Does absolutely everything this guy does have to be pathetic and corrupt? And how does it take anyone on the planet more than two minutes to size up this gormless grifter? I can’t precisely remember the first time I heard Donald Trump’s voice, but I imagine the look on my face was about what you’d see if it started raining nonorganic goat placentas in Whole Foods.
Donald Trump has always been an evil clown—emphasis on both “evil” and “clown”—so of course he made a clumsy bid to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters in order to shield himself from legal peril. He came through for Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, after all. Why wouldn’t he do the same for his army of brown-nosing brownshirts? Indeed, long before this past weekend, when Trump floated pardons for his Jan. 6 shock troops, he asked his dopey advisers if he could issue a blanket pardon for MAGA Force while he was still ensconced in office.
Between Jan. 6 and Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump made three calls to one adviser to discuss the idea. “Do you think I should pardon them? Do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think I have the power to do it?” Trump told the person, who summarized their conversations.
Another adviser to the former president said Trump asked questions about how participants in the riot might be charged criminally, and how a uniform pardon could provide them protection going forward.
“Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol” who could be pardoned? Trump asked, according to that adviser. “He said, 'Some people think I should pardon them.' He thought if he could do it, these people would never have to testify or be deposed.”
It’s actually pretty surprising that Trump didn’t abuse his pardon powers even more at the tail end of his pr*sidency. I half expected him to pardon Bill Cosby in exchange for Lisa Bonet’s hotmail address and a Jell-O Pudding Pop. That said, it’s fair to say that Trump reacted to his pardon power the way a 6-year-old boy responds to getting a BB gun for Christmas—i.e., not at all responsibly.
Of course, at his Houston, Texas, superspreader rally over the weekend, Trump tantalized his horde with an offer of a pardon—but was sure to clarify that it won’t happen unless they make him president again: “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he said. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”
Yes, very, very unfairly. After all, Proud Boys will be Proud Boys. What can you do?
So why didn’t these pardons happen? Because not everyone in the federal government in early 2021 was a splenetic, know-nothing goofball like Donald Trump. As Politico notes, his plans to preemptively issue pardons “quickly hit a wall.” For one thing, no one knew who the FBI would ultimately charge, and for another, the White House counsel’s office was “forcefully” pushing back.
“There was a dangling threat that if he pushed too hard, [White House counsel Pat] Cipollone would leave,” one of Politico’s sources noted. Meanwhile, one House Jan. 6 committee member, Rep. Pete Aguilar, is saying that Trump’s weekend pardon offer “absolutely” counts as witness tampering.
“I think the question is more for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Where are they? Do they support this? When is enough enough?” the California Democrat told CNN. “When a mob is chanting, ‘Hang Mike Pence,’ it wasn’t enough. When the former president asked [Georgia Secretary of State] Brad Raffensperger to find him 11,000 votes, it wasn’t enough. Now, he’s dangling pardons, if he gets back in office, for individuals. Will that be enough? Or will there be more collective amnesia? I just don’t know where the floor is these days on that side of the aisle.”
Floor? There’s no floor, silly man. Republicans are bending over backward to disgrace themselves these days, and the only floor they recognize is the one they grovel on 24/7 to stay in the ocher abomination’s good graces.
Floor. Yeah right. Now that’s rich.
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