How Republicans Learned to Excuse Political Violence
They used to oppose
pardoning the thugs of January 6th. Now they say it’s fine.
Jan 24, 2025
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.
