Pardon The Death Of Liberal DemocracyPulling on the thread of the absolute pardon power, Trump is wrecking the rule of law.
“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:
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. (Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a pod convo with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on Biden’s decline and the cover-up; listener dissent over the Bill Buckley pod; reader dissent over Trump’s assault on Harvard; nine notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award for Elon Musk; 20 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of synchronized indoor skydiving; a window from bustling London; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!) A lovely note from a paid subscriber:
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.  Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Chris Matthews — who just revived “Hardball” on Substack, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture, and Johann Hari coming back to kibbitz for his fourth appearance on the pod. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. I joined another pod this week — Josh Szeps’ “Uncomfortable Conversations” — to talk about the history of the marriage movement and today’s transqueer craziness. Here’s a free preview of the first third of the episode:  Subscribe to Josh’s substack for the whole thing. Speaking of Strayans, our recent episode with Claire Lehmann just got this comment:
Dissents Of The Week: Make Harvard American AgainA reader responds to last week’s column:
I really don’t see this as either/or. But point taken. Read more dissents here and on the pod page, and please keep them coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. You can follow more Dish debate in my Notes feed. A reader flags a typo we corrected right after publishing last week:
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Pardon The Death Of Liberal Democracy
May 30, 2025
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