HOW DOES A POLITICAL PARTY get comfortable with
the use of violence? How does a constitutional democracy drift toward
authoritarianism? The answers are right in front of us. It’s happening
in the United States.
On Monday, his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump ordered an end
to the incarceration or prosecution of anyone involved in the January
6th insurrection. He granted commutations, with instructions for instant
release, to fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy or other
crimes related to orchestrating the attack. He also issued “a full,
complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of
offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States
Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Hundreds of people
had pleaded guilty to, or had been convicted of, assaulting police
officers in the attack. Many of their crimes were recorded on video.
Trump pardoned them all.
This wasn’t what Republican leaders had expected. In the week before
Trump took office, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Vice President-elect
JD Vance had signaled that the pardons wouldn’t extend
to those who committed violent crimes. So when Trump crossed that line,
congressional Republicans had to decide whether to join him.
With few exceptions, they have.
This is a significant moment in the transformation of our country.
The party that controls the presidency and both houses of
Congress—emboldened by a Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority
that has granted Trump broad immunity from prosecution—is exempting its supporters from accountability for political violence, including assaults against police.
How have Republicans rationalized crossing this line? Let’s examine some of their excuses.
1. I support whatever Trump does.
“It’s the president’s sole decision,” Johnson declared on Tuesday. “And he made a decision, so I stand with him on it.”
That’s the authoritarian spirit. No matter what the leader does, his allies fall in line.
2. The pardons show Trump is a man of his word.
“He talked about that during the campaign,” Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, told reporters
when they asked about Trump’s pardons for people who assaulted police.
“President Trump is a man of his word. He’s going to follow through on
his commitments.”
This, too, is the language of autocracy. The moral content of the
leader’s threat or act is irrelevant. What matters is that he deserves
praise for following through on his threats.
3. This is what the people voted for.
In a CNN interview on Wednesday, Senator Markwayne Mullin noted
that during the 2024 campaign, Trump “did not hide that he was going to
pardon January 6th individuals.” By electing Trump, Mullin argued, Americans gave Trump a mandate to do just that: “The American people [on] November 5th chose to move on past January 6th.”
This is the easiest way to unravel a constitutional democracy: You
turn democracy against the constitution, by claiming that an election
gave the winner a mandate to suspend or ignore laws. In reality,
Americans gave Trump no such mandate. Multiple polls have found that they oppose pardons for people convicted of violent crimes on January 6th.
4. The real villain is the FBI.
This is one of Trump’s favorite fictions: that the January 6th
convicts are “hostages” of “weaponized” law enforcement agencies. Many
congressional Republicans have joined him in peddling this lie.
“I support the president’s decision” on the pardons, Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, declared
Wednesday on CNN. Comer explained, “There’s a significant percentage of
Americans, especially conservative Americans, that believe that many of
those rioters were enticed by undercover FBI agents and people within
the FBI. The FBI has not been forthcoming.”
This smear against the FBI has been thoroughly debunked.
But that hasn’t stopped Comer and his colleagues from using it to
whitewash the insurrection and justify the pardons. They’re doing what
propagandists do in autocratic regimes: spreading conspiracy theories to
rewrite history.
5. The real scofflaw is Joe Biden.
This is the most common Republican rejoinder to questions about Trump’s pardons. “Biden opened the door on this,” said
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, blaming the outgoing president for
his last-minute grants of clemency. That’s not true: Trump began talking
about his January 6th pardons more than two years before Biden’s late burst of pardons and commutations.
Many Republicans suggested that Biden’s pardons were worse than Trump’s. Senator Susan Collins claimed
that Biden gave “a pardon to an individual who killed two FBI agents,”
referring to American Indian activist Leonard Peltier. Mullin accused Biden of pardoning cop killers and other violent offenders.
This is standard whataboutism. It’s also false. None of Biden’s
last-minute pardons were for violent crimes. Most of them weren’t even
for crimes. They were preemptive, to protect people who had been
threatened with prosecution by Trump and other Republicans for nonexistent crimes.
