The Dictatorship
Trump’s unprecedented Jan. 6 pardons send a clear message
Less than 24 hours after taking the presidential oath of office for a second time, Donald Trump made good on his promise to grant clemency to the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. With a stroke of his pen, he tried to turn insurrectionists into patriots and people who tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power into heroes.
On Monday, Trump pardoned about 1,500 Jan. 6 offenders and commuted the sentences of 14 people people convicted of crimes related to the insurrection. He did so over strenuous objections not only from Democrats, but also from people like U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger, who noted that his opposition “is not about any particular president.”
“What message does that send to police officers across this nation,” Manger asked, “if someone doesn’t think that a conviction for an assault or worse against a police officer is something that should be upheld?”
Trump’s pardons are unprecedented — but not because he is granting mercy to rebels. He is not the first or only American president to do so. Indeed, at the birth of the Republic, Alexander Hamilton foresaw just such a use of the pardon power. As Hamilton put it in Federalist 74:
In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterward to recall.
Federalist 74
Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists turns this vision on its head. As one of the first acts of his presidency, it certifies his view that we are two nations, not one. Instead of restoring “the tranquility of the commonwealth,” the pardons inflict a fresh wound even as they invite us all to relive a national trauma.
Contrast Trump’s pardons with those George Washington issued on Nov. 2, 1795. That day, he spared two men who were convicted of treason and sentenced to death for their part in the so-called Whiskey Rebellion.
One month later, in his seventh State of the Union address (a speech Hamilton helped to write), Washington explained why he had exercised the president’s clemency power. “It appears to me,” he said, “no less consistent with the public good than it is with my personal feelings to mingle in the operations of Government every degree of moderation and tenderness which the national justice, dignity, and safety may permit.”
The result, Washington claimed in an echo of Federalist 74, was that “the part of our country which was lately the scene of disorder and insurrection now enjoys the blessings of quiet and order.
On Dec. 25, 1868, another president showed mercy to rebels. Shortly before the end of his term, President Andrew Johnson pardoned all the Confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War. He took this action, he wroteto “renew and fully restore confidence and fraternal feeling among the whole, and their respect for and attachment to the national [e.g., federal] government, designed by its patriotic founders for the general good.”
Neither Washington nor Johnson made clemency a campaign issue. Not so Donald Trump.
Neither Washington nor Johnson denied the truth about the rebellions that occasioned their acts of mercy or diminished the seriousness of what those they pardoned had done. Not so Donald Trump. Just to pick one example, in 2022 he labeled the story of what happened on Jan. 6 “the insurrection hoax,” a “grotesquely false, fabricated, and hysterical partisan narrative” and “a lot of crap.”
In offering those pardons, neither Washington nor Johnson attacked the justice system or their political opponents. Not so Donald Trump. The president has said repeatedly that the radical left is using the events of Jan. 6 as a “pretext for their all-out war on free speech.” And he called the rioters “Americans who were denied due process and unfairly prosecuted by the weaponized Department of Justice.”
And neither Washington nor Johnson made clemency a campaign issue. Not so Donald Trump, who was the first person ever to make the promise of pardons a central part of their presidential campaign. In doing so, the president asked voters to endorse his revisionist view of what happened on Jan. 6.
Trump’s effort to erase the truth of what the “J6 warriors” did from the legal record reflects a view of the pardon power that was much more common in the republic’s early days and in Andrew Johnson’s time than it is now. In an 1866 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Stephen J. Field wrote that a pardon “releases the punishment and blots out of existence the guilt, so that, in the eye of the law, the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offence. If granted … it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity.”
Field repeated that understanding six years later, this time writing for a unanimous court: A “pardon not merely releases the offender from the punishment prescribed for the offense … it obliterates in legal contemplation the offense itself.”
But unlike Trump, the 19th-century court still acknowledged that pardons cannot undo history. They do not and cannot “alter the actual fact” of what their recipients did to necessitate clemency.
As leaders of the advocacy group Public Citizen suggested earlier this month, “The incoming administration believes that their word trumps historical facts.” But much to his chagrin, even Trump cannot turn the pardon power into a tool to “alter the actual fact[s]” of Jan. 6.
