The US president-for-just-a-little-while-longer, Joe Biden, has incredulously pardoned his own son. Now, from a certain perspective this does make sense—I have some sympathy for the man, as a father, but as a president with responsibilities to a nation as a whole, I can conjure not much sympathy at all. In fact, I was very tempted to title this piece Joe Biden, you fucking idiot.
Biden’s apparently hapless son, Hunter, was charged with tax evasion and gun possession, and was lucky not to have also been caught out in a few dodgy business deals as well. Whilst not as conspiratorially relevant as his father’s enemies might have hoped, I get the sense that Hunter has long been that kind of entitled kid whose life of ease and plenty rendered his existence fairly meaningless. That is, without needing to exert himself, he likely felt like a fraud most of his life. Then, setting out to distract himself from that fact.
Throw in the early childhood trauma of being involved in a car accident which killed his mother and infant sister, and we’ve got a Freudian wet dream of possibilities churning around in that skull of his. When you don’t have to earn a goddamn thing to get ahead, but life still insists on punctuating the tranquility with random cruelties, it isn’t beyond comprehension that one might turn to booze and drugs and sex on your path to becoming the family fuck-up.
Joe Biden, looming larger than he actually is over a future which, separated by the bar partition of a courtroom, he can no longer control, stares with his son toward an abstract, expressionistic colour field. The bland pastel variegation holds the same ageing, tepid tedium which has come to dominate the Democratic Party he so appropriately represents. Obsessively safe, staring right into the centre of the frame, Biden might hope against hope that these same dull patterns will repeat themselves as they always have done—only, this time there’s a degree of delusion which cannot be overlooked.
What is not in the frame might be as significant as what is. Can his son, doing his best impression of his father and representing the future of US politics with his gaze facing further forward than that of his father, really prevail over the unseen shadow which will soon cast its long reach across this otherwise naive and glowing appraisal of what is to come? One wonders what it is they see in the patterns before them, losing nuance in their desire to move backward into the larger, lighter field on the left, than toward the more fractured, darker actuality expressed on the right.
One is the past, one the future; will the next block of colour be shades of grey, or black, or splattered with some other bright colour as the country is further eviscerated? Image: Vevnos
Yet with daddy rushing in to save his kid (and not for the first time, I suspect), Joe Biden has just given his legitimately corrupt enemies every excuse in the world to do exactly the same thing, only now with impunity because it will become almost impossible for Democrats to argue they are any different to Trump or his various enablers. Because here’s their erstwhile leader doing the same thing.
Little in the way of genuine resistance is worth offering against the notion that the president clearly loves his son; in most pictures of the two it’s not difficult to see the genuine affection the old man showers upon him, as he does all his children. Natural warmth is a quality which he appears to emanate to quite a substantial degree, even with complete strangers.
Which contrasts vividly, in a quite extraordinary way, with his rival and now both predecessor and successor Donald Trump. The latter has a detached and much more formal relationship with his spawn. The one exception might be Ivana—likely because she is a conventionally attractive female and represents a form of status he seems to appreciate—but Trump’s interactions with his children are ultimately performative and literally self-centred, as all of his behaviour is. That’s what it is to be a narcissist.
A secondary argument in support of this move is that Biden has not splashed pardons around to an array of cronies and boot-lickers in his administration (perhaps because he doesn’t need to as none of them are facing prison). His chosen circle of advisors have not been composed of quite so many criminals.
All of this is merely preamble, however: my point here is to only acknowledge that Trump and Biden are clearly not the same. But fuck me… the optics surrounding this particular pardon are so bad. The reek of hypocrisy is evident even across the Pacific.
Trump busied himself pardoning anyone closely involved in his most conspicuous graft at the end of his previous term, and there’s no reason not to expect him to repeat that a second time around—including, hilariously, himself. After all, that’s likely the only reason he’s even interested in being president at all (it certainly isn’t the actual work, which he very likely despises, and any notion of ‘service’ to the public is laughable). The Democrats expended a lot of wind and effort espousing the immorality of these pardons, shrieking about the rule of law, using them as an excuse to paint the ex-president as a fraud, as someone simply looking to exonerate his sycophants—many of whom had committed legitimate crimes which would likely have otherwise sent them to prison. Trump appeared to bandy pardons about like lollies, offering them to his favourites and withholding them from adversaries new and old.
