For Democrats, the Hunter Biden pardon is a problem — and an opportunity

President Joe Biden has pardoned Hunter Biden for all crimes — known and unknown — that his son committed over the past 11 years.

This is not a great look for a man who’s decried President-elect Donald Trump’s attacks on impartial law enforcement, declared that “No one is above the law,” and repeatedly vowed that he would not pardon his son. 

The president justified immunizing Hunter from criminal accountability by arguing that his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” Hunter Biden was convicted of lying on a federal gun application and failing to pay his taxes, offenses that virtually never inspire felony charges, in the president’s telling. That Hunter was not only prosecuted for such indiscretions — but charged so aggressively that he was likely to face 3 years in prison — reflected a politically biased process, Biden argues: Were he not the child of the GOP’s top political adversary, Hunter would never have faced hard time for such minor crimes.

This is a plausible argument. But then, one can just as reasonably argue that New York would never have investigated anyone but Donald Trump for falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star paramour. And in that case, Biden was emphatic that the law was the law. 

All this said, it is not hard to understand Biden’s hypocrisy. His sole surviving son was staring down years in prison, plausibly because of Biden’s own decision to seek the presidency (thereby throwing a spotlight on his troubled, addiction-prone kid). The incoming president, meanwhile, has vowed to investigate the Biden family for further crimes. Joe Biden had the power to protect his child from imprisonment and further selective prosecutions. I suspect most fathers in his shoes would do as he has done.

But Biden is not just a father. He is, for a few more weeks anyway, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party. And this pardon does his co-partisans no favors. 

To the contrary, it reinforces the narrative that Democrats’ ostensible horror at Trump’s use of public power for private benefit is sanctimonious posturing. If all sides are corrupt, why not back the unabashed crook who promises to ruthlessly put America first? These sorts of (deluded) sentiments have badly undermined Democrats in recent years. And the pardoning of Hunter Biden lends credence to such reasoning.

More concretely, Biden has made it more difficult for Democrats to claim the moral high ground in impending fights over Trump’s abuses of the pardon power. Already, the president-elect has hinted that he intends to pardon the January 6 rioters en masse, an act that could embolden other MAGA diehards eager to commit lawless acts in service of their leader.

Fortunately, Democrats now have the opportunity to demonstrate the sincerity of their ideals, while also mitigating one of their party’s greatest political liabilities — all by simply loudly and uniformly condemning Biden’s pardon as an abuse of power.

Indeed, from a certain angle, Biden may have just done his party a favor. The president’s extraordinary unpopularity has weighed on Democrats for years now. During the 2024 campaign, the party had limited capacity to distance themselves from the Biden administration, since their standard-bearer was its second-most prominent member. 

But now that Harris 2024 is no more, Democrats face little imperative to protect Biden’s brand. And the impetus to get out from under his shadow has only grown since Election Day. According to both Gallup and 538’s polling, Biden’s approval rating has fallen since the election, with Americans now disapproving of him by a 19-point margin in the latter’s assessment. Exit polls, meanwhile, showed a record-high 45 percent of voters saying that they have grown worse off under the existing administration.

Thus, even before Hunter’s pardon, it was in the interests of Democrats to loudly break with their president. Now, the party has a means of doing so without implicating anyone else in their firmament. Denouncing Biden over inflation would involve disparaging every Democratic member of Congress who voted for the president’s fiscal policies (which also still have much to recommend them on the merits). Decrying the president for pardoning his son, by contrast, damages no one but the president, whose career in Democratic politics is over.

To be sure, many voters are not going to notice Democrats’ disavowing Biden en masse, while others will see it as a cynical ploy. Taking Biden to task for pardoning his son is not going to solve all of the party’s problems. And this whole episode will have fallen far out of the public’s consciousness by the 2026 midterms, let alone the 2028 presidential election.

But the project of extricating the Democratic brand from a presidency that voters disdain — however misguidedly — must start somewhere. In pardoning Hunter, Biden has given both his son and his party a chance for a new beginning. Democrats should seize it.