Biden has handed Trump a get-out-jail-free card – he will be delighted

American politicians like to talk about why their country is different from all others, with the clear implication that it is better. And when they talk about the idea of American exceptionalism, they tend to use a biblical phrase – first used by one of the Puritans who came over on the Mayflower – that America is “the shining city on a hill”.

It’s a metaphorical allusion, but in Washington, DC, it is – sort of – literal. The top of Capitol Hill does indeed shine with the magnificent, gleaming marble and white stone of the Congress. And just across the road the equally imposing Supreme Court, itself a neoclassical masterpiece: the pinnacle of the justice system in the United States.

But has the rule of law in America ever looked so battered and tattered? Shining city? You’re having a laugh.

Last Sunday night – and totally out of the blue – Joe Biden announced that he was pardoning his son, Hunter. He was awaiting sentence having pleaded guilty to a tax fraud charge, and separately in another case of lying about his drug use when he tried to buy a gun. He was awaiting sentence on both federal crimes.

Now let me give the argument for what the president has done; the mitigation plea, if we’re carrying on the legal theme. The Biden family has been to hell and back: Joe Biden’s wife and daughter died in a car crash when he first became a senator. His other son, Beau, who had a promising political career ahead of him, died of brain cancer. It is, therefore, understandable that Joe wanted to protect his troubled son, Hunter. Don’t we all want to protect our children?

Other Biden loyalists have argued that Trump was planning on turning the justice department into a vehicle of vengeance, and there would be no justice for Hunter so a desperate and loving father did what he had to.

Except that argument has any number of holes in it.

First hypocrisy. Joe Biden had stated, restated and re-restated multiple times that he would not interfere in the case, that justice must run its course; that he was categorically not going to issue a pardon; and that the legal process had been fair. As 180s go, this one is a whiplash inducer.

Secondly, the scope of the pardon is ridiculous. Hunter is not just pardoned for these two crimes on which he has been convicted, but over a period stretching 11 years. In other words, he is pardoned for anything he might have done. Why? Well, Trump’s friends have made no secret of their desire to get to the bottom of why he was made a director of a Ukrainian energy company when as far as anyone knows, Hunter Biden knew nothing about Ukraine or the energy sector. What he did have though, was the surname Biden – and in May 2014 when he went onto the board of Burisma, his pop was the vice-president to Obama.

It’s a legitimate area of inquiry for Trump to ask just a few questions about what went on there, isn’t it? And let’s be utterly far-fetched for a moment, if evidence emerged that Hunter Biden had been the worst serial killer in America’s history in this period from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2024 (dear legal department, I am not suggesting or implying this in any way) then the pardon would extend to that too.

But perhaps the most egregious part of what Joe Biden has done is the total evacuation of any moral high ground for the Democratic Party. No wonder so many are spitting about it. How can Democrats complain about Trump’s nepotism or misuse of the legal system, when Biden has done this? Biden’s argument that an ordinary citizen would have never faced these felony charges (ie a charge with a strong likelihood of imprisonment) in the way that his son has for such minor offences is threadbare.

The offences are not nothing. And anyway, isn’t that exactly the argument that Trump used when he was being prosecuted in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial in New York? I argued then in this column that for Trump to complain about it being a witch-hunt was absurd when the charges had been brought, the prosecution and defence had made their respective cases, and 12 of his peers – the jury – had given their unanimous guilty verdict. Trump also had a point that – at best – his offence should have been dealt with as a misdemeanour, not requiring a full-blown trial.

Sorry. But the same applies to Hunter Biden.

Then there is the clumsy way that the president has done this. On a Sunday night, after the Thanksgiving holiday, just as he is about to board a flight to Angola the president issues this sole pardon. The president does have the power to grant pardons. It is a power frequently used and it invariably causes controversy. But why didn’t Biden include a few other people who might also be vulnerable to a weaponised department of justice under Trump?

What about Dr Anthony Fauci, who led the Covid fight and is totally in the Maga crosshairs? Or Liz Cheney, the one-time Republican congresswoman who stood up to Trump – and urged support for Kamala Harris in November? And if you wanted to show true magnanimity, maybe extend it to Trump himself.

The nightmare this gives the Democratic Party in being able to hold Trump to account is, to my mind, the least of it. What is so corrosive is the sense that it will make the American public think they’re all as bad as each other; they’re all out to feather their own nests. There is an elite that will do its all to protect itself. It is a cynicism inducer of the highest order.

It is also the greatest gift that Trump could have as he prepares for his second term. The election-denying, insurgency-promoting, convicted felon, has been handed from the Monopoly board a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card by the outgoing president.

Which brings us back to the legal system in America. The huge, brilliant white marble columns of the Supreme Court of the United States on 1st Street NE support an elaborate frieze and four words in block capitals: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.

Maybe a stonemason should be engaged to carve a ‘laugh out loud’ emoji next to those words. The gap between the American exceptionalism that the founding fathers dreamt of and today’s self-serving rulers can seem very wide indeed.