Joe Biden can be blamed for many things, but pardoning his son is not one of them

One of the brilliant things Donald Trump and the MAGA world generally have pulled off is normalising a world where outrages on their side are so numerous that they are almost impossible to list or get one’s mind around. Meantime, the occasional minor ones on the other side of the aisle are puffed up to fill a news cycle, or two or three, or 10 or 20.

Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter this week is a case in point. As I write this, there are five stories about the issue on The New York Times website’s homepage, and four on the front page of Politico.

President Joe Biden embraces his son Hunter Biden at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.Credit: NYT

More in a moment on the pardon. But before we get to it, let’s remember that, just less than four years ago, the Trump administration was in its waning days. One might think those left working in the White House might have been soberly reflecting on the reverberations of January 6. But no: Donald Trump was getting his list of pardons ready and, by many reputable accounts, a feeding frenzy arose around him as the grimy remnants of his term in office cashed in on the process. Trump ultimately dropped scores of pardons as his term finally wound down, almost 150 alone on Biden’s inauguration morning.

There were of course pardons for his grimy henchmen, including Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and a fundraiser named Elliott Broidy (who was being prosecuted for making millions while covertly lobbying for sketchy rich guys in Malaysia, but had also been in the news for paying for his mistress’s abortion).

There were also a bunch of pardons for: American contract soldiers duly convicted of murder in Iraq (they worked for a company then known as Blackwater, run at the time by the brother of Trump’s future education secretary); for a raft of convicted corrupt Republican politicians; for a doofus convicted of wire fraud and money-laundering who had gotten involved with a sexy Russian operative; for a guy who cyber-stalked his wife and some other people; for another crook who bilked Medicare out of some $42 million; for various other fraudsters and Ponzi scheme operators, including one who’d been sentenced to 800 years in prison; and for another creep who (I’m going to need to take a deep breath for this one), while in the process of being convicted for elaborate campaign finance violations, had gone after one of the witnesses testifying against him by hiring a sex worker to arrange an assignation with him and tape it and show it to the man’s wife.

All of this was made more delicious by the fact that the man’s wife was the creep’s sister … and that the creep was actually Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, who is about to become Trump’s ambassador to France.

Now, the thing is – there’s more. Lots more. Any scandal that adheres to the Hunter Biden pardon, of course, deserves attention, but it’s certainly true that the corruption of the Trump pardons – plainly on a scale two or three orders of magnitude higher – have fallen down a memory hole.

As for the current political storm, the elder Biden brought most of it on himself. Hunter Biden was being prosecuted for trivial issues; Republicans have been blowing smoke about more serious crimes for years and have never produced any evidence of it. But we can all see Hunter Biden was paid a lot of money for essentially nothing more than his being Joe Biden’s son, and the elder Biden should have taken direct public aim at his son’s business positions and disowned them a long time ago.

Now, how a family deals with the wrenching problems of a substance abuser is personal and painful. Hunter Biden’s drug-fuelled activities, however, were appalling and went on for years. From the outside at least, it seems as if the family too often enabled Hunter’s destructive behaviour instead of forcing him to deal with the consequences. And this, too, should be laid at Joe Biden’s feet.

That said, there are two arguments for the pardon. The first is common human decency. The ongoing theatre of cruelty the Republicans have orchestrated against Hunter Biden has been disgusting and immoral. And then, of course, we can all see that the goons Trump has in mind to run the Justice Department seem set on continuing to make Hunter’s life miserable for years to come. Seen in that light, the pardon was arguably defensible.

What isn’t, however, is the ongoing coverage. I just checked The New York Times homepage. It has since added another news story on the pardon – and three opinion columns. I don’t recall Trump ever being questioned about his scores of corrupt pardons in a debate, whereas you can be sure that Biden will be questioned about this single act for years to come.

Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney. @billwyman.bsky.social