One week ago, President Joe Biden pardoned his son and set off a firestorm.
The howls of outrage across the political spectrum soon drowned out any buzz about Donald Trump’s nomination of son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father as ambassador to France. He had pardoned Charles Kushner’s tax evasion and breathtakingly sleazy witness tampering four years ago.
Many Americans seem charmed by Trump’s cruelty, incompetence and corruption as well as his embrace of well-heeled or influential people who share those traits.
Too many more of us have gotten used to him, but there’s a much higher standard for his political opponents.
Biden had the nerve to successfully challenge Trump’s 2020 reelection bid, and his administration tried to hold his predecessor accountable for inciting an insurrection and for illegally taking and refusing to return top-secret documents.
So when Biden issued a wide-ranging preemptive pardon for Hunter after repeatedly saying he wouldn’t do that, he set himself up for a major bashathon.
Delay and deny
Another war of words broke out Wednesday after a shooter killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was on his way to his company’s investor meeting at the New York Hilton Midtown.
“Delay” and “deny” were written on the ammunition, an apparent reference to how insurers weasel out of paying legitimate claims.
UnitedHealthcare was the worst such culprit in 2022, according to personal finance platform Value Penguin’s analysis of government data. It’s also the largest U.S. health insurer, generating $12.6 billion in operating earnings on $224.1 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2024.
Thompson’s total compensation last year was $10.2 million.
Many people turned to social media to vent their frustration and anger at the industry. Rutgers University researchers found the most popular posts on X “either expressed explicit or implicit support for the killing or denigrated the victim,” according to the Financial Times.
A post from Columbia University lecturer Anthony Zenkus said that instead of mourning Thompson’s death, “we mourn the deaths of 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like [him] can become multimillionaires.”
Zenkus, who was referring to a 2020 study that estimated universal health care would save 68,000 lives a year in the U.S., said he wasn’t celebrating Thompson’s slaying, the Financial Times reported.
Nevertheless, others denounced that and other posts in that vein as “heartless,” “despicable” and demonstrating “an erosion of respect for human life.”
Who’s right? Who’s wrong?
The vast majority of people probably don’t condone violence, let alone murder. Most would probably say it’s a tragedy for a family to lose a husband and father.
And some might even say Thompson was just a guy doing his job.
But that very lucrative job was heading a company with a reputation for collecting premiums but not paying claims. When a business seems to regard policyholders as little more than potential liabilities, it’s easy for those denied treatment to view its leader as a cartoon villain.
By rights, this controversy should prompt Trump and the GOP Congress to come up with what he promised more than four years ago: to replace the Affordable Care Act with a better program for all Americans.
Unfortunately, the party shows signs that it will make coverage skimpier and pricier, especially for those who need it.
Back to the Bidens
Although President Biden reneged on his promise, it’s hard to blame him, given all the twists and turns Hunter’s cases took – from a plea bargain with no jail time, to a judge who derailed it, to a worst-case scenario of a lengthy prison sentence.
Biden called the process “selective prosecution” of a nonviolent, first-time offender.
“There’s no reason to believe it will stop here,” he said. And in fact, Trump and several key nominees have made statements to that effect.
But the president-elect, who’s something of a one-man crime family, showed unusual restraint when news of the pardon broke. Instead of his usual rants about the Biden administration, he again hinted he’d dole out pardons to the jailed Jan. 6 “hostages” who invaded the Capitol and injured at least 140 police.
Acting on Trump’s behalf, those terrorists intended to stop a peaceful transfer of power. By contrast, Hunter Biden’s crimes consisted of lying on an application for a gun license and not paying his taxes until he was caught.
All presidents have a constitutional right to pardon criminals, but there’s a stark difference between how Biden used it and how Trump plans to.
Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
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