Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy

Pulling on the thread of the absolute pardon power, Trump is wrecking the rule of law.

Supporters of Donald Trump inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. (Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

“No MAGA left behind” was how Ed Martin, the failed nominee for DC US attorney, explained the presidential pardon. It was for a corrupt Virginia sheriff, Scott Jenkins, who received $75,000 in bribes in return for appointing several unqualified cronies, including one felon, as auxiliary deputy sheriffs. It took a rural Virginia jury two hours to convict him, and when you read about the trial, you can see why. At one point, on an FBI wire, Jenkins is reminding a convicted criminal how valuable his bogus sheriff appointment would be:

You got a felony record, you got a clean record and can carry a firearm, and we followed it up by swearing you in. Name another sheriff in the State of Virginia that would do that.

Hard to wriggle out of that one, innit? Jenkins ran the “cash-for-badges” scheme from 2019 to 2023, depositing the money in his personal accounts; his sentence was well within the guidelines; and he has expressed zero remorse. So why the pardon? Jenkins is a Trump loyalist and a Second Amendment enthusiast, and some MAGAites lobbied the president. And that, apparently, is now the standard for getting away with rank corruption.

I suppose you can say that at least Trump is not a hypocrite. Fathomlessly corrupt himself, he has been particularly assiduous in pardoning his fellow white-collar criminals.

Just in the past month, he gave a pardon to a former Connecticut governor who pled guilty to honest services fraud, mail fraud, and tax fraud; to a nursing home exec who pled guilty to tax crimes; to reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, for bank fraud, wire fraud, and tax dodging; to a former Staten Island congressman, for tax fraud; to a former Detroit mayor, for fraud and racketeering; to a labor union leader who took gifts up to $315,000 and didn’t report them; to a federal judge in Missouri, for Medicaid fraud; to a former member of the Cincinnati City Council, for bribery; and to a Nevada pol who embezzled the money raised for a statue honoring a murdered police officer and spent it on plastic surgery. Then there’s the infamous former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell a Senate seat.

Trump can empathize, of course. His own company was convicted of tax fraud, and he tried to steal an election. There is nothing in the presidency he wouldn’t monetize — as his latest $1 million-a-plate crypto dinner and the Qatari 747 prove beyond any doubt. He and his family are now, and always have been, emphatically for sale; and he regards any other approach to life as stupid. But it’s also striking how the huge majority of his pardons have been for Trump-supporting Republicans. Even Blagojevich calls himself a Trumpocrat. Fraud is fine and pardonable — if you like and support Trump. It’s the only criterion that matters.

The foulest by far was his pardon of all the participants who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power by mob violence. This mega-pardon of more than 1,500 people, at the very beginning of his second term, was not a validation of fraud, but an actual presidential endorsement of political violence. The pardon process used to be painstaking, methodical, and careful. Trump made the J6 decision with the words: “Fuck it: Release ’em all!” His open mulling over whether to pardon the conspirators to assassinate governor Gretchen Whitmer adds a touch of specific menace.

The concept of a pardon, of course, is extremely hard for Trump to understand. Traditionally, a pardon is due to someone who has completed (or nearly completed) their sentence, expressed remorse, and turned their life around — and thereby been the recipient of mercy. But remorse is a concept unknown to a pathological narcissist. Mercy is even stranger. After all, who wins and who loses in an act of mercy? It’s one of those acts defined by grace — another literally meaningless concept for Trump. For him, all human conduct is built on a zero-sum, winner-vs-loser foundation. So a pardon is always instrumental — a way to reward allies, win credits, and enlarge his power by announcing to the world that he alone is the ultimate rule of law, and can intervene at any point to ensure his version of justice is the dispositive one. A monarch, in other words.

Previous presidents have abused the pardon power for political cronies, of course. Andrew Jackson — perhaps the president most similar to Trump — doled them out to his political allies; and Andrew Johnson pardoned the Confederate leadership, including Jefferson Davis, dealing an early blow to Reconstruction. Clinton famously pardoned Marc Rich, his half-brother Roger, and his erstwhile business partner, Susan McDougal (who did Clinton a favor by not testifying in the Whitewater investigation).

But these ugly moves were often held back to the last minute — and Clinton paid a reputational price immediately. Truman did a few dodgy ones at the end — but kept them entirely secret, because, unlike Trump, he understood that the corruption of justice is corrosive in a republic. Biden is easily the worst apart from Trump — pardoning his own criminal son, Hunter, and the rest of his shady, on-the-take family members. Ford, of course, pardoned Nixon. It may be why he lost the 1976 election.

