Just hours after his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump kept his worst campaign promise: The Republican, taking a needlessly maximalist approach, issued roughly 1,500 pardons and commuted the sentences of 14 Jan. 6 criminals, including violent felons who clashed with police officers.
Pressed a day later for some kind of justification for putting violent criminals back on American streets, the new president falsely claimed that they’d been “treated unbelievably poorly,” adding that as far as he’s concerned, “[M]urderers don’t even go to jail in this country.”
To the extent that reality still has meaning, Trump’s defense fell far short. For one thing, murderers are, in fact, routinely incarcerated in the United States. For another, his pitch wasn’t as persuasive as he might’ve hoped: The Republican’s line was rooted in the idea that if murderers go free, there’s no harm in letting other violent felons go free, too.
Is that a message that will help voters, some of whom were persuaded by Candidate Trump’s “law and order” message, feel safer?
But stepping back, the question wasn’t what Trump was going to say about his own abuse of his pardon power. It was obvious that the president was going to concoct some kind of absurd rationalization. The more salient question was what congressional Republicans would say. As The New York Times reported, most GOP lawmakers struggled to defend the indefensible.
Members of Congress ran in fear of their lives from the Capitol four years ago as it was besieged by a pro-Trump mob, and many Republicans made strong statements in the immediate aftermath of the attack that violent rioters must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But on Tuesday, few spoke up to object to Mr. Trump’s pardons, and many Republican lawmakers said it was time to move on.
It might seem like ancient history, but when Trump first started pushing the idea of Jan. 6 pardons in the fall of 2022 — before he formally launched his bid for a second term — there was some meaningful GOP pushback against the proposal, which seemed quite radical at the time.
But in the months and years that followed, as Trump’s stranglehold over Republicans intensified, and the GOP at the institutional level became more pitiful, it became inevitable that most party leaders and officials would simply go along with their party’s president’s abuses.
To be sure, there were exceptions, and Republicans who had the wherewithal to publicly disagree with the Jan. 6 pardons will likely be applauded by history. But by any fair measure, they were outnumbered by their more cowardly partisan brethren.
My personal favorite was the reaction from Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who said the pardons were “absolutely justified,” only to add moments later that he hadn’t “seen the details” of the pardons.
But perhaps most notable of all were the GOP voices who tried to argue that the pardons were a thing of the past.
For example, Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, his party’s new Senate majority leader, said in response to questions about the pardons, “We’re looking at the future, not the past.” Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, similarly added, “I’m ready to move forward.”
But I’m reminded of William Faulkner’s line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
We’re not talking about events from generations ago. Trump pardoned politically aligned violent felons two days ago. These criminals are free right now. Their victims and the people who helped with their prosecutions are afraid today and will remain scared in the days, weeks, and months to follow. The emboldening effect on radicals and extremists is immediate.
The president’s willingness to abuse his pardon is a scandal, but just as importantly, it’s an ongoing scandal, which makes the weak Republican reactions that much more pathetic.
