Joe Biden Won’t Give Up on Hunter or America
Who is the real tough guy in this race? It’s not Donald Trump.
WE GET IT, AMERICA. You think Donald Trump is tough and Joe Biden is compassionate, and therefore not tough enough. But you’ve got it exactly backwards. Trump whines so constantly about “what I’ve been through” that he should adopt “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me” as his campaign song.
Don’t mistake Biden’s empathy for weakness. The major challenges he has confronted in his first term have required focus, discipline, and strength—from the death, destruction, and global destabilization of two raging wars to his own son’s prosecution on gun charges and the jury’s guilty verdict Tuesday.
Persistence, restraint, forcefulness, forbearance—these qualities speak to an underlying toughness, and Biden has demonstrated them all during his presidency. The Hunter Biden saga is no exception.
Here’s what I mean:
When he took office, Joe Biden retained Delaware’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, David Weiss, to finish an investigation into whether Hunter Biden falsified a gun form and evaded taxes while he was addicted to drugs. Joe Biden did not attack the justice system when a Trump-appointed judge—Maryellen Noreika—questioned Hunter’s plea agreement, which ultimately fell apart. Joe Biden didn’t comment or intervene when Attorney General Merrick Garland—his own appointee—elevated Weiss to special counsel status, allowing him broader authority to investigate and bring charges.
When his son went on trial in Wilmington, again in Noreika’s courtroom, Joe Biden did not attack the judge. He also said he would not pardon Hunter if he were convicted. After the guilty verdict Tuesday, the president said he was proud of “the man he is today” and added: “As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”
Although prosecutions in gun cases like Hunter’s are rare, as even some conservatives have noted, Biden did not call the system “rigged.” He did not howl about the unfairness of it all. And he left it to others to make a point that should be obvious: Trump’s convictions last month are not the same as Hunter’s. As filmmaker/TV producer Morgan J. Freeman joked shortly after the verdict, “How will this affect Hunter Biden’s campaign?” Exactly.
Patti Davis, a president’s daughter and a self-described former speed and cocaine addict, wrote this week that Hunter’s actions and illness forced Joe Biden “into a choice between the primal urge to protect a child and the public responsibility to uphold the law. That is a terrible place to be.”
BIDEN WAS STRONG ENOUGH AND TOUGH ENOUGH to choose upholding the law. He was also tough enough to keep a speaking engagement with gun-safety advocates, many of whom have experienced personal tragedy involving guns, a few hours after his son was convicted on all three gun charges. And he was tough enough to weather what happened at that event.
“Never give up on hope,” Biden told the audience at the conference hosted by the group Everytown for Gun Safety. Then a protester began shouting at him about “genocide,” upset about deaths in Gaza amid Israel’s fierce response to last fall’s Hamas attack. The Biden-friendly crowd erupted into chants of “four more years,” drowning out the heckler. Biden’s response was remarkable: “No, no, no, no,” he said. “Folks, folks, it’s okay. Look, they care. Innocent children have been lost. They make a point.”
Then he dove into a modified campaign mode, asking his “folks” if they remembered when “my predecessor” told an Iowa community to “get over it” after a school shooting. (They did remember.) “Hell no, we don’t have to get over it,” the president said. “We’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to stop it and stop it now!” Cue another round of cheers and applause.
Talk about a crucible. And all on the day his son was convicted of crimes that could have resulted in tragedy, but did not. Hunter owned the gun at the center of the federal case against him for only eleven days, and his lawyer said he had never loaded or used it.
It also takes strength and discipline for a president to let the Justice Department do its job without fear, favor, public criticism, or outright meddling. Trump expected the department and his attorney general to do his bidding. In the case of his pardon powers, he bypassed official channels almost entirely so that he could, as the New York Times reported, “wipe away convictions and prison sentences for a roster of corrupt politicians and business executives,” as well as an assortment of cronies, allies, advisers, celebrities, and operatives. And their crimes actually harmed people, unlike the crime for which Hunter Biden was convicted. (Not surprisingly, some recipients of Trump’s careless largesse are in legal trouble again, ABC News reports.)
The definitive indictment comes from Amanda Carpenter and Grant Tudor of Protect Democracy: “He created a new class of ‘henchmen pardons’” to protect himself, reward loyalists, and encourage violence, they write. That’s not toughness, it’s fear and self-preservation.
THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST—you can probably think of your own additions to it—but here’s where I see Biden being tough-minded:
Navigating the extremely complicated Israel-Hamas war. He has empathized with traumatized Israelis and Palestinians, criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactics, and denounced Hamas for its brutality, sexual abuse, and slaughter of Israeli civilians last October. But he has been adamant about looking to the future, a future of compromise, coexistence, and self-government, and on May 31 boldly promoted an ambitious ceasefire proposal that, miraculously, is still alive.
He has displeased and frustrated a chunk of his own party by doing what’s necessary on political, logistical, and humanitarian grounds to secure and bring order to the southern border. After cynical Republicans killed a bipartisan compromise so they could prolong the “crisis” and campaign on it, he’s been willing to attempt a fix on his own.
He understands the urgency of standing with and for Ukraine, and is gradually seeing the need to unshackle its military to strike inside Russia.
He is putting up with endless carping about his age (81) and calls to step aside, and handling it mostly with jokes. Not that it matters, but Trump turns 78 on Friday.
He is running for re-election, yes, but not to stay out of prison or the courtroom. Not to pardon his friends and punish his enemies. Not to quash the two federal cases against him, or pardon himself if that fails. Not to be a dictator on Day One, or however many days he feels like it. No, as Biden often says, he is running to “finish the job.”
As it happened, a shooter opened fire at an Atlanta food court while Biden was talking to the gun-safety advocates in Washington. “We all agree: We are not finished,” he was telling them. “You’re proving that you’re powerful and you’re relentless,” he added. “We have no choice. We cannot give up trying.”
And then he went home to Delaware, where Hunter and his family were waiting for him.
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