There is one other way that Trump’s pardons depart from Hamilton’s view of the pardon power: the simple fact he did it on his first day. Pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists on Jan. 20 offers a startling preview of the president’s second-term governing philosophy. He did it not despite the hard feelings that would accompany that act but because of those hard feelings. The pardons send what Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, calls “‘a thundering message of permission’ for the use of violence for political gain and election denialism at home and overseas.”
With polls indicating sharp partisan divisions about the merits of clemency for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, the president’s action will divide, not unify. It will inflame divisions, not heal them. That possibility does not bode well for a country already on edge and divided into warring camps. Worse still, as The Washington Post reportsthere may be more to come: “Trump’s attorney general could also drop charges against the roughly 300 defendants still awaiting trial, some of whom have sought to postpone those proceedings until after the presidential inauguration.” But even if that does not come to pass, what Trump did on his first day in office has Alexander Hamilton rolling over in his grave.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.
President Donald Trump celebrating his 80th birthday with UFC fights on the White House lawn was classless enough. Then Josh Hokit was given a microphone. After the UFC fighter won his cage match at Trump’s flamboyant celebration Sunday night, Hokit, who spoke mostly in disturbingly trite rhymes after his win, managed to further degrade the event. At the conclusion of his post-fight interview with announcer, podcaster and manosphere extraordinaire Joe Rogan, the athlete declared,“Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”
Many in the crowd of thousands of UFC fans ate it up, and expecting anything less would require an exceptional level of delusion. Misogynoir and transphobia have been lobbed against Obama at least since 2008, when America elected her husband, Barack Obama, president.
Misogynoir and transphobia have been lobbed against Obama at least since 2008, when America elected her husband, Barack Obama, president.
Misogynoir was coined by academic Moya Bailey in 2008 to describe the intertwining of racism and misogyny that targets Black women. As pervasive as it is, it took 15 yearsfor Merriam-Webster to add the word to its dictionary. Even in writing this piece, each time I’ve typed the term, spell-check suggests I have made a typo.
While it’s tempting to categorize Hokit’s remark as random, it was fully on brand for the athlete. ESPN reported, “In his post-fight interview at UFC 324 in January, Hokit called WNBA star Brittney Griner ‘a man.’”
He’s the poster child for misogynoir.
But his statement was also characteristic of the machismo that drove the event itself. Trump’s entire political persona is crafted in the mold of a strongmanan archetype that couldn’t exist without toxic masculinity. And when he was elected to the presidency a second time, Trump brought back to the forefront an erroneous vision of manhood. Hokit, and a lamentable number of other public figures, have since been empowered to espouse misogyny and preach the shallow gospel of toxic masculinity.
But showmanshiprepressed emotionality and a desperate adherence to benighted notions of manhood alone don’t suffice. Toxic masculinity also requires an allegiance to the desirability politics that are often informed by white supremacy. And Hokit gave it a shoutout Sunday night.
If toxic masculinity is a declaration of what we are expected to perceive as a quintessential depiction of manhood, then completing that picture requires a similar declaration about what we are expected to perceive as a quintessential depiction of womanhood. As has historically been the case, the beauty of Black women, as a whole, doesn’t align with mainstream ideals of attractiveness. So a Trump supporter’s recycling of a racist trope about the first Black first lady being a man was a natural offshoot of Sunday’s glorification of problematic masculinity.
Obama addressed misogynoir-laden and transphobic insults, among others, that she has faced over the years in her 2018 book “Becoming.” She writes, “I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television, but still want a framed keepsake for their mantel. I’ve heard about the swampy parts of the internet that question everything about me, right down to whether I’m a woman or a man. A sitting U.S. congressman has made fun of my butt. I’ve been hurt. I’ve been furious. But mostly, I’ve tried to laugh this stuff off.”
I’ve been furious. But mostly, I’ve tried to laugh this stuff off.
michelle obama in her book “becoming”
Hokit thumping his chest after a violent brawl per the request of a strongman-in-chief, then deriding a high-profile Black female figure as masculine and thus, unappealing, was a true full-circle moment for the manosphere. Notice that Hokit didn’t do a full stop after he insulted Obama. He asked, “Am I right, America?”
