The Next Biden Pardons May Matter More

And why it’s time for the young liberals to make a move.

Baby trade war’s going real good: “President-elect Trump suggested to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week,” Fox News reports, “that if a tariff for failing to address trade and immigration issues would kill the neighbor to the north’s economy, maybe it should become the 51st state.” Happy Tuesday.

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(Photo by Samuel Corum / Getty Images.)

Don’t Stop With Hunter

by Andrew Egger

President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter wasn’t just a display of hypocrisy. It was also the latest in a string of decisions the president has made showing a bizarrely incoherent response to the reelection of Donald Trump.

During the presidential campaign, Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t hold back about the stakes of the election, correctly sounding the alarm over Trump’s malignant authoritarianism-in-waiting. Yet since Trump won, Biden has oscillated between acting as if norms can hold and as if the house may indeed be on fire.

The president has participated in transition activities to ensure a smooth handoff (as he should). And he also gave Trump a backslapping “welcome back” photo op at the White House.

Republicans leered—and some progressives fumed—that this pivot showed Biden hadn’t really believed all that stuff about the dangers Trump presented. Biden’s defenders argued that he was just trying to stick up for the battered norm of the peaceful transfer of power.

But the Hunter pardon suggests the president believes we are now firmly in a new, abnormal political reality.

The dizzying, unprecedented decision to pardon his son not only for the crimes of which he currently stands accused but for any and all federal crimes he may have committed over a decade of his out-of-control life was, as Sonny Bunch notes today, a betrayal of the case he had made to supporters. “The notion that institutions and values are worth defending is something Biden told us to believe,” writes Sonny. “And he dispensed with those stated values the second they proved inconvenient.” But the pardon also betrays a deep worry that Republicans wouldn’t stop coming after Biden’s family until they had extracted their pound of flesh—that we are past the point of saving the institutional legitimacy of our system of justice.

Biden is obviously correct that Team Trump is openly gearing up for vengeance, as Trump’s abortive attempt to install Matt Gaetz at DOJ and his ongoing attempt to replace Christopher Wray with Kash Patel at the FBI show. What remains to be seen is whether Biden’s protective actions against those forthcoming vengeances will extend beyond his own flesh and blood.

A few weeks ago, former Justice Department attorney Paul Rosenzweig wrote for us arguing Biden should issue preemptive pardons to protect those whom Trump had explicitly threatened over their opposition to his candidacy: People like former Rep. Liz Cheney, whom Trump repeatedly called treasonous for her participation in the House January 6th Committee, or Gen. Mark Milley, whom he suggested should be executed.

“There can be little doubt that Trump has an enemies list,” Rosenzweig wrote in the Atlantic, “and the people on it are in danger—most likely legal, though I shudder to think of other possibilities.” Keep in mind that Rosenzweig was writing before Trump’s announcement of Patel, who recently wrote a book explicitly listing dozens of purported deep-state Trump enemies, including everyone from Hillary Clinton and Harris to Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein to former Trump aides who have since spoken out against him, like Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah.

Reading that list, it’s painfully clear that nothing unites the names but perceived enmity to the incoming president. One imagines a loyal lapdog like Patel wouldn’t hesitate to expand that list.

Maybe some of these folks wouldn’t accept preemptive pardons. It’s true that, in some people’s eyes, that could look like an admission of some sort of guilt. It’s certainly true that the right-wing infotainment system would howl that argument to the moon. But Team Trump’s rhetoric of retribution has been so naked and explicit that no reasonable person would find that sound and fury compelling. And it’s a little late for Biden to decide he doesn’t want to make any controversial pardons.

The point isn’t just to ensure that, say, Cheney won’t be convicted of a crime. The point is to shore up the likes of Cheney, Fiona Hill, and Wray—as much as possible—against oppressive, life-destroying investigations on the part of a weaponized federal executive.

Biden can’t protect all of America against Trump. But the people about whom Trump and his lackeys are already openly drooling and braying for revenge—those Biden could preemptively protect. Hunter can’t be the only one who could or should benefit from his use of this power. At least, in this case, the president would be affirming the principles he ran on, not jettisoning them.

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The Times, They Are A-Changin’

by William Kristol

It’s been a month since the election, and one has to give the victors this: They’re hard at work.

Needless to say, if they were to succeed in bringing their efforts to fruition, the results would be damaging to the country and dangerous to the world. But the new authoritarians are doing their best to do their worst.

Donald Trump has moved fast in putting his administration together and his agents have plans aplenty for the next four years.