One wonders what meek resistance they might be able to make, now that the head of their party has deliberately tarred them with the very same brush?
Slow and Steady Doesn’t Always Win the Race
Joe Biden, by any reasonable or dispassionate assessment, is likely to be considered a better-than-average president, if overall somewhat middling. His demeanour in the big chair has been that of quiet and in fact quite unassuming competency, winning often unsung successes in the face of extraordinary resistance (from the House and especially the Senate) and doing the rather boring work of keeping the economy in a strong state after the chaos left by Trump 45. It isn’t an onerous task to argue that Biden possesses the opposite qualities of his blow-hard, sensationalist, self-defeating, and remarkably lazy, forebear. Yet along with these successes, it’s impossible to overlook some colossal blunders stemming from both his age (over which he has no control) and his surprisingly hard-line view on ideological topics such as abortion or his long-standing and utterly unswerving support of Israel despite that nation’s horrific obliteration of Palestine and its people.
But all of his successes are likely to be largely forgotten by anyone other than historians and presidential scholars, because of the two most directly obnoxious failures of his presidency: the first being his long-belated ‘decision’ not to run for a second term; the second being the pardoning his own son in the sunset of his presidency.
That Biden did not run for a second term was almost certainly not a decision at all—at least not his decision—though there will likely be a temptation for his supporters to paint that moment in time as some noble act of self-sacrifice for the betterment of the nation. Where, in reality, I expect he was hauled out ignominiously by the Democratic Party in the form of formidable figures like Nancy Pelosi, who knocked on his door and let him know the time had come. His increasing incoherence and stumbling inability to string thoughts together disembowelled any serious argument that he would have made a better candidate than his vice president, who in the end had a grand total of 107 days to do what most incumbents and challengers spend about three or four times that amount of time doing (and which her opponent, Trump, had clearly been bleating and ranting about since he was booted out of office in 2020).
While understandable in the context of Biden feeling like he was singularly armed to tackle his nemesis—the raison d'être of his successful first challenge back when the establishment was evidently on his side—that was not enough on its own. Biden suffered from more than one degree of ignorance: of the very clear situation before him; his personal incapacity and decline; how certain positions would be viewed publicly—such as his quiet refusal to defend abortion rights, or his disastrously stubborn commitment to Israel at all costs—these were all critical components of his inability to perceive the reality of his circumstances.
Furthermore, whatever his achievements (in regard to the economy in particular), it seemed to me as though his quiet and modest approach worked against him in a media environment dominated by Trump and his incessant grievances. Occasionally the president would swing a few punches but he largely played peek-a-boo, hoping that the audience would notice his deft footwork (which they mostly did not) and that he might win on points. That Trump practically KO’d him by complete accident during a debate performance so poor that Trump’s own stumbling incoherence went largely unnoticed really illustrates the dearth of strong arguments and general acuity which Biden had at that point to offer.
Holding a Mirror Up to the Post-Apocalypse
Democrats will undoubtedly be analysing their defeat from a multitude of different angles, and will very likely come up with some utterly incompetent conclusions such as “perhaps it was a mistake to run a [female/non-white] candidate rather than [the usual type]”. Harris seemed to run a pretty solid campaign (with the exception of two key aspects) right up until the last few weeks when a sense of tedium sucked all the breath out of the race—at which point the only voice left was Trump’s. That she performed as well as she did under the circumstances should be more widely acknowledged than it is; from my perspective, Biden did more to sink the Democrats’ election chances than Harris did.
His refusal to acknowledge reality, and step aside earlier, to fully embrace the candidacy of his vice president, and perhaps most of all to even take some strategic blame for his less popular policies and allow her to run on her own merits without his ancient millstone around her neck, will all have played a significant role. Harris was an eloquent and energetic candidate, and for the vast majority of her campaign made Trump look hapless and listless, his old tricks rendered impotent by her energy and positivity. None of the mud seemed to stick, and he returned again and again to the same dreary talking points he’d prepared about Biden… who was no longer his adversary.
