If you can stomach it, the Washington Post’s recent revisiting of Trump’s many corrupt presidential pardons is a gut-wrenching reminder of the former’s president’s widespread and insidious malfeasance. What makes the pardon abuses particularly galling is that Trump didn’t actually break any laws in issuing them, but rather twisted a constitutional prerogative into a weapon to undermine the rule of law, reward his allies, and advance his own power. And where such behavior would have done serious harm to any prior presidency, his overall bad behavior was so vast that this abuse was just one among many — reminding us that much of Trump’s malign power derived from his multi-front assault on American democracy, making it difficult for his opponents to prioritize what offenses to treat as the highest priorities.
The Post’s finding that many of those granted clemency by Trump have turned to supporting his re-election bid reminds us that Trump’s corruption was a poison that continues to seep into our political system, in a sort of self-perpetuating cycle, as his return to office with their aid would open up vast new vistas for further bad behavior; as the Post observes of his plans to return to the presidency, “some of his most important boosters were pardoned media figures — podcasters, talk show hosts, YouTubers and columnists — who have promoted his record and belittled his legal and political foes.” Just as unqualified Trump judges undermine the justice system years after his electoral defeat, so people who should be in jail are instead giving him money and working to get him back to the Oval Office.
In the Post’s examination of Trump’s pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the sadistic Arizona lawman who racially profiled Hispanics and detained migrants in conditions that amounted to torture (check out this Slate article for a fuller accounting of his truly evil behavior and abuse of office), Trump’s clear goal was to disrupt the execution of justice, not right an injustice or apply mercy in the usual way of pardons, as he first attempted to pardon Arpaio before he was even convicted. Arpaio was a very early supporter of Trump, but more significantly, was an ally in Trump’s white nationalist war on immigrants and darker-skinned Americans; in this, you could say that the Arpaio pardon was a precursor to the white nationalist-tinged January 6 attack on the Capitol.
The Post’s account is not without its dark amusements. The efforts by Trump defenders to spin his dubious pardons as acts of righteous justice are particularly laughable. When former White House press secretary Sean Spicer says Trump was “‘very personally’ moved by the ex-sheriff’s legal troubles,” and that “the president felt that [Arpaio] had been screwed over often in the media, as well, and so he felt that connection with him,” the glare of the former president’s narcissism, self-dealing, and circular logic are hard to ignore. Essentially, Donald Trump felt the urge to pardon people who had engaged in corrupt behavior like himself; the idea that he felt some sort of laudable emotional sympathy is absurd, and at any rate is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the president was primarily defending the principle that corrupt people besides himself should be able to do their corrupt thing without consequence.
Likewise, there’s grim humor, but also grim illumination, when former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein remarks to the Post, apropos of Trump’s wide deviation from Justice Department clemency procedures, that, “If you don’t enforce the department’s rules, you get arbitrary decisions and corruption. Under Trump, the clemency process certainly appeared arbitrary because people with the right connections were able to get clemency. And to avoid the appearance of corruption, it’s important that the rules be followed.” I think Rosenstein inadvertently gets us close to the heart of things here — Trump’s behavior was so openly corrupt that it constituted a sort of meta corruption, so that the president was not simply breaking the rules but demonstrating the powerless of anyone to stop him, and to render traditional notions of justice a dead letter. As in so much else that he and his accomplices did, the strategy was an open demeaning of our constitutional democracy in favor of an autocrat’s playbook.
Trump was acting out of a plutocrat’s playbook as well, as the “wealthy and well-connected brought clemency requests directly to the White House, jumping ahead of thousands of people who had filed formal petitions with the department’s pardon office and in some cases had been waiting for years.” Here, too, the theme of corruption that opens the floodgates to yet more corruption is evident, as “a cottage industry of lawyers and lobbyists selling access to the White House emerged” (needless to say, the purchase and sale of presidential pardons was probably not what the drafters of the Constitution were aiming for).
The prominent and less-prominent pardonees currently helping Trump to re-claim the White House — whether through insurrectionist incitement around a supposedly stolen 2020 election, through donations of money, or through other political agitation — constitute a truly remarkable assemblage of America’s worst. You might say they form a de facto League of Extraordinary Rogues who seem to revel in their own crapitude and lack of repentance. For me — and this is really just a question of personal taste, other choices in this matter are equally valid! — the biggest all-around sad sacks are the execrable (if inimitable) former Illinois Governor Rod “I’ve got this thing and it’s [f’ing] golden” Blagojevich (who obsequiously labels himself a loyal “Trumpocrat”) and dim-bulb Big Lie propagandist Dinesh D’Souza. You might almost be tempted to pity them for their moral emptiness — until you recall their devotion to a man who still aims to replace American democracy with a lawless state of retribution, racism, and self-aggrandizement. Many of them profess that the American justice system is unfair, and point to this alleged fact to justify their pardons, but you only need to scratch below the surface to realize that what they view as unfair is in fact the very existence of the justice system in the first place.
I started off by noting how Trumps’s pardons never received their due attention, let alone comeuppance, given his multi-faceted assault on the law and decency. But I do think some attention to this strand of corruption is warranted as 2024 nears and Trump appears to be on a glide path to the Republican presidential nomination — not so much for the clemencies already granted, as offensive as those are, but as a warning for the pardons sure to come should he regain office. I am thinking in the first place of his suggestion that he would pardon the January 6 insurrectionists — a treasonous action that his earlier pardons suggest he is all too capable of carrying out. If those he has pardoned to date constitute a League of Extraordinary Rogues, then the insurrectionist army currently behind bars and awaiting trial constitutes — well, an actual insurrectionist army. Such mass clemency would signal an armed and dangerous open season on American life and government — a green light to far-right militias, white nationalists, and their fellow travelers that violent intimidation, insurrection, and even assassination would all find forgiveness from the chief executive. There are many paths to taking on Trump, but his plans to empty the jails of degenerate criminals who hate America seems like a pretty powerful thing to talk about.