At least that part made actual sense — Hokit’s instinct to seek validation is yet another manifestation of toxic masculinity. His question offered a boisterous representation of the need for male approval that exists in the manosphere and the willingness of problematic men to give one another an outsized influence on their behavior. It wasn’t enough for Hokit to disparage a prominent Black woman. He wanted someone to say, “Well done.”
As for his question, the answer is “no.” Hokit was the farthest from “right” as one gets. But the derision of Obama surely scored him brownie points in the manosphere. What better way to secure a nod of respect from the community than to denigrate, arguably, the most high-profile Black woman in the United States while at an event teeming with hypermasculinity?
But neither Obama nor any other woman, Black or otherwise, should have to bear the burden of men insulting them in a desperate quest to secure approbation from other men.
Hokit appears to be developing a habit of ascribing masculinity to Black women. He would be better served by questioning why his idea of manhood includes belittling women for applause.
Zahara Hill is a coordinating producer for MS NOW. She previously worked as a front page editor for HuffPost and the deputy editor for Blavity News.
President Donald Trump, with the support of Republicans in Congress, signed legislation last week funding federal immigration agencies through the end of his term. Americans should know how millions of their taxpayer dollars are being spent on the active destruction of their fellow human beings.
As part of my constitutional oversight responsibilities in Congress, I have visited Delaney Halla privately run detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, four times. From the first time I stepped into Delaney Hall, my worst fears were confirmed.
The smell of sewage permeated the building. The air felt stagnant, and I questioned whether there was adequate ventilation for detainees or staff.
What I witnessed with my own eyes was alarming enough. The smell of sewage permeated the building. The air felt stagnant, and I questioned whether there was adequate ventilation for detainees or staff. In the cafeteria, I saw a space that appeared far too small to accommodate the number of people being held. When I asked how hundreds of detainees were fed, I was told meals were served in waves beginning as early as 4 a.m.
Detainees described freezing temperatures, poor sanitation, spoiled food, isolation and being required to clean bathrooms and showers contaminated with urine and other biological waste without proper protective materials.
The most alarming thing I have witnessed, however, is the treatment — really, the lack of treatment — of people with serious and chronic medical conditions. I believe what I have witnessed at both Delaney Hall and the Elizabeth Detention Center amounts to nothing short of medical abuse.
While the Department of Homeland Security leadership may try to wave away accusations of inhumane treatment, they cannot wave away the effect of their medical negligence — nor should they be allowed to. Every time I have visited both the Delaney and Elizabeth detention centers, I encountered detainees whose health was deteriorating because of the actions overseen by DHS employees and contractors. Individuals with chronic health conditions were not monitored, critical medications are given sporadically or not at all and there is little to no continuity of care for the medically vulnerable.
Individuals with chronic health conditions were not monitored, critical medications are given sporadically or not at all, and there is little to no continuity of care for the medically vulnerable.
One woman detained with diabetes told me she was receiving only a fraction of the medication prescribed by her doctor. When I questioned medical staff, they confirmed her dosage had been reduced shortly after she entered detention without first contacting her pharmacy or physician. They also confirmed blood sugar readings consistent with poorly controlled diabetes.
I spoke with a man who suffered ongoing headaches and hearing loss after striking his head in a fall. He told me he feared seeking additional medical care because he had been warned he could be placed in isolation if sent to the hospital. When I raised the issue with facility leadership, they confirmed isolation was their policy.
Other detainees have described to me equally disturbing experiences, including a woman who said she suffered a miscarriage while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after being denied proper medical care when symptoms first appeared. Another pregnant woman told me she feared for the health of her unborn child because she could not obtain the specialized care her condition requires.
These were not isolated complaints. And together, they paint a picture of a detention system failing to provide adequate medical care to the people in its custody.
The Department of Homeland Security insists healthcare is available inside Delaney Hall. What I witnessed firsthand tells a different story. Detainees may have access to care, but they are not receiving the care that their conditions, diagnoses, doctors or even our own good conscience would warrant.
