“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

                                                                                 From “The Rich Boy,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Last week, a Chester County man who has lived his entire life according to the rules of the law  and has taught his three children to live by the same edict saw on his phone that President Joe Biden gave his son, Hunter a full and unconditional pardon, sparing the younger Biden a possible prison sentence for federal felony gun and tax convictions, and thus, reneging entirely from his earlier promise not to use the powers of his office to benefit a member of his own family.

The excoriation of Biden’s decision – one that reverberated with accusations of favoritism and an overt abuse of power – was heard on both sides of the political aisle and will likely resound well past the day when he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2025. In much the way Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974 defined and tainted the Ford presidency, Biden’s setting his son free will be the last and ugliest remnant of his 50-year career in politics. 

The Chester County man continued to scroll. He read that President Biden said that Hunter was “selectively, and unfairly prosecuted,” that he was “treated differently” and that the charges in his cases came about “only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.”

“It was clear that Hunter was treated differently,” Biden wrote. In retrospect, the Chester County man thought, Hunter Biden was treated differently because he comes from a prominent family and, like many other recipients of good fortune whose sins have been waved off by our justice system’s most delicate touches, the normal rules that govern our society do not apply to him.  

A few days before, the Chester County man saw on his phone that special counsel Jack Smith announced that he was dropping both his election subversion case and the classified documents case against President-elect Donald Trump. This came just three days after he read the news that the judge in Trump’s hush money case indefinitely postponed his sentencing for the guilty verdicts rendered on 34 counts of falsifying business records. 

While their convictions are dissimilar, Hunter Biden, a troubled man with a sordid past, and Donald Trump, the first former president ever to be charged with and convicted of felonies, are tethered together as the beneficiaries of what happens when influence overrules justice. It is ironic to note that were he not pardoned, Biden would have faced a firing squad of assault by the Trump administration, led by a President-elect who there but for the grace of his re-election would have faced a mountain of convictions, of which nearly all have been tossed out. 

The Chester County man tossed his phone into his knapsack, where it hummed continuously throughout the day with more news of the Biden pardon. He did not have to read more. He already knew that it was merely the latest document laid in a filing cabinet of American injustice that separates the haves from the have-nots. Ford “forgave” Nixon of his crimes. Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger Clinton, who had pleaded guilty to drug charges. During his first term in office, Trump granted 144 pardons, who included some of his closest allies who committed crimes ranging from financial fraud to witness tampering and more. Among them were real estate developer Charles Kushner, who was convicted of preparing false tax returns, retaliating against a cooperating witness, and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission in 2005, served prison time but was pardoned in 2020. 

On his way home from work, the Chester County man thought about the double standard of law that often lets the most prominent buy their way free in this country while those not born with silver spoons in their mouths are punished to the most severe degree. He cursed all the spoons. He spun Hunter Biden’s crimes over and over in his mind. He stared at the other cars driving by him on the wide-open road. Every one of us, he thought, every one of us on this road now lives in a nation that has allowed a regulated system of fairness move closer and closer toward irrevocable inequity, where the line that separates wrong from right is rubbed out and drawn again by those with the most power, time and time again, without repercussion. 

Before leaving his vehicle, the Chester County man reached into his knapsack one last time before entering his home. There, behind his children’s and wife’s texts, the news was bold and prominent and seemed to leap off his phone. Charles Kushner – a convicted felon -- had just been nominated by Trump to become the U.S. Ambassador to France.