PERHAPS Joe Biden thought of E. M. Forster as he agonised over whether to issue a presidential pardon for his son. The novelist once wrote: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” But, since the President’s tussle with his conflicting loyalties took place over Thanksgiving — a time when Americans focus on family — it seems more likely that President Biden, an active Roman Catholic, may have pondered the parable of the Prodigal Son.
After repeated campaign pledges that he would not pardon his son — who had been found guilty of tax evasion and being an illegal drug-user in possession of a gun — Mr Biden put parenthood before presidency and granted the pardon. Justifying the volte-face, he asserted that “raw politics has infected” the affair, leading to “a miscarriage of justice”. Hunter had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted” after attacks by “my political opponents”.
The prosecutor denied this. But few people are ever brought to trial for incorrectly filling out a gun form. What is inarguable is the extent to which Hunter Biden’s life has interwoven, for better or worse, with his father’s political career.
There is a poignant photograph of Joe Biden, being sworn in as a senator in 1972; it takes place in a hospital ward where Hunter and his brother Beau were being treated after the car crash in which their mother and little sister died. Mr Biden felt “God had played a horrible trick” on him. Filled with anger and religious doubt, he contemplated suicide, and then considered resigning to care for his sons, but was persuaded not to. Instead, he travelled between Washington and his Delaware home every day for 36 years.
Later, in a life plagued by addiction, Hunter traded on his father’s name in questionable business dealings. His father failed to distance himself, and his position as Vice-President, from his troubled son’s lifestyle and place in the family’s inner circle.
Many Democrats see the pardon as an enormous misjudgement which undermines trust in the office of the President — confirming popular cynicism that there is a different set of rules for those in power. Facts may not matter here. Biden has pardoned only 26 people, as against the 237 cronies granted clemency during Mr Trump’s last presidency. But no longer will Democrats be able to claim to represent the rule of law against Donald Trump when he fulfils his promise to pardon his insurrectionist supporters who stormed the Capitol in 2021 — actions far more dangerous and disreputable than anything Hunter Biden did.
Forgiving the Prodigal Son invariably creates resentment among his self-righteous Democrat elder brothers. But Biden may feel that a nation prepared to elect Donald Trump for a second time is too far gone to be helped. That is perhaps why he has framed Hunter’s pardon in such sweeping terms that it prevents Trump’s acolytes from prosecuting him for anything else in the future. If that upsets a Democratic Party that forced him to stand down — to no purpose, in the end — so be it. He is an 82-year-old man who does not want to spend the rest of his life visiting his son in prison.