More filth
President Donald Trump has pardoned a long list of his political allies for their support or involvement in plans to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin.
The individuals listed in a proclamation, which Martin posted on X late Sunday, include high-profile figures like former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and the president’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, among dozens of others.
Filth. We’re in the filth up to our eyeballs. A filthy corrupt kleptocratic state, with no escape open.
“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” read the document, which gives the date of November 7 in its text and the president appears to have signed.
Like hell it does. It doesn’t reconcile me in the least; on the contrary.
On the upside –
Presidential pardons only apply to federal charges, not state or local charges. None of the people on the list are currently charged with federal crimes, though some were named as unindicted co-conspirators in special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion case against Trump, which prosecutors withdrew after Trump’s 2024 election victory.
However, state-level criminal charges are still pending against Giuliani, Meadows, many of the 2020 fake electors, and others on the pardon list. (They deny wrongdoing.) These 2020-related state prosecutions are ongoing in Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. These figures will likely try to use the pardon to aid their defense, though a presidential pardon doesn’t cover state crimes.
The mills of justice grind slowly.
Democracy is an old and beautiful concept, but all too often marred by the fact that the people who present themselves to the voters as candidates in elections are not themselves democrats. They do not want the popular will to prevail. They want their own to do so.
In 27 states of the US, jurors have the power of life and death. Wisely, jurors are not appointed the way politicians are. If I was given to loitering around court houses, buttonholing all and sundry with regard to a desire of mine to ‘serve’ as a juror, I would probably be soon arrested as a public nuisance. Yet politicians do it every election, if not all the time.
Either appoint politicians in the manner of jurors, or jurors in the manner of politicians.? It’s a lay-down misere.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state
I was under the impression that to accept a pardon is to accept guilt. So if Giuliani et al. accept a federal pardon they accept they are federally guilty?
Of course it doesn’t help that a significant percentage of the voters are not (small “d”) democrats either. One recurring theme on the “crisis of democracy” podcasts I’ve been following for the last year or so is that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, and that the (capital “D”) Democrats, despite their recent victories, keep performing lousy in opinion polls, because there’s been too much focus on things most people don’t care about like, say, democracy and climate change (in addition to all the culture war stuff, of course) rather than economics, affordability etc. Well, maybe, but if so, that says more about “most people” (and not in a good way!) than the actual importance of the issues. There are plenty of reasons to be critical of Democrats in general and Harris (or Biden before that) in particular, but I honestly don’t think this is one of them. It brings me back to the course in German history I took while studying germanistics back in the 90s, in which the Weimar Republic was described as a “democracy without democrats”. The day we stop caring about democracy is the day we lose it.
Another recurring theme is that the voters cannot be expected to make any effort what so ever to actually understand the issues or make informed decisions, and that any information that isn’t distilled, condensed, oversimplified and dumbed down to the point of being practically useless, or even outright wrong, means you’ve already lost them. Hence the Democrats need to become more “populist”, appeal to the gut rather than the intellect (even more than they’re already doing!), substitute memes and slogans for arguments etc. Of course none of the podcasters in question put it quite like that, but that’s the gist of it. The obligatory denunciations of “elitism” must, at least in part, be understood in those same terms. Back during the Bush era, when so many liberals and lefties thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse (Lesson 1: Things can always get worse!), Susan Jacoby, in her excellent book The Age of American Unreason imagined what a politician might say if (s)he cared more about integrity and honesty than getting elected:
Some of the symptoms have changed since then, but the underlying pathology has only gotten worse.
(If anything, my impression as an outsider is that Democrats haven’t been focusing enough on the danger Trump and the MAGA movement pose to liberal democracy and the rule of law. I suspect there’s an element of self-fulfilling prophecy to the idea that people don’t care about the issue. As others have suggested, I suspect a lot of people, especially of the “low information” persuasion, are thinking that if Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election really were such a big deal, then surely he would have been held to account by now. If he really did pose an existential threat to democracy and the rule of law, then surely this would be the main focus of Democrats everywhere. Instead they see Democrats talk and act as if we were still operating within the realm of “normal” politics by focusing on everyday “bread and butter” issues like prices and healthcare, so they conclude that the alleged threat of authoritarianism has to be exaggerated, overblown, hyped-up etc.)