President Trump has been on a pardon spree that shows no signs of slowing. In recent weeks alone, he pardoned or granted clemency to two former Republican politicians convicted of tax evasion, a reality-show couple convicted of fraud whose daughter spoke at the Republican National Convention, another tax cheat whose mother raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns and a far-right “constitutional” sheriff who accepted bribes for deputy credentials.
That doesn’t include others like the Jan. 6 rioters who violently attacked the Capitol (roughly 1,500 people were charged or sentenced). And it doesn’t include potential pardons — Mr. Trump said he would “take a look” at them — for two men serving federal sentences for leading a plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
American clemency is supposed to reflect mercy, reduce suffering and repair communities. But it has never quite lived up to billing: Presidents have always been accused of using the power for corrupt purposes, up to and including Joe Biden’s “pre-emptive” pardon for his son Hunter.
But President Trump has transformed the pardon practice into a menacing new frontier of presidential power. I call it “patronage pardoning”: reducing the expected penalty for loyalist misconduct by conspicuously pardoning political allies. This blunt instrument of venality and regime control is a standing public commitment to protect and reward loyalism, however criminal.
As the new U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin recently put it, “No MAGA left behind.”
The defining feature of patronage pardoning is the use of clemency to make regime loyalists less responsive to the threat of criminal punishment. The more partisan and outrageous the pardons, the stronger the signal transmitted to those contemplating loyalist misconduct. President Trump’s pardons may induce people to break conventional criminal laws, but they may also induce criminal interference with official functions — through perjury, obstruction and defiance of court orders.
Healthy democracies don’t sponsor loyalty-for-protection rackets. Indeed, patronage pardoning is part of a broader Trumpist legal project that threatens the rule of law. His governance model treats law-enforcement institutions not as agents of a sovereign people but as tools of regime compliance — prosecute enemies and spare friends, as performatively as possible.