Pardon Me

Stranger Than Fiction

The story could inspire a big-budget Hollywood political thriller. A cocaine kingpin – the corrupt president of a foreign country, no less – is convicted and jailed in the United States. But behind the scenes, right-wing tech billionaires persuade an equally corrupt American president to pardon the foreigner. In a violent side-story, the US president proudly orders illegal, lethal military attacks that kill scores of impoverished Venezuelan fishing villagers (some of whom may be small-scale traffickers) whose coke isn’t even destined for our shores and whose possible crimes pale in comparison with the kingpin’s.

In the hypothetical Hollywood version of this story, the truth comes out, the former president goes back to prison and his American counterpart resigns in shame.

In 2025, however, there is no shame and reality is stranger than fiction. Donald Trump publicly boasted of his planed pardon for former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández before then granting it. Lost in the swirl of Trump’s other transgressions, the story disappeared from the headlines soon after first surfacing.

The element of the hypothetical Hollywood version that hasn’t yet been proven in real life is the tech billionaires’ involvement. But, as reported in Mother Jones magazine,  their backing for both Trump and VP JD Vance on the one hand and their proposed, Hernandez-backed state-within-a-state in Honduras on the other surely looks suspicious.

Even though in normal times such a story would be the stuff of massive scandal, it’s now business as usual when it comes to Trump’s pardons (not to mention so much else). And given that we’re now almost a decade into Trump’s reign of political terror, we must ask what’s normal anymore.

But Wait! There’s Much More…

As horrid as it is, the Hernandez story is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Trump’s abuse of the presidential pardon power. It’s true that certain of his predecessors have also milked that constitutionally granted capacity for personal or political benefit. Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of disgraced financier Marc Rich, apparently in return for donations to the Clinton Library and the Democratic Party, is a case in point. But neither Clinton nor anyone else comes close to the breadth and depth of what Trump has done.

Trump established his exploitation of pardons at the very start of his presidency. As summarized by an excellent post by attorney Kim Wehle at The Unpopulist site, “One of his first acts on returning to office was to issue pardons to hundreds of rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, including those who had viciously assaulted police officers.”  As Wehle further explains:

“It should be no surprise that some of these rioters, having been pardoned for one act of political violence, keep on plotting new acts of political violence. In February, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was arrested at the Capitol (again) for assaulting a protester. In July, Edward Kelley, who was “the fourth person to unlawfully enter the Capitol building at the forefront of the mob” and attack an officer, was convicted for a new plot to assassinate “36 individual federal, state, and local law enforcement personnel” whom he blamed for his arrest on the Capitol riot charges. Christopher Moynihan was arrested in October for planning to assassinate House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.”

In an equally valuable post at the same site, author Robert Tracinski summarizes  some of Trump’s many egregious 2025 pardons:

“…from a corrupt sheriff convicted in a “cash for badges” scheme, to disgraced former Congressman George Santos, who may have diverted election funds to support his lavish lifestyle but “was 100% for Trump,” to the healthcare fraud conviction of the husband of Republican Congresswoman Diana Harshbarger, a Trump ally…

“Trump pardoned an executive convicted of tax fraud after the executive’s mother gave $1 million at a Trump fundraiser. The judge who sentenced him said: “there is not a ‘get out of jail free’ card for the rich.” Under Trump, there is…

“In October, he pardoned cryptocurrency fraudster Changpeng Zhao after Zhao’s company, Binance, made a deal to boost World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto venture.”

Legitimizing the Rule of Lawlessness

Ironically, however, the most significant pardon we’ve seen recently has not been issued by Trump, but in effect  for Trump, by the Supreme Court. Though not literally a pardon, Wehle addresses the Court’s action quite well:

“Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s unconscionable [2024] decision in Trump v. United States, the so-called immunity ruling that essentially sanctioned American presidents using official power to commit crimes without any penalty, the legal perversions coming out of the White House have been legion. So far, Donald Trump’s actions, along with the Supreme Court’s endorsement of them, have effectively kneecapped the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, the Appointments, Spending, and Emoluments Clauses, the 14th Amendment’s ban on holding office after having engaged in insurrection, Article I’s vesting of legislative power in Congress, and Congress’s power to lay and collect tariffs. Trump is acting this way because he no longer has any incentive not to.

“In that immunity ruling, a 6-3 majority held that the exercise of “core” powers under Article II of the Constitution is absolutely immune from legal oversight, even if used criminally, and that lesser “official actions” are presumptively immune unless prosecutors can show that criminally confining a presidential act would pose no “dangers on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.”

In other words, this was Trump’s own get-out-of-jail-free card, including for corruptly influenced pardons since they’re within the presidency’s “core” powers.

We’re accustomed to thinking that no one is above the law, at least in principle and hopefully in fact. The Supreme Court decided the opposite.

Of course, the immediate and history-shattering  benefit of the Court’s egregious ruling wasn’t for President Trump in 2025 but for Indicted Trump in 2024: the decision so delayed and constrained Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election that Smith dropped the charges after Trump’s 2024 electoral victory.

A Larger Problem

An even larger problem we face, however, isn’t Trump’s legal transgressions but the fact that they apparently don’t dent his political and moral standing for large parts of the public. Yes, his approval numbers are dropping to about 40 percent  or less in most surveys. And yes, the prospects of his suffering more political reversals are rising. This is evinced by everything from far-right-wing Majorie Taylor Greene’s declarations of independence to the Democrats’ increasing prospects for retaking the House of Representatives next year to  the possibility of yet more sordid Jeffery Epstein revelations soiling Trump’s brand even among supporters.

But whatever happened to someone simply paying a penalty for  cheating and lying, not least by blatantly exploiting a presidential power to pardon political and financial allies? Like so many of Trump’s disruptions, this is all going on in plain sight and is in effect pardoned, so to speak, by much of the public.

And while we certainly can understand folks prioritizing the damages he’s doing to our pocketbooks in assessing him, it doesn’t seem like his consistently egregious self-dealing makes much  of a difference in his standing. It’s just another day at the Oval Office.

So, with great respect for everyone who’s fighting for democracy, national security and the rule of law, or who dread the crisis even as they simply try to get by during these tough times, certain words may sum up how history will judge many other Americans who condone or endorse what Trump is doing:

Really regrettable.

Perhaps understandable.

Or, just maybe, unpardonable.