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Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do. The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms (even, and perhaps especially, when that algorithm is the algorithm for “justice”).
Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.
I'd respect it if he did it the same day Don Jr. got arrested.
The behavior here is just gross in its attempted manipulation of the American people.
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Jumping up and down on the “defect” button is not the kind of humanity I appreciate.
And while I agree that our Trump stans would bend over backwards to justify such a pardon, I don’t find it admirable.
How is this more defect button than Trump pardoning the Blackwater massacerers? I think killing 14 civillians is bad, and I don't want private security firms representing America to do that on the world stage. I definitely don't want the world to get the message, "we'll accept any level of misconduct, and the perpetrators won't even face a tiny amount of justice."
I don't think Joe Biden should have lied about pardoning his son, and if Joe himself was personally involved in corrupt dealings, I want all of that information set before the American people. However, I don't think the mere act of pardoning his son is a bad thing. It is only bad if Joe Biden was personally involved in corrupt dealings, and is now pardoning his son so that Joe's connections are never made public.
I don’t like that either.
Though I’d have pointed to Charles Kushner, or maybe to Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, rather than PMCs with no personal connection. Trump openly showers favors on people in his orbit; he has somehow passed this off as mundane instead of scandalous.
That doesn’t make me feel better about Hunter Biden.
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How was it a defect button? The president has the power to pardon crimes. This is a known power.
Both options in the prisoner’s dilemma are known, too.
Pardoning your kids is eroding a common good to benefit yourself and yours.
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But I think it's fair to say that it's highly questionable for the President to use that power to prevent his loved ones from facing legal repercussions for misconduct. If the presumption that it's illegitimate for a Republican President to do such a thing, but legitimate for a Democrat President to do it, that is a defection.
Where did I say it would be illegitimate for a Republican to do the same thing?
You said that a President pardoning someone isn't hitting a defect button.
If two teams have agreed not to use the power of Presidential pardons for illegitimate purposes, then if one team goes ahead and uses them for that purpose, that team is defecting.
When was this agreement ever a thing?
Every time Trump has been accused of nepotism (e.g. the Jared Kushner appointment) or of abusing the power of Presidential pardons for nepotistic reasons (Kushner's father), Democrats are implicitly appealing to said agreement.
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A father should do what's best for his son. It's debatable whether get-out-of-jail free cards and general leniency qualifies as such. (I'd suggest it doesn't.)
You do realize how controversial this statement is?
Should a father murder to cover up the crimes of his son if he thinks that this results in a net increase of his expected utility?
Most people would grant that people have some moral obligations to their children, that it is fine and good to spend your money to feed them before you feed random strangers. But people also have other moral obligations (i.e. not to murder), and sometimes they rank higher thank family.
I didn't say a father should cover up crimes. In fact I am suggesting subtly that to do so is not, ultimately, best for his son in that it's a model of criminality and a lack of basic ethics, and that a father should model these.
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I mean, he’s in his fifties, not his early twenties. It’s probably too late to scare him straight; cleaning up so he can’t do too much damage to himself before an early grave(likely baked in by the history of drug use) is the best that can be done.
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Well, they're not condemning Trump for pardoning Kushner's dad and then naming him to the post of Ambassador to France.
Pardoning his son in law's dad after serving a prison sentence, not before.
The decade of preemptive not-yet-charged or even just hypothetical crimes pardoning is the shocker here. Hunter is already convicted for some of his many crimes, but yet to be sentenced. He got free pass on those too.
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The world has enough humans. We need more bots, or at least people who recognize some higher principle than blind tribal loyalty. Especially when you are president of the United States. Nepotism is for peasants.
This is precisely the sort of behavior I despite Trump for, and while I think there's a dramatic difference in scale, that's not going to make me say "actually Biden doing it is good."
We don't have to speculate. Trump pardoned his father-in-law for substantially more egregious conduct.
To be fair to both Trump and Biden, this is honestly not that unusual. The core function of the presidential pardon power is exonerating politically favored individuals. To be less fair, it's not clear to me why this is an essential piece of executive discretion. I'd rather have amnesty be a congressional function where it is not dependent on the whims of one man and where you're going to get fewer instances of blatantly political pardoning of friends and allies.
