Biden’s pardon sets a foul example for America — and the Americas

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COMMENTARY President Biden's dishonest and hypocritical pardon of his convicted son will embolden anti-institutionalists like Trump not only in the U.S. but in judicially-challenged Latin America, too.

The criticism that’s been rightly heaped on President Biden’s wrongful pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, has focused on its potential domestic damage.

It sounds like this: Joe Biden — by declaring that presidents and their families are above the law, and that U.S. justice institutions are partisan political tools — has flashed a bright green light for President-elect Donald Trump's next administration to stomp on the accelerator and run over America’s constitutional order in all the sinister ways he's got planned.

And yes, the dishonest, hypocritical get-out-of-jail-free card Joe Biden just gifted Hunter Biden — after saying he wouldn’t — does promise that effect.

But I worry that’s only the start. The Biden absolution also threatens to leach abroad — especially in judicially-challenged Latin America.

READ MORE: Biden is setting the wrong example for America — and Latin America

I’m still enough of a naïve U.S. exceptionalist to believe that yanqui rule of law sets the civic example for this hemisphere. I said so here during Trump’s first, scofflaw presidency, when his two impeachments — for his Ukraine malfeasance and his far worse incitement of insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — showed the Americas that America still at least pulls its leaders over for running constitutional red lights.

Latin Americans could plainly see: even if a scoundrel reminiscent of so many of the scoundrels they’ve had to deal with gets voted into power in the U.S., the U.S.’s democratic institutionality will be there to check him.

But here we are, gobsmacked at how cavalierly Joe Biden — the guy who called Trump a “threat to democracy” — has thrown that institutionality under the bus.

In Brazil, a former president charged with coup-plotting can take comfort hearing Biden assert that even the U.S.'s model judicial system is illegitimate.

I’m a father, too; I do feel for Joe Biden and his family's tragic past. But if you want to be the most powerful person on earth, your life gets put under the most powerful spotlight on earth — and, surprise, it will notice the criminal misdoings of your son.

If he’s tried and convicted for possessing a firearm while a cocaine addict, and for not paying some $1.5 million in federal taxes, that doesn’t make the U.S. Justice Department or the U.S. legal system’s impartiality suspect. It just confirms Hunter’s lifestyle was suspect.

Scot free

I'll admit that because it coincided with Trump’s own criminal prosecutions this year, Hunter Biden's sordid drama served as a potent rebuttal to the MAGA claim that U.S. justice was biased and politicized against the right.

Joe Biden seemed, honorably, to realize that. Now he’s dishonorably accused the same U.S. system he insisted was justly trying Trump … of unjustly trying his son. And he’s just as dishonorably used that as his excuse for wiping his son’s slate clean.

Then President Donald Trump (left) and then Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro at Mar-a-Lago in Florida in 2020/

Consider the message that sends to Brazil — where reactionary former President Jair Bolsonaro was indicted this month, on the testimony of military brass, for allegedly plotting a coup to overthrow the 2022 presidential election he lost.

Bolsonaro and his legions have long accused Brazil’s judiciary of a lefty witch hunt against him, too. Now, they're not only watching Trump walk scot free from the Jan. 6 charges he faced, because he won the presidency again — they’re also hearing Joe Biden declare that the legitimate judicial institutionality that brought those charges is illegitimate.

That assertion helps justify the cry of Bolsonaristas that Brazil’s democratic institutionality is bogus, too — and needs to be blown up the way Trump’s pledged to burn it down in the U.S.

What’s more, the pardon born from that underhanded assertion only promotes the toxic idea that figures like Trump and Bolsonaro — and Hunter Biden — aren’t subject to the rules we plebeians answer to. As David French wrote this week in the New York Times : it “reeks of the kind of royal privilege that is antithetical to … republican values.”

Hop leftward and consider that Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s dealing with his own allegedly felonious son, Nicolás Petro. He’s charged with pocketing drug-cartel bribes to buy luxury homes and cars while secretly funneling some of it into his father’s 2022 election campaign.

Would Gustavo Petro now want to denigrate Colombia’s judicial system and pardon Nicolás? After all, it’s apparently OK for a First-World constitutionalist like Joe Biden to do it.

Turns out Colombia's president doesn’t have pardoning power. But most Latin American presidents do.

And they can imitate the foul example Joe Biden just set.

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