Ben Wallace-Wells

He's leaned very heavily on things that he can make a kind of show of and do directly, and that's executive orders and it's deals made with foreign countries and universities.

And the pardons feel to me very much of a piece with that.

It's a place where he has enormous leverage and he can seem beneficent and he can do it without a lot of procedure.

And that seems to me just like a very, very friends lead a Trump realm of power exercise.

A bunch of white collar criminals, but notably Sean Combs, the rapper Diddy, you know, convicted of sex trafficking crimes.

Ghislaine Maxwell has been reported to be publicly preparing, it was a number of months ago, but she was reported to be publicly preparing a commutation application.

And he sort of said, I'm not going to do that, you know.

And I think that that is just a sign that there is some boundary here, that there are some cases that are just sort of too toxic.

No, I don't know that this will get back to normal.

I think that this is a kind of odd.

I think you're very right to point out that this did not start with Trump.

And there was real grossness at the end of the Clinton administration and the Biden administration.

And this is also something that, you know, the Constitution explicitly allows, you know, is not really a murky area.

The president can pardon basically whoever he wants for whatever reason.

The only check on him is politics.

Trump has preceded his whole presidency on a kind of assumption of impunity, especially in the second term.

And I think this is maybe an extreme example of what we'll see, but I don't necessarily think this is going to stop.

I suspect that presidents will keep finding it in their interests in discrete ways to let allies or contributors or people that might convey some political meaning for them

off the hook and to wave their crimes away and to think either there will be no political consequence or I can take the hit.

Oh, I'm very grateful to President Trump for doing all the pardons he's issuing because it makes it quite likely that this will sell more than it otherwise would.