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.
…
The unilateral presidential pardon and veto are both huge mistakes.
That puts far too much power in the hands of one person. Especially in a country that wanted to eliminate a king-like position ruling over them.
That wasn’t a mistake. It was absolutely intentional.
It is vital to understand the early American state as a patronage system and the president as the ultimate patrician through which power flows. If you look at early Plantation society, and the subsequent networks of power that flow from landholders to merchant brokers and from yeomen to their wealthy oligarch neighbors, all of this fits neatly together.
The problem the American Founders saw was with the upstart plebians and landless workers. Pardons and vetos check the power of popular judges and legislators, as intended.
Yep, it all flows together because the thinkers behind the Constitution and the plantation model were post-Enlightenment classicists literally basing their perfect model of society on the Roman Republic.
That is propaganda, they wanted a king, just their kind of king. His name was Washington and he would have been a billionaire adjusted for inflation if he had not died in his sixties. The US was always corrupt from the very start.