‘Sleepy Joe’: How Biden stained his already dark legacy with son’s pardon

In what appears to be the nearly final act that seals his legacy as US president, Joe Biden has announced a sweeping pardon for his son who was facing sentencing in two federal cases.

With a single stroke of the presidential pen, the outgoing US president granted executive clemency to Hunter Biden, shielding him from potential punishment for any crimes he may have committed over the last 10 years.

The US constitution allows the president to pardon anyone, even preemptively, for federal crimes. Many past occupants of the Oval Office, including Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, have made use of presidential pardons to protect relatives from sentencing.

But it is the first time in US history that a president has used this arbitrary power – meant to be used sparingly and only on the rarest of occasions – to pardon his son after multiple felony convictions.

Analysts say the decision to pardon a close family member “further undermines” Biden’s legacy, reflecting a “regrettable lapse in judgement of an ageing lion”.

“By putting his selfish aspirations above his responsibilities, Biden paved Trump’s path back to Washington…(H)e let personal desires take over again… It’s a fitting coda to a tragic Presidency,” says The New Yorker columnist Isaac Chotiner in a recent piece on Biden’s legacy.

But is the grant of clemency – however unprincipled and unpresidential – to a close family member significant enough to overshadow the train wreck of a presidency marred by one scandal after another on both domestic and foreign fronts?

“Biden's most catastrophic legacy has been his full support to Israel in its genocide against the Palestinians,” Helin Sari Ertem, an associate professor of international relations at Istanbul Medeniyet University, tells TRT World.

The US bolstered its support for Israel in October 2023 by deploying naval and air forces to the region. US spending on Israeli military and related operations in the Middle East since October 7, 2023, is nearly $23 billion.

Biden’s aid to Israel over the last year has been substantially higher than in any other year since Washington began granting military aid to Israel in 1959, according to a recent research paper released by the Costs of War project by Brown University’s Watson Institute.

The Biden administration has reportedly made more than 100 military aid transfers to Israel, although only six have met the congressional review and been made public.

“His administration continued to approve (of) Israel’s cruelty and kept silent about the suffering of the Palestinians,” Ertem says.

Diplomatically, the US has staunchly defended Israel’s war by vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that called for a ceasefire.

“His administration continued to use the PYD/YPG/PKK as a surrogate actor, which tried to preserve its own and the US interests in Syria despite Türkiye's concerns,” she says.

YPG is the Syrian branch of the PKK terrorist organisation, which has waged a decades-long terror campaign against Türkiye, killing tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers.

“Biden has been a typical American bureaucrat. He is the continuation of the traditional American foreign policy,” Ertem says.

But Biden’s foreign policy follies go beyond the Middle East. He turned Ukraine into a US proxy to weaken Putin and keep him from intervening further in Syria, she says.

The Biden administration has provided Ukraine with weapons and other military equipment in as many as 67 tranches since August 2021. The US has committed $59.8 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration.

“Thanks to the war in Ukraine, the Biden team could consolidate NATO, especially Germany and France,” Ertem says.

Another foreign policy setback under the Biden administration was the chaotic withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan in August 2021.

It drew intense criticism for its poor execution, highlighted by dramatic videos of panic-stricken and desperate Afghans clinging to a US military aircraft in a bid to escape the country. Logistical failures, as well as a deadly suicide bombing that killed 13 US service members and 170 Afghan civilians, marred the final day of the two-decade-long US occupation in Afghanistan.

“The pictures showing Afghans falling from US airplanes symbolised American selfishness in the eyes of its former and current allies,” she says.

Sorry end to a storied career

After getting elected to the US Senate in 1972 at the age of 30, Biden went on to serve in the country’s highest legislative chamber for 36 straight years. He was elected vice president in 2008 and served two terms in the country’s second-highest office until 2017.

He remained out of public office for the first time in 44 years between 2017 and 2021, but then returned to Washington as 46th president.

His party forced him to give up the nomination for a second term because of his visibly poor health.

Kamala Harris, his vice president and the Democratic nominee, lost to Trump in a largely one-sided presidential election last month.

“If there was a stronger president with a better legacy, Trump might have had a smaller chance to be re-elected. Biden and Harris’s passive stance on Palestine and their inability to understand the changing American society brought Trump back,” Ertem says.

According to Murray Stewart Leith, professor of political science at the University of the West of Scotland, Biden’s legacy as president will be one of supporting the previous US administration’s direction and actions.

“Biden has been a very typical, pro-union Democratic president. The public perception of his age and the economy seemed to have overridden his policy and public stance,” he tells TRT World.

The Democratic Party faced a significant challenge because Biden’s term witnessed unusually high inflation, which had ripple effects globally, resulting in the electoral loss of many incumbent parties worldwide in recent years.

Analysts have called the resurgence of inflation under the current administration the “biggest economic story” of the Biden-Harris years. The printing of excess money – mainly to fight the pandemic-induced recession – created a steep rise in consumer prices, with inflation hitting almost nine percent in June 2022.

“Ultimately, Biden’s economic performance was not considerably perceived as strong,” Leith says.

This was despite notable legislative achievements during the Biden years, even though the Democrats faced stiff resistance in Congress.

Some analysts even claim that Biden leaves behind a legacy of policy achievements – at least on the domestic front – that rivals that of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt.

After all, Biden presided over an economic recovery and enacted landmark legislation on infrastructure, climate change, manufacturing jobs and gun control.

At the top of his policy failures, however, was his inability to carry out immigration reforms.

Leith says the impact of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, along with his infrastructure policies, cannot be underestimated.

“They were both remarkable in getting bipartisan support in an incredibly hyper-partisan era. Their economic impact has been huge,” Leith adds.

But despite the small successes, Biden will perhaps be remembered as the bumbling and stumbling leader who almost sleepwalked through a crucial debate with Trump, prompting the president-elect to come up with the derisive moniker, “Sleepy Joe”.