Peltier, who was convicted of killing two FBI agents fifty years ago,
got a commutation, not a pardon. For Biden, this distinction was
important. He commuted the sentences of some violent offenders, giving life-in-prison sentences to nearly all federal death row inmates. (Peltier, who is now 80 years old, had a life sentence, the remainder of which he will now serve in home confinement.) But Biden consistently refused to pardon
people convicted of violent crimes. The only such pardon he issued was
to a woman who shot her husband nearly fifty years ago, allegedly in self-defense, for beating her when she was pregnant.
Trump has rejected Biden’s distinction. He has given pardons, not
commutations, to nearly all the violent criminals of January 6th. This
is wholly unprecedented.
6. God has cleansed the assailants.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Johnson was asked about the pardons for rioters who assaulted police. He defended them, explaining, “It’s kind of my ethos, my worldview. We believe in redemption. We believe in second chances.”
Johnson’s ethos lasted less than a minute. As he continued speaking,
he called Biden’s pardons “disgusting” and made the case for deporting
“illegal aliens who are criminals.” Johnson doesn’t believe in second
chances. He believes in selective legal immunity for Trumpists.
Johnson’s invocation of the Christian doctrine of redemption is a
sham. Real redemption requires repentance, and most of the January 6th
assailants haven’t repented. But Johnson doesn’t fuss about that. He’s
just using religion as a political shield for Trump.
7. It’s not my department.
Every authoritarian regime needs cowards who look the other way. The
GOP is full of such people. “The president’s made his decision. I don’t
second-guess those,” Johnson told reporters at his press conference. When Senator John Cornyn was asked about the pardons for violent offenders, he responded: “That’s not the question. The question is who has the authority. And the president has the authority.”
Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has his own version of this
evasion. “I’m not going to engage in domestic political debates,” he stipulated when he was asked about the pardons on NBC’s Today
show. “My job is to focus on the president’s foreign policy.” Imagine
how Rubio will be received when he urges other countries,
hypocritically, to respect the rule of law.
8. I didn’t see what happened.
Many Republicans, such as Senators Ron Johnson and Rick Scott, ducked questions about the pardons by pleading that they hadn’t yet studied the “details” of each case. Senator Tommy Tuberville, after boasting that Trump was absolutely right to “pardon everyone,”
refused to back down when reporters cited specific assailants who had
beaten police with weapons. “I don’t believe it, because I didn’t see
it,” Tuberville told them.
This see-no-evil farce culminated on Wednesday, when Congressman Tim
Burchett questioned whether the people pardoned by Trump were “truly
violent.”
“I don’t know that,” Burchett insisted during a CNN interview as video of the assault played on the screen. At that point, CNN’s Jim Acosta interjected: “What do you mean, you don’t know? We’re showing the footage on the air right now.”
9. I’m not a lawyer.
Pleading ignorance of the facts, when the facts are right there on
video, might not work forever. So Republicans have devised a backup
dodge: pleading ignorance of the law. When Acosta pressed Burchett about
whether it was right to release the violent January 6th offenders,
Burchett shrugged, “I don’t know if it is or not. I’m not a lawyer.”
This is a variant of the Republican shtick that medical or
environmental questions can’t be answered because “I’m not a doctor” or
“I’m not a scientist.” In this case, it’s a pretext to ignore obvious
lawbreaking.
10. Let’s not dwell on the past.
“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Thune told reporters when he was asked about the pardons. Johnson used the same line, word for word.
Senator Kevin Cramer went further, depicting the pardons as a cleansing
act. “For the greater good, he did it to move forward,” Cramer said of Trump. He suggested that Trump’s pardons, paired with Biden’s, could “get us to a fresh start.”
In countries where grave crimes were committed, such as South Africa,
the idea of seeking a fresh start is understandable. But that requires confession and repentance. It also requires forgiveness, which can be granted only by the victims.
A regime that regains power, admits nothing, whitewashes its crimes,
and pardons its thugs isn’t healing the past. It’s laying the groundwork
for more crimes.
AMERICANS LIKE TO THINK there’s something special about our country
that keeps us free. But that freedom is guaranteed only on paper. All it
takes to dismantle our constitutional system and our liberties is one
bully and a party full of cowards. The cowards can find excuses to do whatever the bully wants, including the suspension of laws.
There’s no sudden epiphany. You don’t wake up one day and discover that you’re living in an authoritarian state. You get there one step at a time. This week, we took a big step.
Here they come, back to a street near you.
