Need to round up a group of unsavory deplorables to do some dirty work for you? The premise of box-office turd "Suicide Squad" is little different from that of the much older classic "The Dirty Dozen": assemble a group of baddies and persuade them to do some good. Donald Trump, perhaps taking his cue from these films, has just exonerated a whole rogues' gallery of baddies from the world of US business and politics, commuting sentences and issuing pardons. If you're old enough, you'll remember these names from the past (source):
1. Rod Blagojevich, former Illinois governor, convicted of bribery, extortion, and fraud.
2. Bernie Kerik, former New York police commissioner, guilty of tax fraud and other charges.
3. Michael Milken(!!!), financier, convicted of securities fraud in the 1980s.
Is Trump nuts? Well, he's certainly giving his enemies plenty of ammunition. This is the sort of thing that will confirm to the Never Trump and anti-Trump crowd that the 45th president is the worst of the worst: just look at the people he's helping! Trump, meanwhile, may be playing some sort of long game. Kerik's a Republican who served as police commissioner under Rudy Giuliani; Kerik's corruption made the news and besmirched Giuliani's mayoralty, which makes me wonder what Rudy thinks of Trump's pardon. But Kerik now owes Trump something, and that matters. Same goes for Blagojevich, a Democrat and former governor: he too now owes the president big-time. One has to wonder: what does Trump get out of all this? Are these people now pawns in a larger game, or is all this just more Trump-style trolling to distract the media-based idiots from whatever Trump is really doing?
I honestly don't have an issue with this. It's a specific Constitutional power granted the President. Here's the list of pardons Trump has granted:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executive_clemency_by_Donald_Trump
Does it get more bipartisan than that?