The
Next Biden Pardons May Matter More
And why it’s time for the young liberals to make a move.
William
Kristol
and
Andrew Egger
Dec 03, 2024
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