When I questioned Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about whether ICE tracks detainees with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease, whether those conditions are regularly monitored and whether independent health officials are allowed to inspect the facility, I did not receive answers. That lack of accountability should concern every American.
The consequences of these failures could be deadly. Severe hypoglycemia can become life-threatening within hours. Heart conditions can rapidly worsen without medication. Untreated infections can become medical emergencies, and the disruption of medication can have life-threatening consequences in the short and long run.
What makes this even more troubling is who is being detained.
Despite the administration’s rhetoric about targeting dangerous criminals, the people I met at Delaney Hall were overwhelmingly low-risk individuals being held for civil immigration violations, not criminal offenses. Some said they had legal status until this administration stripped it away. Others described being picked up off the street, or where they work, or at laundromats, schools and even outside courthouses or routine immigration appointments.
We cannot turn a blind eye to the conditions inside these facilities. Nor can we ignore the role of corporations such as the GEO Group, the company with an estimated $1 billion contract to operate Delaney Hall. Taxpayer dollars are being used to inflict profound human suffering, all too often condoned because those detained are viewed as “other.” To make matters worse, the $70 billion that Congress recently approved for ICE and Customs and Border Protection is in addition to $191 billion previously allocated to DHS with a party-line vote.
The least my Republican colleagues can do now is demand answers about what is happening inside facilities like Delaney Hall and hear firsthand from detainees about what they are experiencing. If they truly listen, they will be moved to action. I know I was.
Because the people I met at Delaney Hall are mothers, fathers, workers and neighbors. They are human beings. They deserve dignity, medical care and due process.
No matter where someone was born or what their immigration status may be, their humanity does not disappear when they enter a detention facility.
The measure of any nation is how it treats the people in its custody. By that standard, what is happening at Delaney Hall is a moral failure that extends far beyond its walls.
And when we allow due process, equal protection under the law and basic human rights to be denied to some, we weaken those protections for everyone. The Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it. We must seek to protect it, starting by closing Delaney Hall.
Analilia Mejia, a Democrat, represents New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District in the U.S. House.
Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Russia’s latest deadly attack in Ukraine: “A large-scale Russian attack on Ukraine killed five rescuers in Kharkiv and wounded at least 20 people in the capital Kyiv on Monday as strikes set apartment buildings ablaze and sparked a fire at one of the country’s most significant religious landmarks. The rescuers were killed in Kharkiv by a second Russian strike as they fought a blaze caused by an earlier attack, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said. At least five other emergency workers were wounded.”
* From late last week: “A joint strike by the United States and Venezuela killed a leader of the Tren de Aragua transnational gang, President Trump and officials in both countries said on Friday, dealing a blow to a syndicate the Trump administration has blamed for an influx of violent crime and illicit drugs.”
* The right way to do it: “Hungarian lawmakers on Monday passed a constitutional amendment that would ban Viktor Orbán from returning to power. The amendment, approved by 135 votes in favor and 50 against, would limit prime ministers to just eight years in office if it becomes law. The amendment is written to apply retroactively, meaning that Viktor Orbán could not return as Hungary’s prime minister. Orbán served as prime minister for a total of 20 years.”
* A case we have been keeping an eye on: “A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to reinstall exhibits and signs on topics like slavery and climate change that it had removed from parks and monuments nationwide because they ‘do not align with its preferred narrative.’”
* Trump’s Department of Justice does what Trump wants: “The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has signed off on Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. The approval, first reported by Blue Light News, clears a major regulatory hurdle for a deal that has become one of the most closely watched media merger reviews of the Trump era.”
* Failing to make America healthy again: “A relentless measles outbreak in Utah has been spreading for nearly a year, putting the U.S. on a path to losing the measles-elimination status it earned more than two decades ago. Fueling the nearly 12-month outbreak: more parents opting not to vaccinate their children for school; infections hitting communities statewide; and lenient public-health policies on quarantining exposed students.”
* McConnell’s health issues persist: “Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, was hospitalized on Sunday, according to his spokesperson, who provided no details on the former Senate majority leader’s condition.”
See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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