‘Of, by and for the elites’ — the cynical messaging of the Hunter Biden pardon

With the election behind us, the Thanksgiving dishes put away and more holidays ahead, Americans had a brief and shining weekend in which we could have felt a bit better about the body politic, if not the body still groaning from the cornbread dressing and pumpkin pie.
That respite ended Sunday when phones began pinging with news that President Joe Biden had pardoned his son Hunter.
It was shocking, not only in the timing, but also in the pardon’s scope and breadth, and the president’s audacity of defiantly doing something that he has for months said he would not do. Before Sunday, it seemed unimaginable that Biden’s news coverage could be worse than it was the day after his campaign-ending debate with Donald Trump, but at least then, there was a measure of sympathy about Biden’s condition. That is absent today, as people denounce and defend the president’s decision.
The news coverage, in particular, has been unforgiving.
Per PBS, “Biden broke a promise … raising questions about his legacy.” Per Politico, “Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.” Per CNN, “White House says Biden would not have pardoned his son had Harris won the election — before backtracking.” The Atlantic published a piece on “Biden’s unpardonable hypocrisy.”
The pardon is a public relations disaster unfolding in real time, but more than that, it is deeply troubling, not only for the message that it sends — which CNN commentator Scott Jennings described as a government and judicial system “of, by and for the elites” — but also for its ripple effects.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, America’s prisons, jails and detention facilities hold more than 1.9 million people, some of whom are imprisoned for cannabis charges. Few, if any, of them have a chance at a presidential pardon, which typically go to people with money, status and connections. And there is no greater connection than your dad being president of the United States. To see this type of favor displayed so clearly builds further distrust in our institutions.
Some analysts are worrying, and not without cause, that the pardon gives President-elect Trump carte blanche with regard to pardons, and that Biden has set a dangerous precedent. Other presidents have pardoned family members — Trump, his son-in-law’s father; Bill Clinton, his half brother — but it’s the pardon’s jaw-dropping life span, more than 10 years, that’s raising eyebrows the highest and inviting questions about what, exactly, we don’t know about what is being pardoned.
Glenn Beck, while acknowledging that Biden was within his legal rights to issue the pardon, said Monday that Trump should declassify all information related to Hunter Biden’s prosecution, to shed light on what might be hidden there, and to determine whether there are other people who have committed crimes for which they should be held accountable.
Doing so may satisfy public interest, but also test how long Americans can abide Hunter Biden being in the news — and his father, for that matter. Over Thanksgiving, we could entertain the hope that the Biden show would be over on Jan. 20. The pardon, as questionable as it was, at least suggested that all things Biden would retire to Delaware after Trump’s inauguration. Instead, we’re back in the thick of Trump v. Biden again, with cynicism on tap.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Americans could dislike “Uncle Joe,” both his persona and his policies, and still grudgingly admire his statements, going as far back as June, about letting the judicial chips fall where they might and respecting the judicial process. Now, he’s talking like Trump, about unfair prosecutions and miscarriage of justice, while those who are attempting to put daylight between the two men on this issue are arguing themselves into corners.
The highlight has to be Whoopi Goldberg saying on “The View” that Trump is more culpable, in part, because he was not addicted to drugs. (I’m old enough to remember when “not on drugs” was a testament to a person’s character, not evidence of the lack of it.) Second would be S.E. Cupp’s blaming Trump for the Hunter Biden pardon, saying that Trump lowered the moral bar for both parties, and that “possessing moral authority on anything is no longer a currency that matters.”
That doesn’t fly. Biden alone owns this debacle and the fallout from it.
This is not to say that Biden’s action should be viewed in a vacuum, without comparison to Trump, whose own activities have been causing fevered speculation about presidential self-pardons since 2019. We might ask ourselves if both Democrats and Republicans might be better off electing people who have no need (or potential need) of pardons for themselves or their friends and family. But we also might come to a consensus about lawfare, and the need to purge it from our institutions.
Of the many blunders of Biden’s “full and unconditional” pardon is the tacit acknowledgement that American jurisprudence can, in fact, be weaponized, which is what Trump and his supporters have been saying for years. In fact, some have argued that Biden should similarly pardon Trump in the name of national unity, seeking to do what Gerald Ford tried to do with his pardon of Nixon. While some of Ford’s critics at the time, including the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, later decided that the move had been right, it was divisive at the time, with many Americans believing that the pardon itself was part of a coverup.
That same sense of distrust has been rekindled at a time when America can ill afford it. Biden has called on Americans to understand “why a father and a president would come to this decision,” and we can understand it, while believing he should have done better. The pardon itself was a cynical act, showing that for all Biden’s previous praise of American jurisprudence, he did not trust the system to perform as it should.
Alternatively, maybe he did — and maybe to the president’s thinking, that potential of justice delivered was even worse for his son.
Either way, the effect is the same: By pardoning his son, the president confirmed what many Americans already thought — thinking that helped elect Trump twice — and with Biden’s legacy already in shambles, he doesn’t have to worry about his poll numbers this month. The consequences will be America’s alone.