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A
Day That Will Live In Infamy And an existential battle that we have to win
Trump’s blizzard of
executive orders in his first hours as president includes a dozen or more
dangerous edicts that bring us closer to an authoritarian state. Driven by
lies, propaganda, and pro-billionaire policies, they will come under heavy
fire in the courts, as a few already have. His brazen moves to revoke
enemies’ security clearances, manufacture an emergency to justify draconian
immigration measures, ignore Congress’s command with respect to TikTok, and
overturn the clear constitutional command of birthright citizenship, among
others, are a tsunami of outrages by a madman. In the coming days, I and many
colleagues will do all we can to painstakingly explain their
anti-constitutional, anti-rule-of-law, and anti-American character. But all of these moves
are swamped by the sweeping pardons that Trump extended to nearly all the
1,600 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a
murderous rampage whipped up by Trump to prevent the peaceful transfer of
power. As a former DOJ official, line prosecutor, and partisan of the rule of
law, I am loath to lump in this putrescence with the other assaults on
constitutional rule. They call out for an initial separate condemnation. The pardons are vile,
vicious, and despicable. They are the most flagrant show of disrespect and
tyranny toward the country by any president in our history. If they are not
strongly repudiated by history, it will mean that the country has been lost. In my paroxysm of
blue-sky posts in the wake of the news, I wrote, “I cannot think of a
remotely similar betrayal of country by a sitting president,” and served it
up as a question to our national historian laureate, Heather Cox Richardson.
She was good enough to reply quickly: “I got nothing. This is huge.” Trump’s outrages,
as I wrote yesterday, are invariably based on a lie. The pardons are based on
several big lies.
The first big lie was
his elaborate insistence that he won the 2016 election, which was rigged
against him. Jack Smith's report makes clear that the claim not only was
always laughable, but Trump knew it. Incredibly, he maintains it to this day:
the pardons are part of an overall mission to erase history that would be
poignant if it weren’t so dangerous. The second big lie is
Trump’s assault on the mammoth Department of Justice operation, the biggest
in its history, to bring over 1,500 of the marauders to justice. Trump’s
portrayal of the prosecutions as politicized—a trope that Pam Bondi picked up
on in her nomination hearing—is grievously wrong and insulting to the army of
career prosecutors at the DOJ who brought the offenders to justice while
safeguarding their constitutional rights. One reason, in fact, that Trump was
unable to cull out nonviolent offenders is that the department had already
given most of them a pass. It was an extraordinarily resource-intensive
operation, and an undeniably righteous one. After Vance and
Bondi’s pronouncements, it had seemed likely that Trump would pull back from
the more extravagant versions of his promises to pardon the marauders. It
would have been in character with Trump’s playbook of under-delivering and
declaring victory, as I expect he will try with the imperialist threats on
the Panama Canal. But he couldn’t resist the full embrace of the thugs who
came to his aid and the full rebuke of the people who sought to bring them to
justice. Trump’s action
delivers two middle fingers to the Department of Justice, raised higher than
Elon Musk’s already infamous Roman salute. (There’s another, more disgusting
image to call on, involving Trump’s doing to the country what one of his
now-pardoned patriots did to the floor of the U.S. Capitol.) That, in fact,
was part of the point. The third big lie was
his portrayal of the vicious marauders he had called into action as “heroes”
and “patriots.” In fact, they were thugs and domestic terrorists. It fell to
the judges of the D.C. district court—young and old, Republican and Democrat,
and Trump appointees—to reject Trump’s lies and set the record straight. They
dismissed Trump’s characterizations as preposterous and insisted that the
defendants were enemies of democracy. Many of them, pushing on limits for
judicial public speech, had cautioned Trump not to issue “blanket pardons.”