Yes, with the key distinction being that pardon was after the prison sentence was completed, not before.
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By the treatment of Hunter's own daughter, this is not some demonstration of higher code to one's family. I understand you want to make Nietchian strong-man arguments, but exercising one's power to meet their ideosyncratic preferences is not virtue, it's tautology of will to power, even when your preference is for your family to prosper. Loyalty to smallest possible tribe, at thee xpense of other duties to one's station, natuion, and culture. is not the ur-virtue by almost any standard. It's just mob behavior. It's the definition of corruption.
I am supposed to appauld someone for taking advantage of power to enrich their personal loyalties as virtue?
Finally, Biden is a professed Catholic, and there's nothing in Catholic morality that upholds loyalty to flesh as virtuous (quite the opposite, tfh). If we want to appaud Biden's virtue, he should start by renouncing the all the other duities and affiliations that this virtue undermines. Or is it also virtuous to exercise raw familial enrichment through deception and expressions of false standards of morality?
I would, of course. Corruption and personal loyalty over loyalty to either the American people, or the principles he was elected on are among the biggest criticisms of Trump. Why would I bury my head if Trump further legitimized those criticisms?
Aside from the fourth commandment, the traditional understanding of which has been to consider loyalty to relatives morally obligatory.
Also, subsidiarity would imply that you should do charity to the once close to you first before you move to larger circles.
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I briefly outlined the reasons for my judgement in another comment in this thread. None of them have anything to do with Biden's "strength". (And for the record, the idea that "good = being 'strong' and doing whatever you want" is, at best, a highly simplified distortion of Nietzsche's actual views.)
It does depend on Biden's motivations to an extent. If it was done out of genuine love, then yes, you should applaud. If it was a purely self-interested act of political calculation, not so much.
Forsaking your flesh for Christ - there's at least a real dilemma there. That's at least an interesting problem. But forsaking your flesh for the abstract idea of democracy and the rule of law? Well, I'm afraid that's where I'll have to part with Catholic morality, if that's what it recommends.
I know that this view (I'm not sure what to call it, post-Rationalist?) has a cadre of supporters on TheMotte as I've seen it numerous times over the years. I imagine because it has a certain meta-contrarian appeal and draws on a yearning of reactionaries that perceive modern western Whites as too domesticated, too deracinated and slavishly devoted to abstract Enlightenment concepts to the point of their own destruction. This view seems to have a kind of admiration for the naked tribalism of American blacks ("He wuz a good boy!") that supersedes any attachment to honesty or justice.
This view is just repellent to me. I'm all for White nationalism and family loyalty and nepotism and blah blah blah, but Hunter Biden is 54 not 18 and Joe Biden is the President not some random guy. If the cops found a teenager's drug stash and his father stepped up and claimed the drugs to be his, taking the fall to protect this son, sure, I could see that as honorable and respectable.
Man how the hell does he still look so good at that age with that lifestyle? He easily looks 10 years younger than he is.
It's incredible. Even his father didn't have nearly as much hair at that age.
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In a similar situation Trump would have pardoned his son before the election.
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That's interesting. I kind of feel the same way, in that it is absolutely virtuous for a father to protect his son, and ensure his family has a future. But this also makes the future of his political party more difficult, along with worsening the state of partisan politics in the world, as it gives the other side both a bludgeon against his party and an excuse to do corrupt things like this themselves.
I'm curious what you mean by this. Pardoning Hunter ensures his family will have a future?
Well, I really don't know too much about the Biden family's situation, so I could be wrong. But my general assumption would be that it'd destroy his family if Hunter were in prison. It'd be detrimental to Hunter and his kids to have a father behind bars, creating emotional trauma and financial and logistical hardships that could last generations. As opposed to if he is pardoned, he could still be a father and go on to still achieve things.
Hunter is known to have fathered at least five children. The first three of these he fathered with his first wife, the youngest of whom was born in 2001. The fourth he fathered illegitimately in 2018 with a former stripper, denying paternity until a paternity test proved otherwise, followed by a court ruling. The fifth child he fathered in 2020 with his current wife.
