How President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics

When it comes to pardons, presidents are able to use unlimited power to give pardons to anyone the president wants to, even to those who have been declared guilty in fair jury trials, to those who have given that president huge financial donations, and even to those who attack outnumbered peace officers during illegal assaults on our nation’s capital. Could we ever have a president who would abuse this kind of power? We do now!–TBPR Editor

By Jess Bidgood/ New York Times/ May 28, 2025

Before he left office in 1953, President Harry Truman handed out a number of pardons to politically connected convicts — and, perhaps to avoid blowback, he did so entirely in secret.

In 2001, Bill Clinton waited until the final day of his presidency to issue a pardon he knew would go off like a political bomb: to Marc Rich, the oil trader and fugitive indicted in a sprawling tax evasion case, whose former wife had made donations to the Clinton presidential library and the Democratic Party.

And around Christmas in 2008, President George W. Bush rescinded a pardonhe had granted to a Brooklyn developer, Isaac Toussie, after The New York Post reported that Toussie’s father had donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee and another $2,300 to Senator John McCain.

“This is a good decision,” a Justice Department lawyer told the White House aide who went to retrieve Toussie’s pardon grant before it could be delivered to him, according to my colleague Peter Baker’s book on the Bush presidency, “Days of Fire.” “Because I don’t know if anybody could survive this.”

The power of the pardon is so absolute that the only way to punish a president for how he uses it is to impeach him or to vote him out. Most presidents have wanted to avoid those things. So they’ve granted pardons carefully, even furtively, often saving what might prove scandalous until the very last days of their terms.

“The pardon power for a president is virtually unlimited,” said Alberto Gonzales, who served under Bush as White House counsel and then as the attorney general. “In almost every case at the federal level, the question is not a concern over the authority to grant clemency, but whether clemency is appropriate given history, the circumstances of the offender and the politics.”

This week, though, President Trump has shown he has no intention of allowing such an unchecked executive power to go unexploited over as trifling a concern as the ordinary rules of politics. Rules that say, among other things, that doling out favors to donors and allies might carry an odor of impropriety.

Today, Trump pardoned former Representative Michael G. Grimm, a Republican from New York who pleaded guilty in 2014 to felony tax evasion. Grimm has been a vigorous and public Trump supporter.

My colleague Ken Vogel reported Tuesday that the president had pardoned Paul Walczak, a convicted tax cheat, after Walczak’s mother raised millions of dollars for Trump’s presidential campaigns and those of other Republicans.

The same day, the White House announced pardons for two reality-television stars, Todd and Julie Chrisley, who had been convicted of evading taxes and defrauding banks of more than $30 million, after their daughter depicted them as persecuted conservatives in a speech at last summer’s Republican National Convention.

And this week, the president’s new pardon attorney, Ed Martin, told The Wall Street Journal that he had personally fast-tracked a pardon for Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff convicted of bribery who has been an outspoken supporter of Trump’s immigration agenda.

This is scarcely the first time Trump has defied political gravity. But it still represents something new.

Trump knows that his first-term pardons of political allies like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn didn’t cost him much if any political support.

Since that first term, he has pressed so hard and for so long to demonize and undo the work of the Biden administration’s Justice Department — claiming that it was weaponized against him and his supporters — that he may have conditioned much of the public to believe him if he says that the recipient of a pardon was indeed a fellow victim.

He appears to be counting on his having changed the weather, hoping that the old rules won’t apply to him in this term, either.