Ultimately though, it was the economy—and the campaign’s inability to sell the achievements of the preceding administration and also come up with some pithy slogan for how a new one might improve on it—which was likely the largest factor. The Democrats, being already in charge, needed to sell their economic ideas, sell them again, and sell them one more time for good measure. Being brat was never going to be enough on its own.
The Harris campaign was smashingly successful amongst the progressive female demographic; the younger, likely the more enthusiastic the support. But that’s a pretty narrow field. Anyone who wasn’t explicitly progressive, or wasn’t female, or wasn’t young, probably felt a little bit dismissed by the focus of the campaign—and that’s a lot of people. Psychologically, when people are dismissed and unrecognised, one of their first reactions is likely to be a big well fuck you, then! In the context of an election, that alone may have done much of the damage. Moderates, especially men, may have found themselves feeling angry enough at Harris to vote for Trump out of a pig-headed (and misguided, make no mistake) desire to inflict some retribution. This follows a global trend at present where incumbents of all stripes are being punished for ignoring constant pleas from the public for relief from inflation. Improving an economy overall doesn’t mean shit if every receipt you glance at incredulously is still far more expensive than it used to be, and you feel it should be. And I say that as someone who is very much affected by the same thing, and is equally frustrated at my own—purportedly progressive—government for their own piss-farting around when it comes to price relief.
Young men in particular really needed to hear a plan for what Democrats were going to do for them, and certainly not to be dismissed or, even worse, blamed for the country’s ills because it makes for some widely-shared, self-righteous hot-takes on social media. Don’t get me wrong, men have an awful lot to interrogate about their behaviour in general, but casting them as the problem isn’t going to encourage many of them to lean away from their instinct to view Trump—who lionises many of the worst aspects of male behaviour which compensates for underlying insecurity—as problematic or extreme. Instead, it was likely to push them further toward the conclusion that he was the one looking out for them.
While Biden would have alienated far more voters with his doddering performances than he would have won by being folksy and white and male, it is clear that an energised progressive base, largely female, largely young, was never going to be make up for lost moderate voters, male ones in particular. That’s the first and largest lesson the Party needs to take from the election. As irritating as it is to compromise on ideals—and Harris copped an awful lot of flak as she attempted to tread lightly between, for example, highly polarised positions on Israel and Gaza—that’s precisely what politics is about. Sure, it’s great to take a stand on various topics, but when you do it’s particularly important to communicate exactly why it’s important to hold that line. It’s not enough to simply signal to different groups that you have their back—especially when that message is vague or inconsistent or, worst of all, both.
Victorious leaders tend to speak to the greatest proportion of voters overall, so the results of this election should in turn suggest to Democrats that they can’t paint issues like border control simply as ‘racism’ or ‘bigotry’ versus ‘compassion’ or some implicit assumption about fairness. Just because it’s not a problem for inner-city yuppies in Chicago or New York doesn’t mean they should stare down their noses at people in Texas who aren’t thrilled about some aspects of the immigrants who make up much more of their local population. When that happens, these people—whose worldview is undoubtedly inflected with the racism which the United States was built upon—are turned away, feeling dismissed, and who is waiting in the wings for them? Mr Ridiculous and his ideas about border walls and deportations.
Those solutions are, most likely, too extreme for the natural tastes of these same moderates. But Trump is at least speaking to their concerns rather than dismissing them outright. I expect immigration, as the world continues to be affected by cascading disasters caused by climate change, will only become a more serious concern going forward. Displaced and desperate populations are going to become greater and greater, and they won’t be turning to other poor regions of the world which are also on fire—they will want to settle somewhere as safe as possible. Those places will usually be relatively wealthy and, until recently, relatively white. This is not an issue which will go away any time soon.