I have a hard time imagining that Hunter is terribly present in the life of the girl whose father he denied being and whose mother had to sue him for paternity (as noted elsewhere in the thread, said daughter was pointedly not invited to Biden family events), so if he'd gone to prison I can't imagine said daughter would've noticed. I agree that his youngest daughter with his current wife probably would have felt his absence. But as upsetting as it is for a young child to have a father behind bars - is it so much more upsetting than having a father who's addicted to crack cocaine and unexpectedly disappears for weeks at a time to go on crack binges and have sex with prostitutes? Sort of sounds like much of a muchness to me, to be honest. There's even the possibility that a short spell in an environment in which crack cocaine is markedly harder to come by than outside might have straightened him out by forcing him to go cold turkey.
Finally there's the point about Hunter providing for his children financially, to which my only response is a high trill of gay laughter. Whether Hunter had gone to prison or not, I think we all know that, either way, his children would have been financially provided for by their grandfather, not their father. Hunter has been a wastrel for his entire adult life, and I don't think even he would dispute that whatever gainful employment he's had (e.g. his seat on the Burisma board) came about purely as a result of his family connections.
But even in the counterfactual world where Hunter had his shit together and was capable of providing for his minor children on his own merit and was a positive role model for all of them - either his crimes are serious enough to warrant jail time, or they aren't. This seems like "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" - why is the welfare of Hunter's children being elevated to being a point of material concern in whether or not he should serve jail time, and not the welfare of the children of all the other people who've been convicted under the same laws he's deemed to have violated?
I think for all his children, but especially his youngest, it could take a big emotional toll to have a father in prison. I just don't really know how they feel about him, but I could see that it could cause anyone to have additional layers of self loathing and feelings of inadequacy to be told that they come from someone that is deemed as not worthy to participate in society.
Yeah, that's probably true. Though I don't know much specifics at all. It may be a drop in a bucket, though, but it is generally costly to a family to have a father in prison.
Well, I'm definitely not saying it's fair, or the right or just thing to do, or that Hunter shouldn't serve jail time. I'm just saying what I would do as a father if I had the power to. But also that Biden may also wish to think about how such a move may have repercussions for his party or the political system.
He has already been deemed not worthy to participate in society -- that's what the pardon is for!
If the Bidens want to protect their young'uns from emotional harm, Hunter should have made better choices. He should have thought about the impact of his actions on his family. Hell, he impregnated a stripper and then rejected paternity until it was proven; maybe he should have thought of his youngest when his then-youngest's mother was asking him to pay for his daughter's upkeep.
I'm sorry, but I'm entirely unwilling to base my concept of justice on not hurting the feelings of the children of criminals. It's not the job of the state to make sure no children ever feel sad. It's the job of the state to enforce the law.
But like I said, I don't think it's "justice" in any way to pardon him. I just think it's what a father would want to do, and maybe should do, because fathers should always protect their children in any way possible.
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Hunter has three children from his first marriage, the youngest of whom was born in 2001. He has two young children, one from his current marriage and the illegitimate child he fathered with a former sex worker.This comment got posted prematurely, the full comment is here.Yeah, I'm somewhat aware of that, though I didn't know all details. I still think that for all parties involved, having Hunter in prison would have far more detrimental effects, emotional, psychological, legacy-wise, and otherwise, than not.
This was intended to be a lengthier comment but my phone posted it before I could finish it. I replied to you with a full comment.
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Whatever Don Jr's failings, which I've never investigated enough to be properly informed of, I'm not aware of Don Jr doing anything close to:
-- Fucking his own sister in law
-- Fathering a child on a stripper and then denying paternity, up to and including refusing to invite the child to Biden family gatherings
-- Buying a firearm illegally
-- Leaving hard drugs in a rental car
I'm aware that all of those sins have nothing, in particular, to do with the tax fraud case. But they're going to color people's opinions of Hunter, and of Hunter getting off scot free.
I honestly just assume, based on his business association, that you could probably get Don Jr on some kind of tax fraud charge if you looked hard enough and played exactly enough with the statutes. But I know nothing about him personally other than I think he hunts? I've read a million drive-by tweet accusations or thowaway magazine lines about how he's "coked out" or something, but idk.
If Don Jr. were publicly scum in the same way that Hunter was, for over a decade, then I guess we'd have a rough equivalence?