But Trump is the real outlier (and Biden, in his defense, used Trump’s abuse as a justification for his own self-dealing). In recent times he’s out in front in numbers: more than 1,700 full pardons so far, and we have three-and-a-half years to go. Nixon’s 863, Carter’s 574, Clinton’s 396, W’s 189, and Obama’s 212 put it in perspective. But these previous presidents abused the power occasionally — it’s an absolute power after all — while largely respecting the contours of the rule of law.

Trump has dispensed with any pretense of that. He is an instinctual tyrant — see his immigration overreach and his unilateral tariff mania — and the pardon power was almost made for him. The weakness of any constitution is the virtue — or, more often, the lack of it — in its office-holders. And Trump has the civic virtue of Jeffrey Epstein. The pardon power was always going to be a loaded gun in his tiny, careless hands.

A Schmittian without ever reading Carl Schmitt, Trump sees the rule of law as largely meaningless. There is only friend and enemy, and there can be no neutrality between them. The rule of law is to reward friends and punish enemies: what else could it be? If the law is applied to Trump, it can only be because someone in power has decided to hurt him. So the entire “weaponization of justice” is not something he is opposed to; it’s the only justice he can ever understand and the only justice he can administer.

So of course, he is using the pardon power all the time, rather than waiting till the end of his term. It replaces the rule of law with monarchical discretion. That’s why he could not tolerate Jeff Sessions all those years ago. Because Sessions, for all his passionate partisanship, still understood the system he was operating in and still believed that the appearance of impartial justice was integral to liberal democracy’s survival. Sessions was an American.

The core reason Trump is an existential threat to liberal democracy is because he literally cannot understand this. I don’t even think he is that cynical about it. He honestly believes that people on his side can only be prosecuted out of political malice, and that people on the other side are always guilty. A judge who rules in his favor is wise; a judge who rules against him is ipso facto corrupt. And his wily capacity to wriggle free of the many impeachable offenses he committed in office, and legal accountability thereafter, has only deepened this belief.

A majority of the American electorate, mind you, endorsed this lawlessness last November. It’s hard to pity them, as they absorb or ignore all the corruption they voted for and are still content to tolerate. They love crypto-monarchy as long as their king is on the throne. They do not seem to understand that this version of monarchy is still an elected one, and that another king from the other tribe may wear the crown some day. They may miss the benefits of liberal democracy once they have succeeded in killing it.

New On The Dishcast: Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson

Jake is the lead DC anchor and chief Washington correspondent for CNN, whose books include The Outpost, The Hellfire Club, and The Devil May Dance. Alex is a national political correspondent for Axios and a political analyst for CNN. They just published Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. We talk addiction, denial, ambition, and the malign influence of Jill Biden and Mike Donilon. I also tackle media complicity in the cover-up.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the deep dysfunction of the Biden family, and the blame that Jill deserves for concealing Joe’s decline. That link also takes you to a bunch of commentary on last week’s pod with Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, as well as reader dissents over my views on Trump’s assault on Harvard.

Money Quotes For The Week

“He’s killing a lot of people. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. What the hell happened to him?” – Donald Trump on Putin.

“Well, we are all going to die,” – Senator Joni Ernst, fielding constituent complaints about cuts to Medicaid and food stamps.

“From the Gaza Strip, we hear rising ever more insistently to the heavens, the cries of mothers and fathers who clutch the lifeless bodies of their children, and who are continually forced to move about in search of a little food and water and safer shelter from bombardments,” – Pope Leo XIV.

“Staggering: Trump lost 96% of federal court cases in May. Even GOP-appointed judges ruled against him 72% of the time,” – Jack Hopkins.

“Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don’t return to acting like a sane country. A sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set itself the aim of expelling populations,” – Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s Democrats and a former IDF deputy chief of staff.

“The Washington Post has now confirmed that it was Trump who asked the Qataris to gift him the plane for free (rather than the Qataris offering it), and that Qatar is demanding a written memo from the White House to this effect before the deal is finalized,” – Tom Malinowski.

“If you ever complained about Hunter Biden and are silent about this, you have no credibility. The Trump family is in talks to buy a stake in the US arm of Binance, whose founder served time in prison and is looking for a pardon,” – Richard Hanania.

