From betraying Ukraine and dispatching masked agents who killed Americans to deporting US citizens and pulling out of accords controlling climate change and Iranian nuclear weapons, the list of Donald Trump’s abuses is long and growing still longer, seemingly by the day.
Looking back decades from now, historians will see that at the top of this shameful list is Trump’s utter abuse of his pardon power. It started on the first day of his second term, when he pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists who, on 6 January 2021, had stormed the US Capitol.
More recently, as documented in astonishing accounts by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, Trump has overseen a robust pardons market in which friends or relatives of criminals offer to pay millions for presidential clemency.
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His pardons are as legitimate as his election fraud claims. The rest of the government should be treating it with similar disdain
There are not really any legal limits on Trump’s pardon power, so what Trump is doing there is technically within the law. In that sense it is quite different from Trump’s fraudulent election fraud claims.
14A3 disqualifies him. He wasn’t legally appointed.
The problem is enforcing it and getting it legally recognized that nothing he did in the second term had legal force, and nothing had immunity.
Which is objectively true. But also kinda besides the point.
If the presidency gets nullified due to always having been disqualified, the pardon power nullifies. So it’s to the point.