Hunter Biden’s pardon is the death rattle of the elites

And just like that, the virtuous come crashing back down to Earth. For months, US president Joe Biden said he would not pardon his son, Hunter. We the high-minded do not play such low games, he said. We respect juries. We respect the law of the land. Look how different we are to Donald Trump, how so much more morally spotless, cried the Dems’ acolytes in the legacy media. Where Trump handed out pardons like candy to his crooked associates, we the righteous few, the ‘adults in the room’, would never dream of exonerating bent friends at the expense of the integrity of the republic. We are better than that, they said. Over and over and over.

Yet now, lo, a pardon has been issued. Biden has gone back on his word. Juries, it seems, don’t count for much after all. The law of the land must play second fiddle to Hunter’s freedom. And the preening elites who held up their non-pardoning president as proof that they are a better moral breed than Trump and the plebs who vote for him now find themselves in the dirt with the rest of us. The magnitude of what Biden has done feels positively dizzying. In so spectacularly breaking his own promise, in spending his last few weeks in this decaying administration issuing emperor-like decrees of liberty to his own kin, he has shattered the moral pretensions of his presidency, his party and arguably his entire class.

The pardon is extraordinary. Hunter was due to be sentenced this month on his convictions for illegal gun possession and tax evasion. He was the first child of a serving president to be convicted of a crime and it looked certain he would spend time in the slammer. But daddy has saved him. And then some. The ‘Executive Grant of Clemency’ is sweeping. Not only does it wash away the crimes we know for sure that Hunter committed – it also protects him from being charged with any other offence that may have occurred in recent years. As Politico put it, the decree ‘insulates’ Hunter from ‘ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade’.

So this is more than the clemency that many presidents have granted through history. Much more. It feels like a Rome-style bestowing of a special status on the son of the ruler. The erection of a moral shield around a convicted criminal solely on the basis that he shares the DNA of the president, that he’s a blood princeling to the court of the Democrats. Dems really went from saying ‘We don’t pardon our loved ones like Trump does’ to issuing the most sweeping aristocratic annulment of a jury decision of modern times. Margaret Love, a former pardon attorney in the Justice Department, says she has ‘never seen language like this in a pardon document’. Apart from in Gerald Ford’s blanket pardon for Richard Nixon in 1974, that is. There, too, the pardon extended even to offences not yet charged.

The very fact that Biden has pardoned his own son, and that this looks likely to be one of the last significant acts of his presidency, drags the republic into murky waters. To be clear, he’s not the first president to pardon a family member. President Clinton, on his last day in office, dashed out a pardon for his half-brother, Roger, who had an old conviction for drug offences. Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on various tax-related offences. Both of those cases raised sticky ethical questions about the use and abuse of presidential power for personal reasons. And so does Biden’s clemency for Hunter. Even more so. That it’s his own kid, and that the kid’s been forcefielded from any charges relating to the entire past decade, give this order a Henry VIII feel.

Even some Democrats are fretting over the precedent their boss has set. He’s ‘got this one wrong’, said Democratic congressman Greg Stanton. Jared Polis, the Dem governor of Colorado, went harder. The president has put ‘his family ahead of the country’, he said. This is a ‘bad precedent’, he continued, that will ‘sadly tarnish his reputation’. Meanwhile, the media elites are scurrying about for an explanation as to why Biden has now done the thing that they praised him for not doing. The toughest thing they’ll have to deal with is the fact that Biden’s lambasting of the supposed lawfare against his son makes him sound an awful lot like… Trump. You could sense the pain and bewilderment in the words of a BBC reporter who seemed shook that Biden appears to be engaging in Trumpist ‘rail[ing] against America’s system of justice’.

This is the key thing about the Hunter pardon: it pulls the rug from under the feet of the woke elites. For months, especially as it became clear that their political fortunes were waning under a second Trump surge, the Dems and their media backers pointed to Biden’s principled position on Hunter as proof that they still enjoyed moral superiority over Trump. Biden categorically ruled out a pardon. ‘I abide by the jury decision… I will not pardon him’, he said in June. What a moral icon, cried the establishment media. He has drawn a distinction between ‘his own acceptance of the jury’s verdict’ and Trump’s rants about a ‘“rigged” justice system’, gushed CNN. What ‘great lengths’ our president has gone to in order not to interfere with the law, swooned Politico. ‘Biden’s love for his son is beautiful’, but ‘love doesn’t exonerate [you]’, said a fawning piece in the New York Times. Only it does. If you’re a son of the powerful. Hunter’s 12 peers who found him guilty be damned – dad’s feelings matter more.

Look, we don’t have to be heartless bastards about it. Many among us would opt to save a child from jail, even if it meant backtracking on all our fine moral grandstanding. But the problem is the Dems tied their political rectitude to Biden’s acceptance of the jury’s democratic deliberations. They used the Hunter case to morally distinguish themselves from the allegedly lawless bruisers of the Trump set. They swore, endlessly, that they would abide by the rules and restore normalcy to the Trump-rattled republic. And they didn’t. They ended up exploiting presidential power for personal favour to a degree Trump never did. Their claims to moral distinction lie in tatters. Their delusion of righteousness stands exposed as just that: a delusion. This is why this pardon matters.

It feels like a Last Days of Rome vibe has gripped Biden’s White House. One envisions Jill still stomping the halls in fury over Kamala’s betrayal. And officials muttering bitterly about Nancy Pelosi’s Brutus-style wielding of the knife against Joe. All while Joe busies himself with freeing his fallen son from the very justice Joe claims to love. This is what happens when an elite becomes ever more estranged from the people: it starts to rule by itself and for itself. Rarely has the moral exhaustion of a government been on such frank and grim display.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy