Joe Biden Pardons Hunter Biden, Screws Over Kamala Harris One Last Time
Photo by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Back in July, President Joe Biden said in reference to Hunter Biden’s felony conviction in a federal gun case that “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.” Yesterday, the president went back on his word and pardoned his son, saying “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.”
The takes have come in hot ever since, as a litany of folks who did not predict our present are all of a sudden confident in what the future holds. This goes for both sides of the critique, people saying this is the biggest mistake Biden could make and those saying it will not matter whatsoever are both equally clueless about what will happen next. I would assert that since we are living in a world that Trump’s own pollsters did not see coming, all of us should eat a big piece of humble pie and accept that Americans have proven the last decade that we don’t know jack shit about what the future holds.
But I do think some things are clear from this. What kind of impact they will have is anyone’s guess, but this very obviously makes anyone connected to Joe Biden more vulnerable to the cynicism America has expressed the last eight years. A majority of Americans, 61 percent according to a CNN poll conducted in September, believe that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings with Ukraine and China while Joe was vice president. I don’t see how this decision doesn’t further confirm what a majority of Americans suspect. I would be shocked if CNN took a poll again after the pardon and that number wasn’t higher.
This belief is proof of how effective the Republican attacks on Hunter Biden were, and how it is very clearly a salient political issue to push for a party who has successfully campaigned against America’s elites. Joe Biden going back on his word to pardon his family member is the exact kind of image of the Democrats that the Republicans have tried to cultivate.
Republicans are not one to drop ineffective attacks, let alone effective ones, and while I have already proven I am not the greatest at predicting the political future, I would be willing to bet good money that they continue with these Hunter Biden corruption angles on whomever they can get it to stick to, as Joe just gave them a credibility no one else could. Logically, you’d just extend these attacks to anyone you can tangentially connect to Joe Biden, asserting that they knew of this corruption all along.
Which brings me to Joe Biden’s vice president and her reported aspirations to run in 2028. I have already detailed how Joe Biden royally fucked Kamala Harris over by stubbornly staying in a race he was manifestly unqualified to run, and this is one more parting shot at her to really ensure she’s as tainted by him as possible. I have a hard time seeing how if she is the nominee in 2028, that the Republicans won’t run the Hunter Biden playbook again — now confirmed by Joe as seemingly real through this pardon — and just assert that Kamala Harris must have been part of this scheme too.
If she is hit with these attacks, it’s impossible for her to respond to short of completely throwing Biden under the bus (which she should have done long ago, for the record). She would be trapped in a situation where she has to answer for things completely unrelated to her and would be unable to talk about her accomplishments under Biden without inviting Biden-esque attacks on her. Anything short of “this was wrong, and Joe should not have done this” will further buttress the narrative the GOP has successfully sold, and there are a lot of ways to mess up a response that could help this attack endure through the next election.
In the wake of Trump’s victory, a lot of Democrats have taken the “nothing matters” line of thinking, and while to a degree this is true, assuming that the Democrats and Trump are subject to the same rules is the belief that got us into this mess in the first place. The Democrats have campaigned on being the party of rules, and when they blatantly break rules they have set like this, it further degrades their credibility, which makes voters more amenable to Trump’s honest brand of corruption that at least pretends to be anti-elitist. Maybe this doesn’t matter in a year, or maybe it’s the chief GOP talking point to try to connect whatever new iteration of the Democratic Party comes of this to the old one. All we can say for certain right now is that Joe Biden going back on his word to pardon his son does absolutely nothing to change the Democrats’ image of a bunch of out of touch elitists who care far more about protecting their corrupt, insular world than helping everyday Americans.