Charles Kushner, the father of Jared, wanted revenge on his brother in law, so he paid a prostitute to have sex and record the encounter, and then he sent the video to his sister:
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-charles-kushner-new-jersey-elections-crime-0155d15fa31108fd2c0e6360a3b597dd
He was pardoned by Trump four years ago and was now nominated as ambassador.
Are you saying this is the equivalent that I should be crying out against?
Kushner served his sentence a decade before the pardon. The pardon primarily removed some residual attached bars from things like voting or practicing law.
In an above comment, I stated directly that Hunter should have gone to prison for a few months. After that I think the pardon would have seemed neater.
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Chris Christi prosecuted Kushner for "one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes" he's ever prosecuted, but agreed to a plea deal which resulted in a felony conviction and a mere 14 months in a federal prison camp? Gee, must be a low bar.
Kushner served his jail term, went to a half-way house to complete his 2 year sentence, completed his probation, and Donald Trump gave him a full and unconditional pardon only for that conviction 14 years later claiming as justification 14 years of reformed behavior and charity. Do you think that's a difference in kind from a complete and total unconditional pardon to a son for any criminal behavior over the last 10 years, known and unknown, and for which son hasn't spent a single day in prison, let alone completed the sentence and gone on to lead a reformed life with charitable works?
Not only is the Charles Kushner pardon the sort of dime-a-dozen pardons we see every single admin, but it's hard to even criticize it much.
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Maybe this is just the availability heuristic, but it does seem to anyone else that the two major political families in American politics (the Trumps and Bidens) are two of the most uniquely toxic and dysfunctional families in the US? This would sound contrived if it happened in a soap opera.
Have you already forgotten about the Clintons? What about the Kennedys?
Obviously the Kennedys held the mantle during the period in which they were the preeminent political family in the states, and probably the Clintons as well.
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I agree with you. IMO both Biden and Trump are in the bottom 25% of presidents generally, they're dysfunctional people who made it to office because of how awful the rest of our political class has been for the past 20-30 years at responding to real economic and social problems in society. Personally I think our politics are just generally degrading, our whole society is degraded now and thus so are our leaders.
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No.
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Why is the Trump family dysfunctional? What is "uniquely toxic" about the Trump family?
The story above, coupled with:
Trump's weird habit of openly lusting over his own daughter
Trump's ex-wife accusing him of rape
Trump's second wife almost certainly being unfaithful to him
Trump's current wife's obvious distaste for him
Trump paying a porn star to have sex with him, along with his numerous other extra-marital affairs during at least two of his marriages
Trump Jr. getting embroiled in a messy divorce and custody battle
Point 2 is a big nothingburger. She admitted she only claimed that to squeeze him in divorce proceedings. She later clarified that he never physically raped her, but his emotional distance was a sort of emotional rape.
I'm sure what you're saying is true, but do you have a source?
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TheMotte is not a person. But yes, I am happy to condemn both Trump and Biden for pardonning their family members. Rule of law means that everyone is subject to the law, not just those who sit outside the ruling family (which itself is a bizarre thing to have to say about a republic).
This is just corruption. Biden is less corrupt than Trump, but as we see here he is clearly somewhat corrupt.
Meh, it isn’t human to prioritize an abstract law over your own flesh and blood.
Bring forth chatgpt as ruler or deal with president’s sons getting away with drug use.
On the contrary, that is the highest praise one can give a human. A good person should be able to put abstract ideas ahead of base instincts.
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I don't know that it was virtuous, but certainly I would have done the same thing, as a parent. I would not, however, have promised in the first place to not do it. The public discourse on this is disheartening but unsurprising; everyone accuses everyone else of being hypocrites, no one makes any efforts toward not being a hypocrite because hey, then you're just giving the advantage to those other hypocrites.
It's weird reading some of the commentary on reddit, where several posters are bemoaning "this is what sucks about being a liberal, we're constantly doing the reasonable thing while the Republicans break all the rules and take unfair advantage of our tolerance and longsuffering." As if this weren't precisely why the Republican party has been moving away from Buckleyan conservatism.
I expect @Folamh3 would; probably others also. I'm not sure why you're referencing "TheMotte" here as if it were a hivemind, particularly when you're only the fourth person into the thread.