Loving all the children of the world is all well and good, but it will become increasingly difficult, and unpopular, regardless of its moral imperative. It might be the appropriate position, but it’s also easy to stand on principle when you are privileged in various ways—that argument is going to need to be made well, and consistently, and in places most conspicuously impacted by the arrival of immigrant communities. Otherwise, it will continue to be read as it has been in the rural U.S.; as ‘elite’ politicians in large urban centres dictating their own moral absolutism to purportedly racist, idiot bumpkins in the country.
Love Is Not Enough
On that note, and to circle back to Biden’s love for his children, I expect that’s precisely what has motivated his second blunder. He either loves, or wants to love, his children so much that it colours his judgement to an unfortunate degree. Surely his advisors would have made it abundantly clear what pardoning his own son would look like (and he publicly declared multiple times that he would not do so), but Biden likely had a few other immediate priorities in mind: the rapid approach of the end of his tenure as president and, parallel to that, his shrinking ability to control or affect his environment; and his fear of what might happen to his son left to his own devices.
Biden claims that his son faced severe or unjust consequences simply because of who he was. Persecution rather than mere prosecution. Perhaps there’s some truth to that—but on the other hand, there’s certainly some truth that his son is some combination of either a blithering idiot, a supremely egocentric man-child, an entitled scion used to covering himself in undeserved glory, or an individual for whom consequence has little real meaning thanks largely to his surname. Is it all that surprising, then, that if Joe Biden has no distinct weaknesses beyond his very obviously ailing cognitive health, that his most glaring vulnerability might be his decadently insouciant brat? Honestly, I wouldn’t hesitate to put it past the Republican Party to stoop that low. Nepo-babies like Hunter Biden are regularly given chance after chance after chance, so in that context it might legitimately seem like some egregious injustice that he is hounded so furiously and obviously by the president’s political enemies.
But does such a fact, in turn, justify his being exonerated simply because of who he is? Literally the same reason he was targeted in the first place. Ergo, one bad turn deserves another. By following that logic, the pardon continues to fulfil the narrative that politics is all about abuses of power. Biden’s enemies abused their power, and so the president abused it right back in order to counter their disingenuous efforts at achieving justice—by which they actually meant to smear the president, which in turn suggests they had very little actual political ammunition to use against him.
Let’s forget for a moment that concepts of right, wrong, and even justice itself are subjective at best, and certainly arbitrary—any act can only be judged on its own merits, and while context is relevant, having been persecuted does not justify breaking the law in response. That the ‘last guy was worse’ or ‘they’re doing it too’ should not be arguments made to justify an action which, once decontextualised, is unjustifiable. Not by a regular citizen, mind you—just by the president of the nation. If the problem here is how the law is being administered, then perhaps more of the president’s energies should have been spent addressing that inequality rather than overruling it with yet another imperfect rule.
It also smacks of inattention or even outright ignorance when incredibly privileged people suddenly realise (with a growing horror which has likely never occurred to them before) that the systems which have heretofore benefited them are suddenly weaponised and turned in their direction. Unfair? Sure. But it’s not like there aren’t a legion of regular American citizens whose own unfair treatment under the same justice system can’t so easily be fixed by waving the magic wand of a presidential pardon.
That Biden has only issued 26 pardons in total—a vanishingly small number compared to say, other one-term presidents such as George H W Bush at 77 and Donald Trump at 237, and particularly two-term presidents like Bill Clinton at 459, or Barack Obama at 1927, and the fifth-least of any president ever—seems now largely irrelevant because this one pardon is so egregious.
Ultimately, Biden’s justification is simply not good enough. Because it speaks only to his personal relationship with his own son, and flies in the face of any reason based on jurisprudence or public interest for issuing the pardon. That particular power in the Republic was designed (in theory) around checks and balances; that is, it was intended that the president could occasionally overrule the courts in the same way which the courts had limited power to overrule the president.
