On Wednesday, Jan. 22, in the first interview since his Inauguration, President Donald Trump met with his compadre and Fox News anchor Sean Hannity at the White House. During their conversation, the reelected Commander-in-chief said nothing that could be classified as controversial or worrisome whatsoever — the end!
Just kidding. That is not the world we live in. The world we live in is what an Emmy-winning HBO dark comedy series would be if it also had all the makings of a surreal fever dream. A world where the sitting President indiscriminately pardoned 1500 rioters who participated in the 2021 insurrection he instigated, including those who committed violent offenses like battery on law enforcement officers.
More recently, Trump also issued unconditional pardons to two convicted Washington D.C. police officers involved in the covered-up death of Karon Hylton-Brown, a black man (via TNYT). This all goes to show that Republicans of Trump’s ilk only care about the police when the police are not on the opposing side to a white conservative mob.
These same members of the GOP were highly critical of Joe Biden’s pardon spree. Although there are reasons we can raise an eyebrow at President Biden’s desperate measures, we can also understand where the underlying reasoning stems from. After all, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. This septuagenarian billionaire loves single-minded retribution almost as much as he loves a McDonald’s Big Mac.
As it turns out, there is an argument to be made that Biden should have gone further with his pardons. This argument is not based on leftist abstract fear-induced cogitations, but on what came from the mouth of the sitting President in the aforementioned interview.
Says the pot to the kettle
In the segment that has fueled concerns of future retaliation, Sean Hannity comments with the President about how his predecessor promised in his campaign that he wouldn’t issue preemptive pardons. Succinctly, a preemptive pardon is when the President pardons someone who has not yet been indicted for a crime. During the final hours of his presidency, Biden did so for several individuals, family members, and Trump critics alike– Dr. Anthony Fauci and retired General Mark Milley, for instance.
Although Biden actively contradicted his promises regarding his pardoning powers, those were other times, times when one still had hope that we were “not going back.” Hannity’s question aims at hiding Donald Trump’s ever-consistent hypocrisy by willfully pretending that hypocrisy is fully concentrated on the side of the Democrats. In his answer, the 47th President was true to himself:
“This guy went around giving everybody pardons. But you know the funny thing – maybe the sad thing – is, he didn’t give himself a pardon. And, if you look at it, it all had to do with him.”
As late-night show host Seth Meyers pointed out, Trump rebuking Biden for his pardons is “like Kevin Hart saying, ‘that guy makes an awful lot of movies,'” considering his recent official actions regarding Jan. 6 offenders.
Later in the Hannity interview, Trump also suggested Biden had bad advisors because “somebody” incentivized the pardons but failed to advise him to pardon himself.
Does this all mean Trump is embarking on a revenge path to punish the former President for… well, being a political opponent? We may wish we had the answers but we can’t yet know for a fact. During the campaign trail, the then-candidate claimed his success would be his retribution, but he also alleged retribution would be retribution. We might have as good a chance of predicting how Trump will act regarding his opponents as tossing a coin and seeing how it lands.
Published: Jan 24, 2025 08:22 am