Donald Trump on Monday restored the warp speed presidency.
Proclaiming a new American “Golden Age,” Trump consolidated power hours into his new term, wielding massive executive authority in seeking to obliterate large chunks of Joe Biden’s legacy and showing he plans to learn from his first-term failures to pull off a transformational presidency.
Trump pardoned hundreds of rioters from the January 6, 2021, attack with a single signature in his black Sharpie. He initiated his promised immigration purge and border security plan and ushered billionaire tech oligarchs into his inner political circle.
The new president set off simultaneous political alarms in multiple foreign capitals with off-the-cuff foreign policy making, instantly turning the US away from the internationalism embraced by every president apart from him since World War II.
In a freewheeling news conference back in the Oval Office, Trump demonstrated a capacity to drive his own message and move geopolitical chess pieces in public in a way that Biden lost when age caught up with him. The imagery was of a well-briefed new president eyeing big goals, confident that his first term gives him a heads-up on how to wield the levers of power and determined to make the most of a second chance.
But Trump also laced the pageantry of Inauguration Day with rally-style grievance politics and vast doses of untruths, twisted facts and an increasingly messianic sense of his own power, which was a foreboding omen for the rule of law. Several rambling and vindictive speeches in addition to his inaugural address suggested that, as in his first term, his biggest challenge in forging a meaningful legacy will lie in choosing presidential focus over stunt politics.
And despite the theatrics of signing scores of executive actions, the arrival of the first legal challenges heralded new political battles. A substantive second presidency will need to match executive power with new laws threaded through a tiny GOP majority in the House of Representatives. After all, much of Monday’s action could be wiped out by a new Democratic president in four years just as Trump expunged Biden’s.
There was something almost surreal in seeing Trump back behind the Resolute Desk in the hastily redecorated Oval Office — as if he’d never been away.
On a day of soaring rhetoric, an executive power earthquake and euphoric receptions for the 47th president at MAGA inauguration balls that ran late into a frigid cold night, these were the most important developments.
Emptying the jails of January 6 prisoners
In a gesture that was shocking in its magnitude and that instantly raised questions about the equal application of the law, Trump offered blanket pardons to approximately 1,500 January 6 rioters. Hours after swearing to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, he showed no distinction between those guilty of beating up police officers and others who entered the US Capitol but were not convicted of violent offenses. His commutations extended to some of the country’s most high-profile extremists including Proud Boys and Oath Keepers hardliners.
Trump’s stunning move showed that presidents who win office after assaults on democracy can defy justice themselves and then absolve their supporters. It legitimized the use of violence as a tool of political expression, weakening American democracy and suggesting that those who use commit violent crimes in the 47th president’s name might get away with it.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trump’s “actions an outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and emotional trauma as they protected the Capitol, the Congress and the Constitution.”
Presidential pardon power has jumped the shark
But Trump was not the only president accused of abusing the pardon power.
Before he left office, Biden granted preemptive blanket pardons to public servants, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, former top government infectious diseases official Dr. Anthony Fauci and lawmakers and staff who served on the House select committee that investigated the Capitol riot. Biden argued that his hand was forced by Trump’s vows of retribution against innocents. But the pardons further tarnished the reputation of a president who took office vowing to restore the integrity of the Justice Department but then pardoned his son Hunter after saying he wouldn’t.
Biden also handed Trump an opening just 20 minutes before the end of his term by preemptively pardoning more family members, including his brothers James and Francis Biden and his sister Valerie. Biden said his kin had done nothing wrong but warned that “the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage their reputations and finances.”
Presidents have almost unlimited pardon power for federal matters. But by approving countless preemptive pardons in recent weeks, Biden has given Trump or any future president incentives to theoretically push staffers or relatives to break the law in the knowledge that they can get a pardon at the end of a term. This represents a huge potential expansion of presidential power, which the Founders never intended and which threatens to foster White House corruption.
Trump picked up on the implications immediately. “Now every president, when they leave office, they are going to pardon everyone they met,” he told reporters.
Source: CNN