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Who knew that fully restoring the soul of America would require Democrats to pardon a cocaine addict who cheated tax collectors and violated the party’s sacrosanct gun control laws?

More than anything else, Joe Biden and the legacy media sold him for president in 2020 as the person who could make the nation decent again. It was corny every time he said he was running to “restore the soul of America,” but just as the manipulative news media manufactured pandemic hysteria and instigated violent race riots, they pushed the fiction that Biden would be the cure to make it all go away and re-instill principles, norms, and civility to our government.

A month after the 2020 election, the New York Times editorial board wrote that Biden “won the presidency because, at a moment when so many Americans were exhausted by the chaos and nastiness of the Trump era, he promised stability, decency and healing.” The line was on repeat.

“Joe’s Fearsome Weapon Against Trump: Simple Decency,” read a headline from as early as August 2020.

“Decency will return to the White House, a fundamental moral shift,” NYT Opinion Columnist Roger Cohen wrote in December 2020.

“[H]e represented the calm after the storm, the sense after the sensation,” read a piece from the same month by Frank Bruni.

A personal favorite comes by way of Times columnist Bret Stephens, who still refers to himself as a conservative despite routinely rooting against Republicans in election after election. In August of 2020, Stephens proudly identified himself as a “Biden conservative” — it’s okay to laugh — and said that if nothing else, at least Biden was someone “who believed in loyalty and decency more than in any particular set of ideas.”

It was all an attempt to get voters to believe that all of their problems — the pandemic, the riots, the conflict — would go away if they would only remove Donald Trump from office.

America wasn’t ready for so much decency. After Inauguration, Biden set about throwing perfectly healthy patriots out of the military for declining Covid shots. Then he pressured companies to fire Americans who did the same. His Justice Department combed the country for harmless Jan. 6 protesters to harass them with lawfare and lock them in prison. Halfway into his tenure, Biden declared his political opponents “a threat to the very soul of this country.” Days before the 2024 election, he called Trump supporters “garbage.”

Investigative efforts turned up overwhelming evidence that Hunter Biden had used his father’s high government rank to pull financial strings with foreign companies and officials. The goods indicated that Joe Biden knew about the business dealings, though he denied it. And when his son was finally in real legal jeopardy, Biden insisted he’d never interfere. What’s more, he was adamant that should his son be convicted of a crime, he wouldn’t issue him a pardon. Because no one is above the law, a concept as decent and civil as Biden.

On Sunday, Biden told everyone he changed his mind. He said his Justice Department was actually corrupt for prosecuting his son after all. Biden went ahead and gifted his son a pardon covering all federal-level crimes, known and unknown, that took place over the course of more than a decade.

Bret Stephens, the columnist at the Times who swore by Biden’s “decency,” called it “a degrading finale for Biden’s feeble, forgettable, frequently foolish presidency.”

Neither Stephens nor any of his peers have a right to be offended. They dutifully assisted in the illusion that Biden was a good person full of only sweetness and light. It was a lie like nearly everything else they say. Biden is only in a position to do all of the sick and indecent things he did because of their own indecency.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”