Trump’s old, but these authoritarian apparatchiks are young and energetic. The key powers in the White House will be the incoming vice president JD Vance (age 40), Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller (39), and OMB Director Russell Vought (48). The original nominees for the key power ministries were Matt Gaetz at Justice (age 42), Kash Patel at the FBI (44), Pete Hegseth at Defense (44), and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence (43). And then there’s the power near the throne: Elon Musk (53).

The New Authoritarianism is a youthful movement. Its young leaders are lined up in service of Trump today and ready to carry on after Trump tomorrow. This shouldn’t be a surprise. While authoritarian agendas are often reactionary, authoritarian leaders are often young. Benito Mussolini was 39 when he took power. Huey Long was 42 when he was assassinated. Joe McCarthy was 41 when he came to national prominence.

The time in the limelight for those authoritarians was, for various reasons, limited. But I doubt that the leaders of today’s anti-liberalism are going to be aging out of our politics any time soon.

So it would seem a matter of some urgency for young defenders of liberal democracy and youthful proponents and reinventors of liberalism to step up to the plate. This is their moment.

President Biden will be leaving the scene. Lots of Democrats are doing what the losing party always does, and so we see around us right now a festival of finger-pointing, hand-wringing, navel-gazing, self-loathing, and second-guessing.

But this will pass, partly because the world isn’t going to pause for all this jawing. The new authoritarians certainly aren’t waiting for Democrats to finish poring over the last voter file or agree on every analytical point. It’s time, now, for the emergence of a new liberalism and new liberal leaders.

Democrats and liberals are in the wilderness. They’ve lost two of the last three presidential elections to Trump, including most recently losing the popular vote. In 1932, Democrats had lost three elections in a row, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (age 50) led them to the promised land. In 1992, Democrats were again three-time losers, and Bill Clinton (age 46) took them back to the White House. Or if a new party proves possible or necessary—Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 at age 51.

It’s not that older, experienced graybeards don’t have a part to play. And after all, Churchill and Reagan contributed a lot to saving liberal democracy when they were in their 70s. But I don’t see any Churchills or Reagans on the political horizon. We oldsters can today play an advisory role.

It’s pretty simple: Today we need young leaders in the fight to defend our institutions and our democracy. We need new leaders in the formulation of a forward-looking agenda for the second quarter of the 21st century.

Step up. It will be meaningful. It should be fun.

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Quick Hits

MILE HIGH MORAL CLARITY: President Biden’s pardon announcement for his son Hunter has been mostly met with crowing from Republicans and groans from Democrats. “Not a banner moment but no shock,” one House Democrat anonymously [footnote: lol] told Axios’s Andrew Solender.

Still, a notable group of Democrats did criticize the move. And for some reason, that notable group was “Democrats from Colorado.” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis bemoaned that Biden had “put his family ahead of the country.” Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet was not a fan: “President Biden’s decision put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all.” Neither was Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, who said he sympathized with “a father’s love” but called the pardon a “mistake.” Presidents, Crow added, “hold enormous power and responsibility and must be held to a higher standard. They must instill trust and promote the American people’s faith in their democracy.”

They love their norms in the Rockies.

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HERE COMES MR. FOREIGN POLICY: While out of power, Donald Trump was cagey on his foreign policy plans, deriding President Biden as a toothless schmuck and insisting everything would be better under his watch while rarely offering specifics. Now, however, he’s weighing in on Truth Social—where else?—about his plans for the Middle East: “Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East . . . Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.”

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MMM, CRUNCHY: This New York Times profile on the granola voters who fell in love with Donald Trump via the dulcet tones of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could have been created in a lab by scientists wanting to test how high they could spike our blood pressure:

As a nature-loving physical therapist in Boulder, Colo., Colin O’Banion shops at farmers markets, grows organic squash in his backyard and thought he could never vote for Donald J. Trump.

But during the pandemic, he said, he and his wife became social outcasts when they refused Covid-19 vaccines for themselves and their three sons. Tuning in to alternative health podcasts, he became convinced that the country’s public health establishment was corrupt, and that the only antidote was the upheaval being promised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he teamed up with Mr. Trump. . . .

Scientists and public health experts have expressed alarm that Mr. Trump wants to give over the country’s health agencies to people like Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who have spread misinformation about vaccines and Covid treatments and vowed to gut the government agencies that regulate food and medicines. But to people like Mr. O’Banion, rejecting norms is exactly the point.

Read the whole thing, if you’ve got the probiotic gut health to stomach it. Perhaps a bit of Colin’s organic squash will help.

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