Another Indefensible Trump Pardon
The president’s use of the power, which he deployed again over the weekend, is legal. It’s also a grave threat to the rule of law.
Not even Donald Trump’s own White House staff can keep track of what his tariff policies are. After weeks of White House messaging that a 10 percent global tariff would remain the floor for all countries going forward, Trump’s economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNBC this morning that tariffs could go to 10 percent “or perhaps even below” for countries that bring forward “good offers.” Hassett is the same adviser who caused a market spike (and then a slip) two months ago when he speculated that, ya know, maybe Trump would implement a delay to all his tariffs. Maybe this guy should stop guessing at policy—but then again, that’s what the rest of us are doing. Happy Tuesday.
Trump’s Dangerous Pardon Power
by William Kristol
In the midst of his administration’s many attacks on the rule of law, Donald Trump’s pardon yesterday of one Virginia sheriff is barely newsworthy. But it is nonetheless a fire bell in the night, a reminder of the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s assault on our free society.
Scott Jenkins, the former sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia, was set to report to jail today. He’d been convicted in December 2024 by a jury of his peers on one count of conspiracy, four counts of honest services fraud, and seven counts of bribery. Jenkins had accepted more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for appointing various untrained and unvetted individuals to no-show jobs as auxiliary deputy sheriffs. The evidence was overwhelming, including video of Jenkins accepting bags of cash, the testimony of some of those involved in the scheme, and reports from two undercover FBI agents. In March 2025, Jenkins was sentenced to ten years in federal prison.
“Scott Jenkins violated his oath of office and the faith the citizens of Culpeper County placed in him when he engaged in a cash-for-badges scheme,” acting United States Attorney Zachary T. Lee said at the time of his sentencing.
But Jenkins was a rabidly anti-immigrant, pro-Trump sheriff who’d become a minor celebrity in MAGA world. Trump himself may not have known of him, but Ed Martin did. Martin, you’ll recall, was made Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief pardon attorney at the Department of Justice after failing to get Senate confirmation as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin celebrated his achievement just after the pardon: “Thank you, President Trump! I am thrilled that Sheriff Jenkins is the first pardon since I became your Pardon Attorney.”
As for Trump, he claimed with no evidence that Jenkins was “persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters’” at the Justice Department and convicted unjustly by a “Biden Judge.” He called Jenkins a “wonderful person” who “doesn’t deserve to spend a single day in jail.”
Former member of Congress and current gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, who represented the county where Jenkins was sheriff, was justifiably outraged. She pointed out that “Scott Jenkins was in a position of public trust and he broke the law.” She called the president’s pardon “an affront to the oath [Jenkins] swore, the community he betrayed, the laws he broke, and the law enforcement officers who investigated this case and hold themselves to the highest ethical standard every day.”
Spanberger is right. Trump’s pardon is an affront to the oaths both he and Jenkins swore. Though the pardon is legal in the sense that it’s within Trump’s power, it is an affront to the rule of law. As Abraham Lincoln put it in his great 1838 speech on the rule of law, with regard to acts like this, the “direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but a small evil; and much of its danger consists, in the proneness of our minds, to regard its direct, as its only consequences.”
What are some of the consequences of Trump’s abuse of the pardon power?
Well, if you’re a fervently pro-Trump law enforcement officer, and you commit crimes, you can now have a reasonable expectation that you’ll be pardoned. Your crimes could be as simple as personal enrichment. But they can be much larger, too. As the pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists reminds us, they could be crimes carried out on behalf of Trump’s own efforts to avoid the law or impose his will.
So under Trump’s pardon regime, law enforcement officers can become Trump enforcement officers. Others who decide to engage in vigilante action—perhaps in cooperation with Trump-supporting law enforcement officers—can also expect pardons. Trump sheriffs and wannabe sheriffs will increasingly believe, thanks to Trump and Ed Martin, that they can act with immunity. MAGA vigilantism over the next four years will be supercharged.
The lawyers and judges and juries who do their jobs will be attacked by Trump, as he did yesterday, and by his MAGA minions. In the end, MAGA lawlessness will be emboldened while citizens and officers who seek to uphold the law will be attacked and perhaps intimidated.
The president’s pardon power is virtually plenary. In other instances of presidential malfeasance, the courts can ride to the rescue. But not here. Trump’s wielding of the pardon power is a good reminder that there are things he can do that may not be illegal, or that may not be found illegal, that are nonetheless very dangerous to the overall rule of law and to a free society.
The pardon power under Trump is a threat. And the only real check is political and civic leaders like Spanberger who call attention to its abuses, and who seek to guard against some of the implications of those abuses. The fundamental check has to be a citizenry that upholds standards of legality and decency even when the president and his administration don’t.
The Founders did their best to establish a republic with political checks and balances, with a robust assortment of governmental and nongovernmental institutions, all of which would help preserve freedom. But at the end of the day, we the people have to be the fundamental check and balance.
As Federalist No. 55 puts it: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
Do we still possess these qualities to a sufficient degree today?
AROUND THE BULWARK
This Memorial Day, Remember the Afghans Who Saved American Lives… We dishonor the fallen if we forget what they fought for, writes WILL SELBER, who visited Arlington with Gen. Haibatullah Alizai.
