Suckers and Fighters, Revisited

Seeing the thesis of a piece you’ve written vindicated on television is like going to the movies and spotting a friend in the background of a scene. The flare of recognition is enough to jolt you physically. Heyyyyy, I know that guy!

It happened to me after I filed yesterday’s column and then stumbled across this clip from The View. The topic in both cases was President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, of course. In my piece I argued that whether you favor or oppose clemency will track with how much idealism you retain about traditional American norms following Donald Trump’s reelection.

Watching the exchange play out among the View panel felt like laboratory confirmation of a hypothesis.

The harshest Biden critic on set was Alyssa Farah Griffin, a Republican who served in the first Trump administration but resigned in December 2020 when she realized where the “rigged election” insanity was headed. She’s a belated convert to Never-Trump-ism, and one thing about Never Trumpers is that we believe strongly in norms. (Well, I did until last month.) It’s no surprise that she took the president to task on Monday’s panel, appalled by his remarkably brazen lying about his willingness to pardon his son.

The other three panelists were partisan Democrats. (I don’t know if Ana Navarro characterizes herself that way, actually, but c’mon.) Partisans care more about their party’s interests than about norms, so all three were fine with the pardon. Whoopi Goldberg went as far as to question whether the president had truly lied at all. “I think Biden had no intentions of pardoning Hunter,” she claimed, incorrectly, “and I think the more stuff that went down … I think he said, ‘well, why am I busting my behind to stay straight and do this when nobody is? When no one else is?’”

Griffin hasn’t yet thrown in the towel on liberal norms following Trump’s victory. Goldberg has, whether or not she’s willing to cop to it. Their disagreement is a premonition of a dispute that will trouble Trump’s detractors chronically over the next four years: Should Democrats lean all the way in on Trumpian postliberalism themselves or should they defend the liberal order?

They keep trying to have it both ways, paying lip service to norms while angling to overturn them in practice—agitating to end the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court, conniving to forgive student debt without an act of Congress, pardoning cronies from federal crimes after rivers of florid rhetoric about the greatness of the justice system during Trump’s criminal travails. It hasn’t worked out for them legally or electorally. American voters want to take their postliberalism pure, it seems, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Should Democrats now recommit to liberalism, a morally superior political ethos that would constrain their own political tactics and which, frankly, no longer has much of a public constituency? Or should they emulate amoral Trumpism forthrightly by disdaining liberal norms as nuisances that impede effective action?

In short, should they be “suckers” or should they be “fighters”? How you answer that question will determine how you think Joe Biden’s party should respond to his corrupt pardon.

Two defenses.

There are two defenses of the Hunter Biden pardon circulating among Democrats, one of which is much harder to refute than the other.

The easy one is what we might call the “retribution” defense. Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware offered it in trying to explain why Joe Biden had supposedly changed his mind about clemency for his son. “I think what changed was that President-elect Trump put people in place who made it really clear that they intended to go after, not just anybody, but in their campaign activity, had talked about going after Hunter Biden directly,” Coons told CNN. “This was a significant change from President Biden’s insistence he would not do it, and as I’ve been turning it over in my mind today, the thing that changed was who Trump nominated.”

Is that right? Joe Biden had fully intended to let Hunter serve time in prison but reversed course once Trump started nominating vengeful toadies like Matt Gaetz and Kash Patel for law enforcement leadership?

It is not right. It’s nonsense on stilts, and not just because it was already very apparent when the president began promising this past summer not to pardon his son that a second Trump administration would be keen on exacting “retribution” against political enemies.

One reason it’s nonsense is because, according to NBC News, it’s literally untrue. “The president has discussed pardoning his son with some of his closest aides at least since Hunter Biden’s conviction in June, said two people with direct knowledge of the discussions about the matter,” the outlet reported. “They said it was decided at the time that he would publicly say he would not pardon his son even though doing so remained on the table.”

Biden lied about his intentions from the jump, in other words, knowingly and deliberately. Alyssa Farah Griffin was right to call him out on it. And needless to say, the prospect of a second Trump administration was already quite real when the president began telling those lies. If Biden wanted to make a Hunter pardon conditional on whether a “responsible person” would be leading the Justice Department next year, he could have done that from the start. He didn’t.

The “retribution” defense is also overinclusive and underinclusive.

