The Media Is Ready to Hold Trump to a Lower Standard

I’m not sure that I can improve on TNR’s Matt Ford’s assessment of President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter as “a quintessentially corrupt act.” That just about covers it. With scant weeks remaining in Biden’s term, his act will look even worse if he fails to extend the same sweeping protection to the numerous other people threatened by the incoming Trump administration—to say nothing of the many nonviolent drug offenders who, unlike Hunter, are doing time in federal prisons. But, this being Washington, there is always some reprobate lying around with an even worse idea than the one making all the headlines. Congratulations to Marc Thiessen, an inexplicable survivor of multiple rounds of Washington Post layoffs, and his American Enterprise Institute podcast host Danielle Pletka for suggesting an even more rancid use of Biden’s pardon power: Use it to take Donald Trump off the hook.

According to the pair’s recent op-ed, “A pardon would make good on the president’s inaugural pledge of unity.” I must hasten to clarify, this would be Biden’s pledge of unity that they are referring to here, a long-forgotten relic of his inaugural address. Trump, for his part, has promised to persecute his political opponents, “remigrate” disfavored legal immigrants, fire the civil service workforce to turn the administrative state into an engine of revenge, and turn Kash Patel—a nefarious troll with a foot-long enemies list—loose at the FBI. This is a different vision of unity: one nation under a boot.

Acknowledging the obvious—that Trump is all but set to skate on everything he’s been charged with, regardless of the merits of the cases against him—Thiessen and his co-author write, “Trump may not need Biden’s pardon, but America does.” Naturally, you shouldn’t hold your breath that these two will hold Trump to account when he launches his revenge campaign in a few weeks’ time for the sake of “America.” The whole point of this call to have Biden pardon Trump is less about any authentic desire to heal our divisions than it is to simply entangle Biden more permanently in Trump’s lawlessness.

More importantly, you can mark this op-ed as the last time we’re going to hear about the importance of unity for a while. With Trump returning to office, Thiessen won’t be the only person in the commentariat who’ll be recalibrating their barometers for harmony and unanimity. The media will soon be leaving their fetish for bipartisanship, compromise, and comity behind since the only people on whom they ever impose these standards—Democrats—will be out of power.

If you are old enough to remember the first time Trump came to power, then you’ve seen this movie before. During his tenure, President Barack Obama was constantly besieged by the worst pundits in America for his failure to bring Republicans—who were at the time following Mitch McConnell’s monomaniacal pursuit of obstruction at any cost—to the table to support broad bipartisan initiatives. The chief dunce of the Washington press corps at the time, David Broder, established his own benchmark for Democratic policy legitimacy at 70 Senate votes, thus setting up the Affordable Care Act to fail at an arbitrary standard that ended up not mattering because, as near as I can tell, Obamacare is still the law of the land, oddly durable for having failed Broder’s big purity test.

Obama, who was nevertheless pathologically eager to please the chattering class, followed their lead down a multitude of blind alleys, from negotiations over the debt ceiling to multiple failed attempts at debt-slashing committees. With each failure, the pundit class slagged Obama for his failed leadership. It was, to me, such a deeply rooted insanity that I often wondered what it would take to dislodge these obsessions with watering down policy in order to broker deals with Republican sickos. Little did I know that the answer was to elect Trump president.

But yeah, that did the trick. Seemingly overnight, the constant chorales to the virtues of bipartisan deals and the need to pass laws with 70 Senate votes vanished. And I’m guessing that when Biden quits the scene at last, you won’t hear anything more about the importance of unity or harmony again. You’ll want to remember how quickly the pundit class flips the off-switch, and recognize their unrelenting cynicism: When, after all, is it more necessary for critics and observers to try to hold fast to a high standard than when the person doing the standard-bearing is bent on debasing the constitutional order? And yet, these clowns only found the courage to pillory a president for supposedly insufficient bipartisanship when that president was someone who more or less agreed that sensible centrism and adherence to polite norms was the way the country should be run.

I’ve no idea how the press will respond to a second Trump presidency. But I can already hear pencils being sharpened, ready to greet the president-elect’s plan to pardon the January 6 rioters with a flurry of hot takes about how Biden’s pardon of Hunter made it all OK.

Who even knows what purpose such journalism is supposed to serve? The senseless flattening of wildly different offenses by wildly different presidents is not going to help make sense of the world, give people the information needed to confront big problems, or really make anyone happy or better off. It’s a thought exercise, invented by nimrods, that will fail in advance—but every nincompoop in the political media is going to follow this and other bankrupt notions in a lemming-like parade off the discourse cliff, all the same. But this makes my admonition for Democrats to quit the bipartisanship business all the more sensible, because if they’re not careful, in a few weeks’ time they’ll be the only people left in town pretending it’s a virtue.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.