It’s been a rough go of it for those of us still clinging to antiquated notions that with leadership and power should come things like honesty, integrity, morality and expertise.
One look at any number of Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks and it’s clear those things no longer matter to a great number of people. (Hell, one look at Trump himself and that’s painfully, comically obvious.)
But these long-gone vestiges of a forgotten America, one in which criminals don’t get to be president and sex offenders don’t get Cabinet posts, got another blow Sunday night when the outgoing president went back on his word and pardoned his son.
President Joe Biden, after insisting he wouldn’t, signed a “full and unconditional pardon” for any offenses his son Hunter had committed, which includes lying about drug use when buying a handgun, tax evasion and other charges.
The defenses of Biden’s craven last-minute flip-flop came rolling in from many on the left who’d previously spent years wagging their finger at Trump’s nepotism and clear corruptibility.
But the pardon didn’t go over well with many others, including some Democrats who still seem to at least know the value of appearing to care about honesty and hypocrisy.
But for those of us who simply believed the whole point of Biden was to save us from Trump and Trumpism, it was just the latest in a long line of disappointments from a man who turned out to be a lot more self-interested than he promised.
Shutting out a primary
In 2020, many of us voted for Biden not because we liked his policies, but because he was qualified, decent and had the best chance of stopping Trump.
And importantly, Biden signaled over and over again that he would serve only one term, and that mattered. After all, we weren’t voting for a lifetime of Biden or Democratic policies, but merely a means to an end: get Trump out for good.
As early as 2019 he indicated to aides that he wouldn’t run again, and as recently as July 2024 he acknowledged that he’d initially run with the expectation that he’d “pass it on to somebody else.”
Not only did he run again, he effectively shut out a Democratic primary. Then, even with dismal polling numbers, an obvious decline in his mental and physical faculties, and his own party members begging him to drop out, it would take months before Biden would do the right thing and step aside.
While Vice President Kamala Harris ran as good a campaign as she could have in these circumstances, Biden’s obstinance hardly gave her a shot.
But it wasn’t just Biden’s selfish decision to run again that ushered Trump back into the White House where he was never supposed to be. It was his policies, too.
Eager for an early win, Biden ignored warnings about inflationary policies from a slew of economists — in his own party — and signed a massive stimulus package that sent prices soaring. The inflation rate was 1.4% when he came into office, peaked at a painful 9.1%, and is now down to 3.3%.
Then, he ignored a chance to lower prices when he decided to not only maintain Trump’s tariffs, but hike them an additional $18 billion, an average annual tax increase on U.S. households of $625.
For the purposes of politics, Biden also rolled back Trump’s approval of the Keystone Pipeline, a project that Biden’s own Energy Department estimated would have created up to 60,000 jobs and generated an economic impact of up to $9.6 billion.
Also for the purposes of election-year politics, Biden forgave $175 billion in student debt, a cost passed on to taxpayers when many were struggling to pay for basic needs.
For political reasons, too, he undid Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy and opened the border to a flood of asylum-seekers and countless others who would take advantage of our intentionally broken immigration system. For months he insisted there was no migrant crisis, until he tried to reverse the order — again, in an election year.
Most importantly, these policy decisions on the economy and immigration didn’t work. Americans felt the effects of them everywhere. But secondarily, they most certainly inured to the benefit of Trump
While Biden is obviously not the existential threat to democracy that Trump is, he showed us that he wasn’t, in the end, willing to put country over party, or country over himself. Biden was motivated by politics and personal grievances, hubris and partisanship.
While that hardly makes him unique, it does make him a failure at the one thing many of us elected him to do: He was meant to save us from Trump, and instead he seemingly did everything he could to invite him back in.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
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