It’s overinclusive, as a colleague noted on Monday in a Dispatch Slack discussion, because the terms of the pardon aren’t limited to uncharged crimes that Hunter Biden might potentially be prosecuted for by the Trump administration. It includes the gun and tax offenses of which Hunter was convicted by his father’s own DOJ. Why does protecting him from Trump’s “retribution” require letting him off scot-free in cases brought by a special counsel who was appointed by Merrick Garland, not by Gaetz or Pam Bondi?

It’s underinclusive, meanwhile, because there are many other Trump enemies now facing persecution by a Patel-led FBI who haven’t—yet?—received the same clemency bestowed upon the president’s lowlife son. Kash Patel has a literal enemies list, Andrew Egger noted today at The Bulwark; our own Sarah Isgur appears on it, for God knows what reason. If Biden’s defenders are serious about wanting to protect Trump antagonists from unjust harassment by the Justice Department next year, the pardons shielding them from “retribution” should have begun with the likes of Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Mitt Romney, not an influence-peddling crackhead.

The fact that they didn’t proves that there’s no high-minded reason behind Joe Biden’s act of clemency. It’s a simple product of fatherly “guilt” over the fact that his ascendance to the presidency led to his son enduring a yearslong political ordeal, never mind that a) Biden’s political career also gave Hunter fabulous advantages in life, b) no one forced Hunter to commit the actual, honest-to-goodness federal crimes he committed, and c) Joe Biden repeatedly “directed the resources and stature of both the party and the government he headed to the Save Hunter Project,” in Josh Barro’s words, which made Hunter’s corruption a matter of public interest.

A father chose to place his crooked son above the law because he could, full stop. There’s no “retribution” defense.

But maybe there’s a “suckers and fighters” defense?

“Suckers and Fighters” was the title of my first newsletter for The Dispatch. Trump has concocted a sort of populist anti-morality for the American right, I argued in that piece, in which “ruthlessness in pursuit of cultural dominance” was the only true virtue. According to that anti-morality, dishonorable behavior is a qualification for political leadership rather than a disqualifier because it demonstrates a ruthless willingness to ignore norms in pursuit of one’s interests. It’s the hallmark of a “fighter,” whereas observance of norms is characteristic of a “sucker” who prefers to lose honorably than win dirty.

That thesis has also held up pretty well in the two years since.

Whoopi Goldberg’s argument for pardoning Hunter Biden, that Joe Biden would be a fool to “bust his behind to stay straight … when no one else is,” is a Democratic version of Trump’s populist anti-morality. If the ruling class—now represented by Donald Trump and his postliberal vandals—doesn’t care about norms, why should the Bidens? Why should they be “suckers” who follow traditional pardon practices if it means leaving the president’s son to rot in prison rather than “fighters” who emulate Trump’s brand of cronyism by doing whatever they can to immunize Hunter from legal consequences?

There’s no easy retort to that argument anymore. The obvious one, that abusing presidential power for personal gain is morally wrong, feels so naive in light of Trump’s reelection that I’m cringing while typing it out. It takes a person of unusual honor to continue to follow a moral code that places them at a competitive disadvantage and no longer inspires feelings of admiration among the wider population. Joe Biden is not a person of unusual honor, needless to say. Few politicians are.

How candid should officials in the president’s party be about pointing that out over the final two months of his term?

Under the bus?

The occasion of Hunter Biden’s pardon is the perfect moment for Democrats to break emphatically with an unpopular leader, Eric Levitz argued in a piece for Vox on Monday.

The perfect post-election moment, I should say. The actual perfect moment was sometime in early 2023, before 80-year-old Joe Biden somehow talked himself into believing that running for reelection was a good idea.

But we are where we are, and clemency for Hunter now offers Democrats a twofer. By denouncing Biden aggressively, they can separate themselves from him politically and—maybe—salvage what’s left of the crumbling taboo against issuing freakishly broad pardons to anointed toadies before Trump takes office and runs wild with the precedent.

“Had Biden not pardoned his son, elected Republicans at every level would have had to answer for Trump’s actions without reference to the Bidens,” Tom Nichols wrote on Monday of the incoming president’s imminent corrupt clemency spree. “Forget all that. Joe Biden has now provided every Republican … with a ready-made heat shield against any criticism about Trump’s pardons, past or present.” That’s true—unless Democrats come out of the woodwork to attack Biden over the Hunter pardon, perhaps. In that case, they might be able to create a distinction in Americans’ minds between the rotten First Family’s position on clemency and the Democratic Party’s.

