President Trump was so very wrong to grant clemency to every convicted criminal who sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in pursuit of his incendiary lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The horrific violence of that day was all about Trump, who ignited the fire, but each person who followed him and then broke the law bears their own responsibility. His presidential pardons and commutations for his loyalists unjustly lifts that responsibility.
Without Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat by Joe Biden, losing six of the seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), there would have been no march on the Capitol and no riot. No barriers would have breached. No windows would have smashed. No doors forced open.
The hallways of the seat of government would not have trashed and desecrated with human waste. Police officers would not have been assaulted with fists and makeshift weapons. The House and Senate chambers would not have been invaded. The vice president would not have been threatened with a hanging. The Congress would not have fled and the certification of Biden’s victory would not have been delayed.
But all of that did happen and the nation watched it on live television, including Trump, who sat in the White House, viewing his handiwork, as his aides begged him to call off his mob.
Most of the 1,600 or so being pardoned were charged with misdemeanors, such as entering a closed area of the Capitol grounds or walking into the Capitol building. Maybe those were the “grandmothers” and the “tourists.” But Trump didn’t stop there. He also wiped clean the records of hundreds of offenders who committed felonies, including acts of violence against police officers.
Men sentenced to long prison terms for pummeling cops are being freed. Is this “Back the Blue?” Also freed are the leaders of the conspiracy, from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. And the ongoing prosecutions by the Justice Department are being dropped.
None of this is a surprise, as Trump campaigned on what called the “J-6 hostages.”
Trump’s unAmerican clemency has the practical effect of springing duly convicted rioters from prison or other conditions like supervision, or keeping them out in the cases that are ongoing and which will now never get to their conclusions.
This is in itself a real public hazard for obvious reasons: many of these people are dangerous and have shown themselves willing and able to engage in political violence up to and including the invasion of the Capitol building, brutal and sometimes fatal assaults on police and a desire to engage in political assassinations.
Trump’s clemency isn’t just a legal act but an effort to recast one of the bleakest days in American democracy and his role in making it happen. He still insists he won and that Jan. 6 was some sort of righteous effort to uphold — not subvert — democracy. This is a dangerous path he is leading us down, a path where anything that serves his quest for power is right and anything that runs against that is wrong.
No president, including Trump, can have their own force of extralegal activists, ready to take action. The pardons can’t be undone, but they must not be forgotten.
