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.
more ... https://newrepublic.com/post/189072/media-trump-lower-standard-biden
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While the GOP can appoint neo Nazis and sex offenders to the highest positions of power, kill people, and attempt to overthrow the government, and no one bats an eye. WTF. 