Perhaps most problematically of all, Biden has also just handed Republicans an escape clause for anything vaguely associated with the abuse of presidential power. He has offered, by his own example, a form of reasoning which suggests that pardons can be personal. It sets a terrible precedent. Presidents of the United States have for well over a decade now essentially ruled by presidential decree—though Trump may not need to given his control of both Congress and the Senate, depending on how extreme his ideas become—because of the extraordinary divisiveness inherent to algorithm-fuelled, filter-bubble, contemporary identity politics, which have driven politicians in general to become more and more performative of the virtue signals their supporters like to see.
The Cult of Individual Liberty
In other words, political discourse has shifted away from arguments over alternative ways to address commonly-understood issues, toward denying the very legitimacy of, or shared reality with, one’s political adversaries. Because of this, politics has stopped being about issues at all and have devolved into a winner-take-all ideological spat which benefits nobody but the capitalist ruling class who continue to dominate essentially all of Western culture, unchallenged.
In the meantime, plebeian voters get stuck in their own heads, bickering about pronouns and guns and the ‘cultural’ importance of bald-faced corporate spend-a-thons like Christmas which, in a truly supreme irony, is neither Western (unless you count Istanbul as Western) nor even Christian (it’s a rebranded pagan holiday). The inclination to revel in so-called individualism turns politics into a sport where we just barrack for different teams. Few people deign to actually learn what “Christmas” even is, or what might be important to some people about gun ownership or using various pronouns; we just hear a position over and over, and parrot it ad infinitum. That process makes it very hard to meet in the middle—because the middle itself been corroded by positions becoming ever more shrill and defiant, not uncommonly wrapped in a miasma of self-righteousness. It’s always ‘my’ right to think what ‘I’ want, fuck the facts… especially if they’re inconvenient.
Individualism, by which I mean the illusion that we are all masters of our own choices and free to decide what is ultimately ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, is an insidious cult which keeps Western culture so securely chained to capitalism. Whilst it is most egregious on the right, the left engages in it to a strikingly similar degree, and both sides love a strong dose of virtue signalling masquerading as actual understanding. Solidarity, class struggle, and common good are all subsumed beneath the dopamine dribble of the doom-scroll within our bubble-enshrouded target audience demographics. We become largely isolated, miserable, and lonely consumers—not just of goods, but of political content, too. That’s what we do: we eat fast-food opinions and shit out a stinky version of our own to impress our friends, whether they’re in lunch rooms, lounge rooms, or internet chat rooms.
And with this one unfathomably foolish act, Joe Biden has simply further enabled the erosion of trust in norms and traditions to a phenomenal degree. He has enabled and encouraged a degree of cynicism which will surely endure well beyond his presidency, at a time when Americans in particular need a pair of fucking paddles to the heart when it comes to reality. Objectivity was already reeling, and this may be a concussive blow which keeps it that way for some time, if it doesn’t flat-line it completely. All Trump needs to do from here on is point back to Biden and use him, not unreasonably, as an example of political corruption, which will be all his allies will require in order to do… pretty much whatever they like.
In future annals of the Fall of the American Republic, these two Biden bungles are unlikely to stand beside a Reaganite embrace of capitalistic cronyism, nor a Nixonian effort to boldly concentrate presidential power and utilise it for personal gain. Nor will it measure directly with Trump’s embrace and exaggeration of both these things. It will not merit its own chapter, but will be a salient turning point somewhere in that tale of decline. The path which Donald Trump now walks has just been made much easier. Even paved, one might say, by these very acts.
Even staggering acts of stupidity, as this most certainly is, can be laced with affection and good intentions, and of course they can absolutely be justified that way. Good intentions, as the saying goes, pave the way to hell. That’s the all-too-frequent tragedy of human tribalism as it intersects with modern politics: we become so lost in our detachment and isolation from the real, from dasein, from our very nature, that these moments read not as the shocking displays of ineptitude or self-serving insulation or even dangerous precedents, but just as the next thing to shrug at while the unsustainable crisis of material capitalism sees us sink further into some future bed we have feathered for ourselves with bright screens and cheap plastic consumables, which are the prized compensation we have won for offering our labour so cheaply to our corporate overlords.
In that sense, perhaps Joe Biden is yet another chump looking out for himself, just like the rest of us.