abusing presidential power for personal gain is morally
wrong, feels so naive in light of Trump’s reelection that I’m cringing while
typing it out. It takes a person of unusual honor to continue to follow a moral
code that places them at a competitive disadvantage and no longer
inspires feelings of admiration among the wider population. Joe Biden is not a
person of unusual honor, needless to say. Few politicians are.
How candid should officials in the president’s party be
about pointing that out over the final two months of his term?
Under the bus?
The occasion of Hunter Biden’s pardon is the perfect
moment for Democrats to break emphatically with an unpopular leader, Eric
Levitz argued in a piece for Vox on Monday.
The perfect post-election moment, I should say.
The actual perfect moment was sometime in early 2023, before 80-year-old Joe
Biden somehow talked himself into believing that running for reelection was a
good idea.
But we are where we are, and clemency for Hunter now
offers Democrats a twofer. By denouncing Biden aggressively, they can separate
themselves from him politically and—maybe—salvage what’s left of the crumbling
taboo against issuing freakishly
broad pardons to anointed toadies before Trump takes office and runs wild
with the precedent.
“Had Biden not pardoned his son, elected Republicans at
every level would have had to answer for Trump’s actions without reference to
the Bidens,” Tom
Nichols wrote on Monday of the incoming president’s imminent corrupt
clemency spree. “Forget all that. Joe Biden has now provided every
Republican … with a ready-made heat shield against any criticism about Trump’s
pardons, past or present.” That’s true—unless Democrats come out of the
woodwork to attack Biden over the Hunter pardon, perhaps. In that case, they
might be able to create a distinction in Americans’ minds between the rotten
First Family’s position on clemency and the Democratic Party’s.
And if they do, their attacks next year on Trump’s
pardon-palooza won’t seem so hypocritical. Joe and Hunter Biden may have given
up on liberal norms, Democrats would be signaling, but the wider American left
has not.
Some prominent liberals have in fact spoken up against
the pardon. Two of Colorado’s highest-ranking officials, Gov. Jared Polis
and Sen.
Michael Bennet, objected. So did Sens.
Gary Peters of Michigan and Peter Welch of Vermont. Ditto for Democratic
members of the House like Greg Landsman
of Ohio, Greg
Stanton of Arizona, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez
of Washington. Ultimately there’ll be more Democratic outrage in Congress
over pardoning Hunter Biden, I’m sure, than Republican outrage over pardoning
the cop-beaters who went to prison after January 6. The populist anti-morality
that’s utterly conquered the right hasn’t yet conquered the left.
But it has gained territory. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, the most influential young leftist in America, celebrated
Hunter Biden’s gun conviction earlier this year as proof that “Democrats are
willing to accept when our justice system works”—but as I write this on Tuesday
afternoon, she has yet to say a word against the pardon. In a story published
on Monday, the New
York Times pointed to Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett as an example of
the enthusiasm with which many progressives have greeted it. “Way to go, Joe!”
Crockett told MSNBC this weekend. “Let me be the first to congratulate the
president for deciding to do this, because at the end of the day, we know that
we have a 34-count convicted felon about to walk into the White House.”
Centrist suckers like Jared Polis and Michael Bennet
might simper about norms, but fighters like Joe Biden understand that that’s a
mug’s game in an age when Donald Trump can be elected president twice. If
American voters aren’t going to punish corruption and ruthlessness by
Republican leaders, progressives might reason, Democrats would be fools not to
take full advantage of their lowered standards.
It’s a simple matter of “knowing
what time it is.”
How are figures like Polis and Crockett, Bennet and
Ocasio-Cortez, supposed to navigate this nascent schism between liberals who
want Democrats to follow norms more faithfully than Republicans do and
postliberals who want the party to behave more ruthlessly, if perhaps not as
ruthlessly as Trump? A centrist Democrat who goes to bat for norms risks
finding himself viewed contemptuously by leftists as an out-of-touch weakling;
a leftist who makes excuses for norm-breaking risks finding herself ghettoized as
a radical in party primaries and/or general elections.
This is no idle thought experiment. It’s a cinch, for
instance, that the Biden White House will soon consider pardoning other figures
on Trump’s enemies list, assuming it isn’t already doing so. What if the
president opts to pardon his entire Cabinet along with dozens of
undersecretaries for any crimes they may have committed between January 20,
2021, and the date of the pardon, reasoning that they need legal protection
from Kash Patel’s “retribution” crusade?
Liberal Democrats like Polis and Bennet would presumably
disapprove, fearing the precedent Biden will have set by immunizing his
deputies for any lawlessness they might have engaged in. We don’t want them to
be persecuted by Patel for crimes they didn’t do but we do want them to be
prosecuted for crimes they did do, no? And with the American people’s
faith in institutions already collapsing to the Democratic Party’s electoral
detriment, what conclusion will the public reach about the propriety of the
Biden administration if practically everyone involved in it requires a pardon
on the way to the exit?
Progressives, on the other hand, will presumably be fine
with the idea. Sure, it looks bad for the president to be handing out pardons
like gold watches as his team heads off toward retirement, but Trump and his
toadies are genuinely evil figures who’ll exploit Team Biden’s criminal
jeopardy if the opportunity isn’t snatched away from them. Democrats didn’t
choose postliberalism; it was chosen by Republican populists and the American
electorate. By pardoning his aides, Biden is simply reacting rationally to the
new political reality that’s been foisted on him and the left. He’s protecting
them in the same way that he protected his son.
And as for setting a bad precedent: please. Whatever Joe
Biden does or doesn’t do, every sleazebag Trump has ever met who’s remained in
his good graces will receive a pardon before 2029 as a matter of course. We’ll
be lucky if he doesn’t end up inducing his deputies to commit specific crimes
by promising them pardons in advance—a practice which, as far as I can tell,
would be perfectly legal for him and for them thanks to the Supreme Court.
Liberal “suckers” and postliberal “fighters” are going to
wrestle for control over the direction of the Democratic Party. And while the
suckers stand a better chance of winning this fight than they did on the rotten
American right, their chances will depend partly on Trump: The more corruptly
he behaves in his second term and the more tolerant of that corruption voters
prove to be, the weaker the electoral incentive for Democrats to follow liberal
norms will get. At some points, “suckers” really are suckers.
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