A Marine’s Case Against MAGA… On The Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL talks with MICHAEL WOOD about his military service and the meaning of Memorial Day, Texas politics, and his political future.
A Critic of the World of Choice… Our choices are fraught with illusions, manipulation, and anxiety. Has our concept of freedom “lost its way”? JONATHAN MARKS reviews The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life by Sophia Rosenfeld.
Three Essential Next Steps on Ukraine… Trump wants the war over. The American people don’t want Ukraine to lose. Here are three constructive actions Trump could realistically take, writes TAMAR JACOBY.
Quick Hits
THE LATEST ON SOUTH SUDAN: Last week, Judge Brian Murphy ruled that the Trump administration “unquestionably” violated his court order by deporting seven criminal migrants to Africa without adequate due process. But at the government’s own suggestion, Murphy permitted the migrants who were en route to South Sudan to instead be shuttled to a U.S. military base in Djibouti, where they might get some semblance of the process they were previously denied.
Now, the government is complaining to the court that the new arrangement is too costly and chaotic, and that Murphy should let them go ahead and ship the migrants to South Sudan.
In a frosty order last night, Murphy denied that request:
It turns out that having immigration proceedings on another continent is harder and more logistically cumbersome than Defendants anticipated. However, the Court never said that Defendants had to convert their foreign military base into an immigration facility; it only left that as an option, again, at Defendants’ request. The other option, of course, has always been to simply return to the status quo of roughly one week ago, or else choose any other location to complete the required process.
Murphy rounded his rejection off with another paean to due process:
The Court recognizes that the class members at issue here have criminal histories. But that does not change due process. ‘The history of American freedom is, in no small measure, the history of procedure.’ . . . The Court treats its obligation to these principles with the seriousness that anyone committed to the rule of law should understand.
Amen to that.
ABOUT THAT DINNER: Donald Trump’s memecoin dinner, which took place at his D.C.-area golf club last Thursday, may have been a straightforward wealth transfer from investors to him and his family, with the promise of access to Trump himself dangled in return. But investors hoping their collective $148 million purchase of the coin would put them in a place to bend the president’s ear were reportedly left disappointed. Trump showed up, reeled off 20 minutes of loosely crypto-themed stump-speech material, and then bounced without mingling with the crowd.
Which is, we guess, a good thing! Trump had been so openly suggesting that buying $TRUMP would equal buying presidential access that there were only two possible outcomes: He was indeed corruptly selling access, or he was merely pretending to sell access in order to scam investors out of their money. Of the two options, the latter is arguably less worse. (If attendees wanted real access to the president, maybe they should’ve bought him a $400 million plane instead.)
Will future Trump scams be met with a cooler investor response? It seems unlikely. The president’s prior history of grifts, from Trump University to the 10x campaign match, didn’t cool the $TRUMP buyers’ ardor this time around. A president so openly transactional as Trump will always seem inviting to those who are willing to buy access. And Trump, for his part, seems likely to continue trading on that allure to make a quick buck.
For now, though, it seems we’ve got an answer to the question I asked at the White House briefing a few weeks ago: Were investors wasting their money by buying the memecoin in the hope of bending the president’s ear on pet causes? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dodged the question. The answer turns out to have been “yes.”
RESPECTING THE DAY: Every family has its own cherished holiday traditions. And so it wasn’t exactly a surprise when the president of the United States popped off the pillow yesterday morning and logged into Truth Social to tap out a pre-breakfast holiday greeting: “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THEM BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE . . .” He carried on in this vein, focusing particularly on “USA HATING JUDGES” who are “ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER, AND RAPE AGAIN.”
This sort of thing is by now par for the course with Trump, for whom every holiday is an angry Festivus. Happy Easter to “all the people who CHEATED in the 2020 election,” Merry Christmas to “Governor Justin Trudeau of Canada,” happy Thanksgiving to “Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country.” Last Memorial Day, the object of his “Human Scum” invective was the “Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York” who had presided over E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial against him.
Going by the sloppy mistakes and the dribbling quality of the diatribe in these posts, he doesn’t appear to be farming these out to staff—this is just how the he likes to commemorate the holidays.
MAGA loves this stuff. But at this point, what is there to say? The president is a megalomanic lunatic, but we knew that before. It’s just the polluted water we swim in now.
Cheap Shots
The way around the pardon power is prosecution by the states. Did this Virginia Sheriff not commit a single state crime? State prosecutors often cede big cases to the feds. That needs to stop, especially in blue states. They need to tell the feds, "Go ahead and do you're thing, but we're also going to do our thing." Trump would have been prosecuted much sooner in the Stormy Daniels case if New York hadn't let the feds yank their chain for years.
Bill: "Trump’s pardon is an affront to the oaths both he and Jenkins swore. Though the pardon is legal in the sense that it’s within Trump’s power, it is an affront to the rule of law."
Someday Bill is going to internalize that Trump isn't Godlike with his base in spite of stuff like this. He's Godlike **because** of stuff like this. The 49.8% of the electorate who voted for Trump knew that he'd do stuff like this, and they're on board with it so long as Trump uses the law to destroy people who aren't MAGA.
What's the saying? For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.