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One of the least compelling arguments against President Joe Biden's Dec. 1 pardon of his troubled son Hunter is the idea that it will give President-elect Donald Trump an excuse to abuse his own pardon powers to free individuals convicted in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and could further fuel his thirst for revenge against his enemies. But to believe the idea that Trump—a serial violator of cherished Beltway norms who wantonly and repeatedly exploited his sweeping clemency powers during his first term—needs any excuse to pardon insurrectionists requires you to set aside years of public statements he has made that refer to such individuals as "hostages" and to forget that liberating them has been a Day One promise.
Handwringing about what Trump will do in response to the Hunter Biden pardon is illustrative of the many ways that Democrats have allowed themselves to be unilaterally abused throughout the Trump era. Don't provoke the strongman, the argument goes, because you'll only make things worse. It's the same argument that was used against the very idea of pursuing charges against Trump in his unprecedented, broad-daylight effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It's the same argument used to scold the Colorado Supreme Court for using the unambiguous language of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to declare Trump ineligible to appear on the state's 2024 ballots. It's the same argument that was used against efforts early in his first term to get to the bottom of the Trump campaign's collaboration with Russian intelligence.
Trump has never needed a reason to escalate. To name but one example among dozens—his plan to gut the federal civil service and fill the executive branch with Project 2025 recruits wasn't a response to any of his legal troubles of the past four years. It was actually way back in October 2020, weeks before Trump launched his coup effort, that he issued an executive order that would give the president permission to fire thousands of career civil servants who don't show sufficient obeisance to MAGA World. He has always regarded the federal government as a tool that should be available for use exclusively by him. It's why he has always referred to military officials as "my generals," and why he spent years hiring and firing executive branch employees who would not agree to do his bidding without asking questions.
And as a point of fact, he has been loudly promising to free those convicted for their actions on Jan. 6. for years. On Sept. 1, 2022, for example, he said that convicted insurrectionists would receive "full pardons with an apology to many." It was a staple of his campaign rhetoric! He's been playing a remixed, pro-J6 version of the Star Spangled Banner at his rallies for almost two years! It was always going to happen, and when he does it, which he will, it will have nothing at all to do with Joe or Hunter Biden and everything to do with the elaborate fictional universe he has constructed for himself and his followers. It's a place with constantly shifting rules and narratives that have only one constant: that Donald Trump can do no wrong and that if he does something that seems crazy, illegal, unprecedented or dangerous, it must either be ok or a response to some imagined Democratic provocation.
It is also impossible to gaze upon Trump's list of cabinet nominations over the past month and conclude that this could be a normal administration if Democrats would just play nice. After all, he announced he would appoint one of his chief attack dogs, Kash Patel, to direct the FBI the day before the Hunter Biden pardon was announced. Among many other things, Patel runs an eponymous foundation devoted to obtaining justice for "defamed Americans"—which means people accused or convicted of committing crimes on that cold and bloody day in January.
What was going on there, would you say? Was it the famed Trumpian game of four-dimensional chess, trying to bait President Biden into pardoning his son so that Trump could then gleefully turn the federal government against his enemies and jailbreak the insurrectionists? Or perhaps—just hear me out— Trump has been planning all along to harass, persecute and intimidate the very civil servants who were tasked with investigating him and to free his allies and supporters who tried to overthrow the American system of constitutional government?
The simple, straightforward hypothesis is that Trump is a vindictive maniac who needs no excuse to destroy the political system in which he operates. Yet a lot of Democrats still believe that doing the right thing will work. It's why, despite the fact that the 45th president didn't meet with Biden in 2020 or attend his inauguration, Biden dutifully did the whole photo-op thing with Trump. For such people, normalcy is always just one concession to Trump's madness away.
I could not possibly care less what does or doesn't happen to Hunter Biden, but Democrats absolutely have to tune out the scolds about the optics or even the justness of this pardon and concentrate instead on how we are all going to survive the next four years. As the past four should have proved conclusively, clinging desperately to long dead norms and procedures in the face of incipient authoritarianism isn't the answer.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