They are surely among the most frustrated and disappointed American citizens
today. As for the pardoned
horde, it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t conclude they now have license,
even duty, to intimidate Trump’s opponents anytime they perceive a wink and
nod from the boss. Or do we expect them to now go back to their day jobs and
become peaceful model citizens? Fourth and finally,
both Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance and Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi
assured the public that pardons should not be given to violent marauders or
anyone who had threatened law enforcement. Vance and Bondi either were
sending up smoke screens or they themselves were left completely in the dark
by Trump’s radical plans. If she had any
self-respect, Bondi would now withdraw her nomination. Not only is this the
worst affront to the DOJ in its history, it contradicts her testimony and her
expressed revulsion for pardoning people who are violent to law enforcement
while making her look impotent. Worse, enormously
worse, the pardons sweep in some of the most dangerous domestic terrorists in
American history, including the two organizing forces behind the operation,
Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, and Enrique Tarrio,
former chairman of the Proud Boys, who made their name with political street
violence. Both were convicted of
seditious conspiracy, a famously rare and difficult charge and one of the
most serious offenses in the books against not just a person but society and
the Constitution. Tarrio received the longest sentence—22 years—of any
January 6 marauder; Rhodes received 18 years. A few of Tarrio’s and
Rhodes’s words, set out in their indictments for seditious conspiracy: ·
Tarrio: “If
Biden steals this election [the Proud Boys] will be political prisoners. We
won’t go quietly…I promise.” ·
Tarrio:
“It’s time for fucking war if they steal this shit.” ·
Tarrio:
“Hopefully the firing squads are for the traitors that are trying to steal
the election from the American people.” ·
Rhodes:
Trump has to involve the Insurrection Act, and if he doesn’t, it would lead
to a “much more bloody war.” ·
Rhodes:
After the insurrection, “We should have brought rifles. We could’ve fixed it
right then and there. I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamp post.” And for good measure,
there is this gem from Daniel Rodriguez, which Professor Richardson
highlighted on her indispensable Substack, Letters From An American. Rodriguez received a 12 ½ year sentence after he
pleaded guilty to tasing Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, causing
a heart attack and traumatic brain injury. After the tasing, he boasted to
his friends in a group chat: “Omg I did so much fucking shit right now and
got away. Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue.” All in all, Trump’s
blanket pardons include over 600 marauders convicted of crimes of violence,
including assault, resisting or impeding law enforcement, or obstructing
officers during a civil disorder. 174 of those were charged with using a
deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
Besides Rhodes and Tarrio, several other high-up members of the Proud Boys or
Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy. These were villains to
the Constitution who belong in the same infamous company as Timothy McVeigh,
the Tsarnaev brothers, and Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. There may be some
crazed MAGA extremists out there who applaud Trump’s treachery. But all the
political figures that continue to support him surely know how sickening and
dishonest it is. You have to wonder how Republican members of Congress,
forced to flee from the Capitol floor when the mob Trump sicked on them broke
through, are feeling tonight. Not to mention Mitch McConnell, whose loss of
nerve at the second impeachment allowed Trump to fight another day. Or the
justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who buoyed his return to power. But the greatest
grievance belongs to the country—that is, to all of us. Some of Trump’s
orders today harm some constituencies but not others. Not the pardons. Like
January 6 itself, they are an assault first and foremost on the Constitution
and the rule of law. They reward violence not just against people but against
the Constitution, and in the service of a treacherous lie on his behalf. The
more they sink in, the more sickening they are. They are, and will remain, a
deep stain on our history. It follows that our
47th president, in his very first hours in office, has become a profound
traitor and extreme menace to the country as a whole. It is, in a way, a
moment of excruciating moral clarity. It reveals that the people and
institutions—notably media and big tech—who are bowing the knee are betraying
the national good, and the figures counseling finding middle ground are
misguided. I want, as always, to
bring it home to the smart fight. I recognize the apocalyptic tenor of my
reaction to the pardons, and it’s a fair fit to the off-the-charts level of
constitutional insult. I also realize that it’s critical not to be fatalistic
and, moreover, to keep an even keel for the marathon we are in. For one, it’s
hard to be persuasive when you are screaming at the top of your lungs. So I
intend to be keeping it together even as I implement the two-part platform
I’ve set out in various entries in these pages: 1) always call out the lies; 2) never capitulate to an
inroad on constitutional rule.
But make no mistake
about where things stand as of today, day 1 of a historically miserable
presidency. We are in an existential battle for our democracy. It's a battle
that could be lost but must be won. Talk to you later. |
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