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For that exact reason, the Hunter Biden pardon is an early Christmas gift to the president-elect, who is already planning to exercise the pardon power in even more grotesquely self-interested ways. He has long promised to pardon the January 6 rioters, for example, who attempted to overthrow the 2020 election on his behalf four years ago. “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” he said on his personal social media website on Sunday. “Such an abuse and a miscarriage of justice!” (Trump was referring to the prosecutions, not the pardon, as an abuse of power.)

Other pardons will likely flow to favored subordinates and reliable allies. As I’ve noted before, Trump dangled pardons during his first term to prevent witnesses from testifying against him. Trump may even try to pardon himself for his various alleged offenses, something that he proposed doing during the Russia investigation but never attempted for fear of political backlash. That power will supplement the so-called “presidential immunity” that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority granted him earlier this year. The end result will be a presidency where Trump wields near-absolute power to exculpate his friends and punish his enemies, and the rule of law becomes a fading aspiration in American political life.

Naturally, Trump would have done this whether Biden pardoned his son or not. The president-elect may have even pardoned Hunter himself, perhaps to muddle the waters surrounding his own planned uses of the power. What Biden has done instead by pardoning his son—and only his son—is normalize further abuses of the pardon power for corrupt personal gain. If Biden had issued this pardon any sooner, the House would be justified in considering impeachment. As it stands now, it is merely a self-serving final act for a president whose administration failed on its own terms.