This is reasonable. It's rarely a good look to contradict yourself so blatantly in public.
I was combining this thread with the post in last week's thread on the same topic, which got 3 additional replies that were critical of Biden.
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Why?
What a bizarre way of saying "there's no point in having rules or laws of any kind".
I would.
Why should a father not protect his son when he is able to? This should be the default position (not an absolute position of course, but the default one, at least) - especially for a crime as minor as tax fraud.
There's something heartwarming about the party that has recently been so obsessed with procedural norms and maintaining the moral high ground learning that there are, in fact, situations where a strict literal interpretation of the norms should be suspended. This may be more of a tactical consideration than a purely ethical one, because it helps Republicans illustrate how absurd the prosecution of Trump has been.
It's an appropriate parting "fuck you" to a political establishment that conspired to replace him without his consent in the 2024 election.
That's not what I said, and that's not the position I endorse.
A father should protect his son when he is able to - when the son is a child. Even if Hunter was in his early twenties, it'd be a lot more understandable if Joe pardoned him - sowing your wild oats is what youth is for. But Hunter is 54 years old and has been a fuckup and prodigal son for essentially his entire adult life. Tough love has to come into effect at some point.
One of the crimes Hunter was indicted on was providing false information when purchasing a firearm, namely lying when asked if he was a drug user. "Crack cocaine addicts should not be carrying guns" seems like a rare gun control policy proposal that I could imagine a lot of 2A diehards getting onboard with. Given Joe's outspoken support for gun control (e.g. his support for the federal assault weapons ban of 1993; his longstanding support for universal background checks; the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which he signed into law two years ago), this makes his leniency all the more hypocritical.
I see nothing heartwarming about this naked hypocrisy and corruption. Espectially seeing as, contrary to your interpretation, I have zero confidence that this pardon will prompt reflection among Democrats and they'll realise "you know, maybe it's more about the spirit of the law than the letter, perhaps we should be more forgiving when the Republicans overstep in future". No - the takeaway from this will be, as always, "it's okay when we do it".
It's weird that I specifically asked you why you think this action was "virtuous", and part of your answer is, in essence, that was a wonderfully spiteful act of malicious revenge. Which is quite far from what I typically think of when I hear the word "virtuous".
I agree in the abstract, but it's still not a serious enough infraction for me to change my assessment of the situation.
Spite and malice can be virtuous. Who told you they couldn't?
Virtue is the appropriate response in the appropriate situation. It's not a static table of naughty and nice feelings that can be drawn up in advance. There's no reason a priori to think that spite is never an appropriate thing to feel.
To give a simple example, if a criminal is breaking into your house uninvited in the middle of the night, then the virtuous thing to do is certainly to respond with malice.
"Spite" may be an appropriate emotional reaction in certain situations, in the sense that it was what we would expect the average person to reasonably feel in that situation. That's quite a ways from saying it's the virtuous emotional reaction. The whole point of virtue as a concept lies in recognising that many times our instinctual emotional reactions to situations are both morally wrong and often counterproductive.
Not only is being spiteful not virtuous almost by definition, in many cases it's counterproductive from the perspective of pure pragmatism - hence the phrase "cut your nose to spite your face". It's an ugly and irrational emotion.
Hard disagree. The virtuous thing to do in that situation is to defend yourself from home invasion using no more than force than is strictly necessary (which, yes, can escalate into lethal force depending on the specifics of the situation). In the hypothetical situation in which you can point a gun at the criminal, force him to surrender and wait for the police to take him away, what do you stand to gain by using additional force beyond that?
The malicious thing to do would be to maim the criminal breaking into your house and then sadistically torture him for hours on end. Your immediate response to hearing someone breaking into your house in the middle of the night should be concern for your and your family's welfare, not "oh goody, now I have a blank cheque to be as vicious and cruel as I please!"
"Bullshit - if someone breaks into my house, beating the shit out of him is a totally understandable, even reasonable response." No argument here. We're not discussing what's understandable - we're discussing what's virtuous. The standards are higher, by design. I can't even truthfully say that this is a standard of behaviour I would succeed in meeting in the heat of the moment - but this is a failing on my part, not a failing of the moral standard I've set myself.
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