What Does This Say About Joe?

Fr Mike Schmitz's Bible in a Year podcast in recent weeks has been moving through First and Second Samuel, with its dysfunctional story arc of King Saul and King David. It's hard not to see Biblical reverberations in King Saul, a failed ruler intensely jealous of his eventual successor, David, but there's now the additional parallel that US Catholic bishops, beginning with Cardinal Gregory. are criticizing Joe for being a "cafeteria Catholic", which faintly echoes Samuel's mesaage that God has rejected Saul as king.

But an even closer parallel is the story of David and his strange, almost codependent, relatonship with his entitled son Absalom.

He was a great favorite of his father and of the people. His charming manners, personal beauty, insinuating ways, love of pomp, and royal pretensions captivated the hearts of the people from the beginning. He lived in great style, drove in a magnificent chariot, and had fifty men run before him.

Absalom had his half-brother Amnon, David's eldest son, murdered in revenge for Amnon's rape of their sister Tamar. Fr Schmitz stresses David's apparent hesitation to do much of anything about this whole situation, and although David sends Absalom into quasi-exile, Absalom is able to manipulate things to get David more or less to rehabilitate him, upon which, once Absalom returns to Jerusalem, he attempts a coup d'etat.

This starts a civil war, which ends when Absalom's hair is caught in a tree during the climactic Battle of Ephraim's Wood. David's general Joab finds him, and against David's explicit instructions not to harm Absalom, has him killed. Fr Schmitz stresses the inapprpriateness of David's public grief at Absalom's death:

2 Samuel 18:33 Then the king trembled and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept. And this is what he said as he walked: “My son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, Absalom, my son, my son!”

At this, Joab slaps David upside the head:

2 Samuel 19:5-7 Then Joab came into the house to the king and said, “Today you have shamed all your servants, who have saved your life today and the lives of your sons and daughters, the lives of your wives, and the lives of your concubines, 6 by loving those who hate you, and by hating those who love you. For you have revealed today that commanders and servants are nothing to you; for I know today that if Absalom were alive and all of us were dead today, then it would be right as far as you are concerned. 7 Now therefore arise, go out and speak kindly to your servants, for I swear by the Lord, if you do not go out, no man will stay the night with you, and this will be worse for you than all the misfortune that has happened to you from your youth until now!”

This is the puzzle for me in the relationship between Joe and Hunter. According to Politico, as Hunter heads for trial on his gun and tax charges,

While aides insist that the White House will have no involvement in the case, brought by special counsel David Weiss, some fear it could dramatically impact the president himself, more psychologically than politically.

Three advisers granted anonymity to speak about private deliberations said they, and members of the First Family, are worried about the weight Hunter Biden’s trial will place on the president at an already difficult time for him politically. Biden has expressed fears to them about the possibility that his son will serve time in prison.

“He worries about Hunter every single day, from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep,” said one of the three advisers. “That will only pick up during a trial.”

But it's probably an even bigger issue that Hunter seems to have been banned from the White House since last July and the baggie-in-the-cubby episode. As I posted then,

From the little we hear, Joe has been at least in part preoccupied with Hunter's legal problems, and the baggie-near-the-Sit-Room scandal appears to have forced Joe to move Hunter out of the White House -- for whatever he was worth, Joe seems to have needed Hunter as an important adviser/enabler. If that had even a minimal effect in distracting Joe from better uses for his time, it served its purpose, but the focus now is on Joe himself.

In fact, the strategy for Joe's handlers was to get Hunter out of the public eye, and this has been remarkably effective -- Hunter has since been out of the tabloids, and there've been no new kerfuffles over special treatment. It looks like he's headed for trial, his uber-fixer lawyer Abbe Lowell has ben remarkably unsuccessful at pulling strings ever since the diversion agreement was scuttled, and now it looks like Kevin Morris can't even pay Lowell to keep representing Hunter.

But all this has done has been to put the focus on Joe. One issue was this: whatever Hunter was, he wasn't Joe, and the antics over Lunden Roberts, their daughter, Hallie, her sister, the Russian escorts, and the whole laptop fiasco did in fact serve the purpose of distracting attention from Joe himself. Joe's handlers got Hunter offstage last summer, but that just left the spotlight to Joe -- and that's precisely when Trump began his long march in the polls.

But the whole Hunter story and its shadowy impact on Joe's psyche still leaves one question -- what does all this say about Joe and his personal qualities that he should have allowed Hunter to have the position he had? Commentators are beginning to point out that Joe will now be forced to pardon Hunter if he wants to keep him out of prison, which is a real dilemma that will affect his place in history. It all seems even to go back to David and Absalom.