By Monica Hesse / The Washington Post
I don’t know whether Hunter Biden’s pardon was a shrewd strategy, a broken promise or a desperate Hail Mary, but I can say with some certainty that it was inevitable.
Anyone who has ever seen President Joe Biden interact with his family, talk about his family or gaze at his family would have known that in his world, family is the beginning and ending, the all and the everything. Hunter might relapse, Hunter might fall apart, Hunter’s infernal laptop might reveal pictures of hotel benders and dangling jockstraps, and through everything Joe’s steadying response would be to send texts — like those allegedly uncovered in the laptop scandal — reading, “I miss you and love you,” or, “Good morning my beautiful son.”
The president had sworn repeatedly that he knew how to keep his personal life and his political life separate when it came to Hunter’s legal travails. He believed in America, he believed in the justice system, he would abide by whatever decision the courts handed down.
And then the courts handed down a conviction — in June, Hunter was found guilty of lying about his drug use on a gun-purchasing form — and with a prison sentence looming, Joe released a statement on Sunday declaring he had changed his mind. Hunter had been “selectively, unfairly” prosecuted, the president wrote. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.” Once he’d made the decision, he wrote, he figured there was no point in waiting to share it, so there it was: a full pardon for any offenses Hunter might have committed in an 11-year span from the beginning of 2014 through Dec. 1 of this year.
Was this act, as a headline in The Atlantic declared, an “unpardonable hypocrisy”? Or was it, more accurately, the end of Joe Biden’s American Dream? After 50 years in public service, after countless speeches about unity and bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle, Biden was throwing up his hands in defeat. He is preparing to turn the White House back over to the felon he’d beaten just four years ago. His beloved rules of sportsmanship no longer seemed to apply, and they only hurt those who try to uphold them. If you’re a Biden, you get Marjorie Taylor Greene displaying your naked photos on the floor of the House of Representatives; if you’re a Kushner, you get the ambassadorship to France.
What was notable to me was how, in the end, the president seemed to acknowledge that the separation between the personal and political was never going to be as possible as he’d said it would be. “In trying to break Hunter they’ve tried to break me,” he wrote, articulating what many parents have known since the beginning of time; that you are only ever as happy as your least happy child. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
A president? No. But a father? Yes. And reading that part of the statement I could think only of the thousands of parents of incarcerated men, all around the United States, and how they might absorb the president’s rationalization: Does the wealthy, powerful leader of the country truly believe that the legal system has uniquely failed only his son? What a privilege, to get to rebalance the scales of justice, toward one’s own child, with the flick of a pen. What father alive wouldn’t do the same thing?
Throughout the president’s long political career, there’s a phrase he has fallen back on repeatedly, in speeches and debates and on Instagram: “I give you my word as a Biden.”
It was a funny little phrase that always seemed grandiose. It’s understandable that the family name meant something to the president, but did he really think it would mean something to the rest of us? That the Biden name was imbued with such a known mythology that the country writ large would see it as a sort of Bible, something upon which oaths could be sworn?
But it turned out the phrase was a tell all along. He would govern as a Biden, make promises as a Biden, and if he broke those promises it would be for the only reason he could fathom breaking a promise: as a Biden, for another Biden, the blood running through both their veins.
The love story between Joe and Hunter Biden has been, as so many familial love stories are, both pure and fraught, complicated and simple, a source of strength and an Achilles’ heel. Hunter was an addict craving approval. Joe was, perhaps, an addict of a different kind in the way that many politicians are; craving leadership, sincerely believing that he was the only man who could save America. That is what brought him to the presidential race back in 2020, when Hunter’s sobriety was still perilously new. This is what carried him through his term, when Joe Biden’s foes correctly discerned that they had found his most tender vulnerability: his only living son.
And I cannot help but wonder if that is what has been going through his mind this week. He couldn’t have it all. His vision for democracy was sinking. And since he hadn’t been able to save the country, he would throw a life preserver to the person he loved the most.
Follow Monica Hesse on X @MonicaHesse.
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