And if they do, their attacks next year on Trump’s pardon-palooza won’t seem so hypocritical. Joe and Hunter Biden may have given up on liberal norms, Democrats would be signaling, but the wider American left has not.

Some prominent liberals have in fact spoken up against the pardon. Two of Colorado’s highest-ranking officials, Gov. Jared Polis and Sen. Michael Bennet, objected. So did Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Peter Welch of Vermont. Ditto for Democratic members of the House like Greg Landsman of Ohio, Greg Stanton of Arizona, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington. Ultimately there’ll be more Democratic outrage in Congress over pardoning Hunter Biden, I’m sure, than Republican outrage over pardoning the cop-beaters who went to prison after January 6. The populist anti-morality that’s utterly conquered the right hasn’t yet conquered the left.

But it has gained territory. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most influential young leftist in America, celebrated Hunter Biden’s gun conviction earlier this year as proof that “Democrats are willing to accept when our justice system works”—but as I write this on Tuesday afternoon, she has yet to say a word against the pardon. In a story published on Monday, the New York Times pointed to Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett as an example of the enthusiasm with which many progressives have greeted it. “Way to go, Joe!” Crockett told MSNBC this weekend. “Let me be the first to congratulate the president for deciding to do this, because at the end of the day, we know that we have a 34-count convicted felon about to walk into the White House.”

Centrist suckers like Jared Polis and Michael Bennet might simper about norms, but fighters like Joe Biden understand that that’s a mug’s game in an age when Donald Trump can be elected president twice. If American voters aren’t going to punish corruption and ruthlessness by Republican leaders, progressives might reason, Democrats would be fools not to take full advantage of their lowered standards.

It’s a simple matter of “knowing what time it is.”

How are figures like Polis and Crockett, Bennet and Ocasio-Cortez, supposed to navigate this nascent schism between liberals who want Democrats to follow norms more faithfully than Republicans do and postliberals who want the party to behave more ruthlessly, if perhaps not as ruthlessly as Trump? A centrist Democrat who goes to bat for norms risks finding himself viewed contemptuously by leftists as an out-of-touch weakling; a leftist who makes excuses for norm-breaking risks finding herself ghettoized as a radical in party primaries and/or general elections.

This is no idle thought experiment. It’s a cinch, for instance, that the Biden White House will soon consider pardoning other figures on Trump’s enemies list, assuming it isn’t already doing so. What if the president opts to pardon his entire Cabinet along with dozens of undersecretaries for any crimes they may have committed between January 20, 2021, and the date of the pardon, reasoning that they need legal protection from Kash Patel’s “retribution” crusade?

Liberal Democrats like Polis and Bennet would presumably disapprove, fearing the precedent Biden will have set by immunizing his deputies for any lawlessness they might have engaged in. We don’t want them to be persecuted by Patel for crimes they didn’t do but we do want them to be prosecuted for crimes they did do, no? And with the American people’s faith in institutions already collapsing to the Democratic Party’s electoral detriment, what conclusion will the public reach about the propriety of the Biden administration if practically everyone involved in it requires a pardon on the way to the exit?

Progressives, on the other hand, will presumably be fine with the idea. Sure, it looks bad for the president to be handing out pardons like gold watches as his team heads off toward retirement, but Trump and his toadies are genuinely evil figures who’ll exploit Team Biden’s criminal jeopardy if the opportunity isn’t snatched away from them. Democrats didn’t choose postliberalism; it was chosen by Republican populists and the American electorate. By pardoning his aides, Biden is simply reacting rationally to the new political reality that’s been foisted on him and the left. He’s protecting them in the same way that he protected his son. 

And as for setting a bad precedent: please. Whatever Joe Biden does or doesn’t do, every sleazebag Trump has ever met who’s remained in his good graces will receive a pardon before 2029 as a matter of course. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up inducing his deputies to commit specific crimes by promising them pardons in advance—a practice which, as far as I can tell, would be perfectly legal for him and for them thanks to the Supreme Court.

Liberal “suckers” and postliberal “fighters” are going to wrestle for control over the direction of the Democratic Party. And while the suckers stand a better chance of winning this fight than they did on the rotten American right, their chances will depend partly on Trump: The more corruptly he behaves in his second term and the more tolerant of that corruption voters prove to be, the weaker the electoral incentive for Democrats to follow liberal norms will get. At some points, “suckers” really are suckers.