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Trump supporters clash with police on January 6, 2021. Joseph Prezioso/Getty

Well, I hate to say I told you so. Back in December, I warned that Donald Trump’s plan to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists was going to be greeted by the media with prewritten takes about how President Biden’s own use of the pardon power justified a decision to free a violent mob. Today, The Washington Post’s editorial board, tasked with the mission of obtaining 200 million paying users while simultaneously following owner Jeff Bezos’s directive to make the venerable newspaper substantially more mendacious, made me look prescient.

"The outgoing and incoming presidents both abused their pardon powers on Monday, undermining the rule of law and setting dangerous precedents that perpetuate America’s divisions," they wrote. According to the pundit logic here, Biden "started the trouble" after he preemptively issued pardons to immunize members of his family, administration, and Congress from future prosecution related to their activities during his term in office. Then Trump "ended the day by giving clemency" to the aforementioned insurrectionists. Just a bad day all around, and everyone’s to blame!

To put it charitably, this is a bungle from the editorial board. In the first place, the editors demonstrate a real inability to follow cause and effect chains; here asserting that the "the trouble" began with Biden’s preemptive pardons, when the use of the term "preemptive" clearly suggests a precipitating event. In this case, somebody forgot the well-documented history of Donald Trump publicly announcing his plans to persecute members of Biden’s family and administration, over and over again. Just this week, Trump intimated in an interview that he might go after Biden specifically because he wasn’t corrupt enough to pardon himself on the way out the door.

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Then, once "the trouble began," the editors suggest that Trump’s decision to pardon the January 6ers naturally followed from Biden’s actions—leading the reader to make the logical leap that the pardons handed out in the morning forced Trump’s hand later that day. But again, a reminder: Effect follows cause, and it was actually Biden’s hand that was forced when Trump repeatedly made the wanton persecution of his family and colleagues one of his big campaign promises. Meanwhile, Trump’s plan to pardon the insurrectionists has been a done deal for some time; it was another one of his oft-repeated campaign promises.

But the larger problem here is the way the Post editors senselessly flatten two wildly different actions by two wildly different presidents. Their main concern with Biden’s pardon is that it "opens the door for future presidents to likewise immunize their families and staffs from merely theoretical prosecution by their successors." Meanwhile, they say that Trump’s decision to loose the January 6ers onto the world "risks emboldening militias and others to commit future acts of barbarity in support of political aims."

Maybe these two things aren’t the same? It sounds to me like I’d grade the Biden pardons as a 3 out of 10 on the "I’m Worrying About the Precedent This Sets Whilst Stroking My Chin Thoughtfully" scale, whereas it’s safe to say I’d give the potential for "future acts of barbarity" a substantially higher rating. What if—and I’m just spitballing here!—one of these theoretical consequences is a lot graver than the other? And honestly, what if one of these theoretical consequences is a lot less theoretical than the other, given that an attempt to unlawfully overturn a legitimate election result actually happened?

Back in December, when I was lamenting the Post’s decision to run an insane op-ed suggesting that Biden should pardon the January 6ers himself because it would, according to the idiots who wrote this idea down, bring the country together, I pointed out that one of the very best reasons for Biden not to do that is that you don’t want to be responsible for setting free the type of person who is likely to reoffend. Say what you want about the people Biden preemptively pardoned, but I don’t see a lot of violent crimes in their future.

I can’t (frankly, I won’t) say the same thing about the January 6ers. One of those whom Trump pardoned this week—specifically a guy who tossed an explosive device into the Lower West Terrace tunnel of the U.S. Capitol—has already been rearrested on a gun charge that had been left pending. According to Politico, he’s got some fun priors: a previous conviction for "domestic violence battery by strangulation in June 2017" and "resisting law enforcement with violence and battery of a law enforcement officer" in October 2021. In short, a real gem, and I’d be willing to bet there are other jewels among his scofflaw comrades. The granting of clemency to this sort of criminal is the kind of thing that more often than not ends a political career. We’ll see how Trump fares now that he’s taken ownership of all of these Willies Horton.

The most worrying thing is that the most scintillatingly obvious aspect of Trump’s actions completely eluded the Post’s contemplations: that the possibility that these offenders might reoffend might be why they got a pardon in the first place. The main political focus of Trumpism has been establishing the rule of impunity. Trump’s actions here should be regarded as a calculated maneuver to very quickly and substantially reassert that impunity. All of these people who committed acts of political violence have been liberated, the obvious implication being that future criminal acts undertaken on Trump’s behalf will be viewed approvingly.

Here, the fears go well beyond the actual mob of men and women who stormed the Capitol four years ago. These pardons signal that anyone is welcome to get into the game; that a get-out-of-jail-free card is waiting as a reward. And as writer Julian Sanchez noted, Trump needn’t be an active field marshall of these irregulars: "An efficient fascism does not require much direct state violence. It merely requires the assurance that private violence aligned with the desires of the regime will go unpunished."

This should be easy to understand. Whatever the ethical implications of Biden’s pardons—and I’ll stipulate to the fact that there are some that are worthy of concern—he actually hasn’t established a precedent that other future individuals might exploit, as there isn’t going to be another Biden administration or Biden family for Trump to threaten with unjust prosecutions. Trump’s pardons, on the other hand, beckon forth future acts of violence. Overnight, America has become a more dangerous place to run for office against the GOP, to say nothing of how risky it now is simply to be the person charged with counting votes and certifying elections. It’s disconcerting that the people running a major newspaper in our nation’s capital aren’t intelligent enough to grasp these distinctions.

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor

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