The entire point of the American Revolution was a rebellion against monarchy, yet US presidents persist in proudly aping that most English of traditions, the royal pardon.

Americans seem to love it. Come November, there are smiles all around as US presidents happily spare turkeys from being killed for Thanksgiving dinner, courtesy of a symbolic presidential pardon. The salvation of turkeys has been a perennial since the 1980s, but presidents have been pardoning the good, the bad and the related since the days of George Washington, with hardly a bleat from people of the republic.

Among the 30,000 or so who have benefited from presidential clemency, mercy has been extended to a folk singer convicted of a sexual offence against a 14-year-old girl, Watergate conspirators, a suffragette, the US Army whistleblower who leaked to Wikileaks, a former owner of the Herald and hundreds of men who corrupted government or contributed to party funds.

The presidential pardon is a kingly moment enshrined in the US Constitution, and apart from Abraham Lincoln’s kindness to a wife’s cousin who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, blood ties rarely affected the quality of presidential mercy, until recent administrations.

Jimmy Carter pardoned his brother after dubious business venture attempts in Libya; George H. W. Bush extended mercy to a son over his involvement in a financial scandal; Bill Clinton pardoned a half-brother who served a year in jail for cocaine possession and Donald Trump pardoned his son-in-law’s father, who had been jailed for convictions surrounding real estate deals.

Loading

Now, Joe Biden has pardoned his son Hunter. In June, a jury had found Biden the Younger guilty of lying about his drug use on a federal form to apply to own a firearm. Then, in September, he pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in California.

Biden appeared to have developed a saviour complex after saving the US from a second Trump coming in 2020 and his fatal decision to stand a second term, compounded by a fumbling Democratic Party hierarchy too timid to tell him he’d passed his use-by date, which meant his real legacy was making Trump great again. His egregious pardon further tarnishes that legacy.

Biden promised he would not do it and was still playing politics with his son’s life in the dying days of his presidential reign as his popularity ebbed: last June he said he would neither pardon his son nor commute his sentence. His press secretary repeated the line after the Democrats lost the election last month. And then, seemingly out of the blue, the president this week announced mercy, saying his son’s convictions were a miscarriage of justice.