You’ve probably heard that cosplay Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been blowing up alleged drug running boats from Venezuela in extra-judicial killings that give new meaning to the phrase “war on drugs.”
But you might not have heard that his boss just pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for abusing his office by leading what prosecutors called “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
If the cognitive dissonance gives you whiplash, that’s because you’re paying attention.
For a guy who talks a lot about how much he hates drugs — and is now floating it as a pretext for knocking off the odious Maduro regime — Trump has developed a strange habit of giving pardons to drug dealers. A day after his latest inauguration, Trump pardoned the founder of the Silk Road website, which was notorious as a dark web drug den. This was followed by the strange commutation for the founder of the Gangster Disciples in Chicago, who flooded the Windy City with cocaine.
This weirdness is part of a wider pattern. Because Trump has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations this year — 10 times the number he pushed through in his entire first term.
The presidential pardon is written into the Constitution, but Trump is not aiming for mercy or addressing objective injustices, as the founders intended.
He is abusing the power to reward partisan political allies, enabling pay-for-pardon schemes, and attempting to decriminalize corruption.
Right out of the gate, Trump offered pardons to all the January 6 MAGA minions who attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. This list included violent individuals who assaulted police officers and those with criminal records. Last month, he added blanket pardons for the white-collar instigators and fake electors who advanced those election lies — including his lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell. The rule of law doesn’t apply to Trump loyalists.
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A boatload of connected big businessmen have also been getting presidential pardons. A former nursing home executive who was set to report to prison for tax crimes found himself off the hook after his mother attended a $1 million fundraiser for Trump that promised face-to-face access with the president. As The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reported, the curiously timed pardon spared Paul Walczak from “having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there ‘is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.’”
The judge spoke too soon. There are get-out-of-jail-free cards available to Trump supporters, for the right price.
The CEO of the failed EV Truck company Nikola, a Utah billionaire named Trevor Milton, received a full pardon after being convicted for defrauding investors. It was surely just a coincidence that Trevor Milton and his wife gave almost a million dollars each to a Trump-backing Super PAC less than a month before the 2024 election. That’s expensive but pardons are priceless.
More notorious is the case of billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, dubbed “crypto’s richest man,” who had previously pleaded guilty to money laundering that U.S. prosecutors said benefitted Hamas terrorists and Russian drug dealers. Zhao “rehabilitated” himself by helping to boost the Trump family’s crypto venture, which “raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year … far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually,” according to The Wall Street Journal. When Trump was asked about this shady pardon on 60 Minutes, he said he didn’t know who Zhao was.
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But perhaps the most consistent beneficiaries of Trump’s pardons and commutations have been corrupt politicians. This includes names associated with buffoonish corruption and fraud like George Santos, Rod Blagojevich, Michael Grimm, Duncan Hunter, and Duke Cunningham. It covers local elected Trump loyalists like Tennessee Statehouse Speaker Glenn Casada, who was convicted of fraud, and Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore, who was convicted of using money raised for a memorial to slain police officers on personal expenses. As of this week you can add to this list conservative Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, who was indicted by the Biden Justice Department for accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil company and a Mexican bank.
This list is exhausting but nowhere near exhaustive. Trump’s pardon-palooza is not just fueled by his own bitterness at being America’s first felon president, but also a desire for obsequious signs of fealty from the people he’s let off the hook. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s disastrous presidential immunity decision, there remains the specter of more pardons for anyone who puts loyalty to Trump ahead of loyalty to the Constitution.
There is a sickening rationalization creeping across our nation which says that sucking up to Donald Trump is just the cost of doing business in America at the moment. This decays the integrity of our democracy like acid.
When this insane era is over, we will need reforms that rein in the power of the executive, because many of the unwritten guardrails were rooted in a belief that virtue and character would be a self-corrective. The founders apparently did not anticipate an era in which shamelessness was considered a political superpower.
That’s why we need to pursue reforms to stop the abuse of the pardon power. A constitutional amendment is the biggest lift, though both parties have howled at past pardons from opposition presidents. Representative Steve Cohen has put forward an amendment that would “clarify and limit” presidential pardons, prohibiting self-pardons and pardons for actions that personally benefit the president or for crimes committed with a president. Sounds common sense enough even though the two-thirds threshold seems insurmountable in our stupid hyper-partisan era.
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A more achievable approach could be pursued through Congress, where a bill called the Abuse of Power Prevention Act would require that the Department of Justice and the president turn over details about the crimes and explain the pardon rationale to Congress, making it clear that the bribery statute applies to presidential pardons while also barring self-pardons. The website Just Security has a good write up about these options.
Trump’s pardon spree is a daily scandal that is deforming the norms of our democracy. But populist anger over corruption is historically one of the forces that takes down would-be autocrats. People understand that corruption is fundamentally unfair as long as they understand how it affects their lives. So as you take in this list, just remember this: The rich, connected, and powerful are getting out of jail free cards under President Trump.