The "Nice Guy" president has done it again.
Joe Biden has broken yet another promise in pardoning his son Hunter. I wrote in a blog post about Biden’s classified document scandal that “Comparing Trump and Biden is comparing apple to orange, but their mud fights make it increasingly difficult for the average voter to tell them apart.” As Biden once again pulls the same kind of trick that he disparages Trump for, that is more true than ever.
Biden’s central pitch as a candidate was that he was a decent guy, someone with the reverence for norms and institutions necessary to put America back together after Trump and Covid, but he has repeatedly, even ostentatiously, failed to live up to the standards he set for himself. His demeanor is less abrasive than Trump, but on the merits it is increasingly hard to tell them apart; any difference is by degrees. Both had classified document scandals, which both mishandled. Both have family members with murky dealings with foreign companies, and who trade on their father’s name. Both implemented recklessly pro-cyclical economic policies. Both had big foreign policy failures, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the phase one trade deal. And now both have pardoned family members in the final days of their administrations, and have cast doubt on the impartiality of the American legal system.
Of course, their conducts are not equivalent. But the myth of Biden as a good guy who embodies old fashioned decency is just that, a myth. Some people have made the case that Biden is a tragic figure, someone who finally achieved his dream of becoming president right when he was getting too old to be able to make good use of it. His failings are not primarily due to his age though. In a real sense almost no one has as much agency as the leader of the free world and as such he needs to bear the responsibility for his actions, and those actions were not to the standards he promised on the campaign trail and in the White House.
Biden is too me less of a good guy and more of a proverbial ‘nice guy’. Someone who is sure of their own goodness and niceness and thus feel entitled to more than they have; often in terms of romantic appreciation. After all, they are a nice guy, isn’t that what women want? Similarly, Biden is sure of his own moral superiority over Trump and his decency as a politician, isn’t that what voters want? That core arrogance, the ironclad belief in his own superiority and inability or unwillingness to critically assess himself is what annoys me so about Biden.
Biden’s supporters, or in this case apologists, make the case that Hunter’s conviction was the end result of a politically motivated investigation, and that it is perfectly natural for a father to look out for his son. I sympathise with the second point, but it does not change the fact that Biden promised time and time again to be better than that, to be the adult, to be a decent and responsible president. He talks like a decent guy, but he just does not act like one.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Nitin Dhumal from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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