Joe Biden’s last day in the White House was spent resuscitating America’s political norms, a task he had embarked on since first coming to the presidency in 2021.
But despite Biden’s final act in office welcoming Donald Trump to the presidential residence with a ceremonial meeting for tea, the bristling new president appears eager to shred those standards in a bid for revenge.
Biden’s final hours as commander-in-chief were bewildering to many in his party as he maintained a steadfast commitment to the peaceful transfer of power, which included not showing any visible signs of the smallest personal slight to a man he supposedly believes is a fascist and a threat to American democracy.
It was a graciousness that Trump will not return. And with his first week back in the White House just half over, the 47th president is already diving headfirst into a campaign of vengeance.
His grudge-settling desires reached new heights Wednesday night as Fox’s Sean Hannity aired the first sit-down TV interview with Trump since the president took office at noon on Monday. In the roughly hour-long interview, the president seemed to threaten Biden with criminal prosecution over long-arbitrated claims of family corruption.
“This guy is running around giving everyone pardons,” Trump grumbled to Hannity. “The funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon,” he added ominously.
The 46th president granted unconditional pardons to multiple members of his family, including his brothers Frank and James Biden (and James’ wife, Sara Biden), sister Valerie Biden Owens and her husband, John Owens.
Biden said his family has been “subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me —the worst kind of partisan politics,” adding that he had “no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
He appears to have been correct, as Trump on Wednesday laid the groundwork for going after the former president further: “If you look at it, it all had to do with him,” said the new president, referring to people surrounding Trump who were convicted of crimes.
HANNITY: “Joe Biden ran and said he would never do preemptive pardons.”
TRUMP: “I was given the option, they said, ‘sir, would you like to pardon everybody, including yourself?’ I said I’m not going to pardon anybody.” pic.twitter.com/1ZHQFrXk83
— Conservative War Machine (@WarMachineRR) January 23, 2025
“We had people that suffered. You had [Steve] Bannon put in jail. You had Peter Navarro put in jail,” the president said, making his case that a precedent had already been set. “You had people that suffered and and far worse than that, they’ve lost their fortunes. “
In a possible reference to Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered by a court to pay massive damages to a pair of election poll workers he defamed, Trump added: “They’ve lost their nest egg, paying it to lawyers.”
Such threats shouldn’t always be taken at face value coming from Trump. This is the same president who repeatedly vowed to “lock up” his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, though his Justice Department never launched any criminal investigations into anyone in the Clinton family during his first term.
But in this instance, the threat to use the federal government to conduct a highly politically-motivated prosecution of his former opponent comes after a whirlwind few days of targeting Biden appointees, National Security Council (NSC) staff, and other federal employees in an ideological purge.
Any prosecution will likely be a decision ultimately made by a Trump political loyalist, Pam Bondi, whom the president is set to install as attorney general in the coming days.
Trump, having endured four separate (and in the end, largely inconsequential) criminal prosecutions and intense ridicule after leaving office in 2021, seems more motivated than ever to get even with his enemies. And nothing Biden did during the post-election transition period made things any better — least of all his use of presidential pardons.
Democrats are now reckoning with their party’s across-the-board failure to defeat Trumpism after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. That failure is now likely to resound for decades as an emboldened and vengeful Donald Trump vows to settle the scores.