“We’re a non-partisan news organization,” – Katherine Maher, NPR’s CEO.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit and undermines the work the DOGE team is doing. I think a bill could be big, or it could be beautiful — I don’t know if it can be both,” – Elon Musk.

The View From Your Window

London, England, 7.47 am

Dissents Of The Week: Make Harvard American Again

A reader responds to last week’s column:

I agree that Trump is trying to destroy Harvard, not reform it. The question is whether it’s capable of being reformed. (You couldn’t do it, and Buckley couldn’t do it at Yale.) Can’t you understand that even the most tepid “reforms” would be greeted with hysterical cries about “existential threats” from the left?

Harvard needs to be broken, full stop. The Supreme Court rules on affirmative action and then Harvard thumbs its nose? What incredible, almost unbelievable hubris. Harvard is effectively declaring itself untouchable — a sovereign entity within the racist old U.S. of A. If Trump humbles them just a little bit, the spectacle will have been worth it.

Another backer of Trump’s efforts:

The American taxpayer gives significant amounts of money to Harvard — both directly and via its tax-exempt status. I find it outrageous that 25 percent of the Harvard student body is foreign. There are many qualified American kids who would love to go there, but it’s now almost impossible for them to get in there or any other Ivy League school. These are our schools; we fund them; and foreign students should be restricted to 5 or 10 percent at most.

I realize this isn’t Trump’s stated reason, but I can’t help but take a great deal of satisfaction in his move. Our elite schools need to reconnect with the American people, and it would be a good start to let more of our kids in again. (And yes, I recently went through a stressful college hunt for my kids, so I am bitter as hell.)

I really don’t see this as either/or. But point taken. More dissent along those lines:

I was startled by the fact that at least 25% of Harvard’s student population are from foreign countries. (I was expecting 5-10%.) In the NYT this morning, its reporters provided a list of our top universities with high percentages of foreign students (apparently because they pay full tuition freight to attend). To name a few: Carnegie Mellon (44%), John Hopkins (39%), MIT (30%), and Caltech (32%).

I find these high percentages deeply disturbing, because our elite institutions should be focused on teaching the best and brightest American citizens. In my neck of the woods, we have two high schools that are consistently rated in the top 50% nationally. I know two students who excelled academically in science and math but were denied admission to top schools. It seems that catering to wealthy foreign students might have had something to do with the denial of admission.

One more dissent:

Great column on the crisis at Harvard. Just one small criticism: calling out Kristi Noem’s lack of academic bona fides was a low blow. You wrote that she received her degree from South Dakota State at age 41. In her twenties, she left college in her senior year to take over the family farm after her father was killed in a farming-machinery accident. It’s the one admirable thing I discovered about an otherwise cruel and feckless human being.

Read several more dissents on the pod page, and please keep them coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. A reader flags a typo we corrected right after publishing last week:

“Ross Douthat’s emergence as a pubic intellectual.” Freudian slip?

It happens every now and again. Leave Ross alone!

Mental Health Break

Synchronized indoor skydiving is a thing — and a beautiful one:

In The ‘Stacks

• Noah Smith tackles Trump’s block on visas for all international students.
• Even the most popular bill in the Senate — to sanction Russia — is stymied by the Trump cult.
• Looking under the hood of the car tariffs.
• Dr. Joseph Marine summarizes the new MAHA report — “a seismic shift in US health policy.”
• The Trumpian crusade against Obamacare continues under the radar.
• Some actual good news: overdose deaths have plummeted, and polar bears have rebounded. Is Antarctica actually gaining ice?
• More good news: the FDA commissioner says psychedelics are a “top priority.”
• As Elon exits DOGE, he returns to his broken promises of making Teslas “Full Self Driving.”
• Sam Kahn urges civil servants to stand their ground against DOGE’s continued threats and bumbling.
• Eli Lake explains why Michael Anton is “MAGA’s Machiavelli.”
• Louis Pisano lampoons the hypocrisy of the Bezos mega-yacht.
• Mark Halperin and Aishah Hasnie talk to Ben Domenech about the “Democrats’ Toxic Anti-Masculinity Problem.”
• Aaron Kimberly reveals “what the data on trans offenders really show” when it comes to violence.
• Freddie DeBoer calls the woke cynicism over cross-racial adoption “a kind of blood & soil approach towards family.”
• Noah Millman remembers Alasdair MacIntyre, who just died at 96.
• Politicians, including Rahm Emanuel, have flocked to Substack. Will the platform displace Twitter/X?

The View From Your Window Contest

Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you next Friday.

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