What are you getting for Christmas? For most of us it’s a mystery, hidden within wrapping paper, stashed somewhere around the house, or yet to be decided in a last-minute panic, depending on your family’s approach to these things.
Not so Donald Trump. He already knows the big, shiny gift he is getting from Joe Biden. His predecessor has kindly unwrapped it for him early: it’s a wide-ranging, nepotistic and reckless pardon granted to Hunter Biden. Oh, you shouldn’t have! No, seriously, Joe: you shouldn’t have.
Biden has been generous to Trump already. His misguided attempt to run for re-election gave a huge leg-up to the campaign for Maga: the Sequel.
It took a titanic lack of self-awareness to even consider seeking a second term. Yes, politicians need confidence, but it’s not unreasonable to think that someone wielding power at that level, with so much at stake, should have some capacity for self-scrutiny.
All the more so once it became clear the Republican candidate was Trump. The consequences of losing the election became all the more acute, so the incumbent should have been responsible enough to question his own capacity.
Those around him bear plenty of blame for that, too. When they indulged his wishes, right through to putting him up for that disastrous debate, they did their boss, their party and their country a dreadful disservice.
It beggars belief that even after Trump humiliated Biden on the debate stage, many of the President’s team continued to pretend everything was OK. Remember when they were briefing that he was fine, just so long as a meeting wasn’t late in the afternoon because then he got tired? Or when they transparently lied that he was at his sharpest ever?
Trump couldn’t have hoped for a better opportunity. Now that he’s won, one might hope that Biden would at least seek not to punch his party or his office in the head any more. Perhaps a drive to shovel as much support to Ukraine before he leaves the building, or a flurry of executive orders to lock in legacy projects from his policy agenda.
Instead, he has undermined it all, and reached a nadir of self-indulgence, by pardoning his son. The temptation to do so is obvious, and even understandable – but governing ought to involve self-denial.
Perhaps he feels so aggrieved at his ejection by his own party that he simply doesn’t care. Sod it, I’ll do something for me and me alone.
But the damage done by this specific fit of pique will be wide-ranging and lasting. It speaks directly to the very issues which raise so much legitimate concern about his successor. The nepotism. The exploitation of the presidency for personal and family gain. The defiance of the soft but vital conventions of decent conduct which ordinarily constrain a president even in the gaps between explicit constitutional restrictions.
The Trump administration is already filling up with family members, supplicants and clan followers – most recently, Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, has been announced as the president-elect’s senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
Democrats and others will rightly seek to scrutinise these appointments, and the wider do-what-I-like approach that the Donald brings to the White House. They should also want to talk about a cleaner, tougher approach to law-breaking, given Trump’s own convictions and the recently-dropped legal cases against him.
Now, though, the incoming administration has the perfect response, wrapped up in a shiny bow: the last guy pardoned his criminal son.
American democracy – like any other – suffers when opposition is weak and scrutiny is impaired. It’s ironic that for all the understandable fretting about what a second Trump administration will do to weaken opposition, the first big blow has been struck by Joe Biden.
For the wider free world, this also undermines our message of legitimacy, of meritocracy and of the democratic difference – the idea that our way of life is preferable to and distinct from tyranny, theocracy and all the rest.
Yes, it’s only one act – however distasteful and improper – but the propaganda value of such a grubby use of the most powerful office in the world offers fuel for the relativism and whataboutery touted by corrupt dictators from Tehran to Moscow, and their armies of social media warriors.
This time, the spin will have a core of truth, which makes it more dangerous. For a country without a hereditary aristocracy, America sure does love trying to manufacture one.
The dynastic politics of the Kennedys ceased to be a happy story decades ago – and now the latest scion to rise to prominence is the roadkill-eating, dead-bear-pranking, conspiracy theorist RFK.
The Clintons’ attempt to score the first spousal double presidency in history stumbled into facilitating Trump’s initial election victory, rolling themselves in so much celebrity glitter that they allowed a billionaire host of The Apprentice and guest star of Home Alone 2 to cast himself as an outsider.
The Trumps themselves bring the most clannish approach yet to the exploitation of the White House, with a seemingly endless cast of in-laws, cousins and offspring taking on political appointments. Their iron-fist approach to advancing their own interests is deployed without bothering to mask it in a velvet glove.
America’s enemies point to all this and more as a means of claiming the West is just as rotten and wrong as the mass murderers, gangsters and thieves that make up the opposing axis. They’re wrong: democracy, for all its faults, remains by far the best system yet discovered for human liberation and advancement. Joe Biden, in a fit of self-indulgence, just handed them another stick with which to beat it.
Mark Wallace is the chief executive of Total Politics Group
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