The president, the pardoned and the poisoned polity

One year ago today, a sitting president looked upon the scarred walls of the Capitol, upon the memory of officers bleeding on the marble, and saw not an atrocity to be condemned but a constituency to be cultivated.

With a stroke of his pen, Donald Trump did not merely pardon approximately 1,560 individuals convicted for their roles in the violent attempt to nullify an American election.

He performed a corrupt alchemy, transmuting sedition into saintliness and assault into absolution. He told the nation, in the clearest terms possible, that political violence in his service is not a crime but a credential.

The calculated timing, hours after an inaugural address empty as a broken bell about “law and order,” was not hypocrisy. It was a declaration. The rule of law, for this administration, is not a principle but a provisional tool, to be brandished against enemies and brushed aside for friends.

Consider the company these insurrectionists now keep in the ledger of clemency.

In the months since, the floodgates have opened for a rogue’s gallery of the convicted: foreign bribe-payers like Imaad Shah Zuberi, securities fraudsters like Trevor Milton and Carlos Watson, a Honduran president convicted of drug trafficking, and a parade of corrupt politicians and tax cheats.

This is not the careful exercise of mercy. It is the systematic dismantling of justice, the creation of a two-tiered system where loyalty to one man outweighs felony against the state.

The states have taken note, and their reactions form a damning portrait of a nation’s fracture. In Michigan, Minnesota, and Colorado, Democratic lawmakers moved to formally condemn the pardons, met not with sober Republican reflection but with a barrage of deflection, denial, and disturbing equivalence.

To hear some senators tell it, a coordinated assault on the heart of our democracy to overturn a vote is akin to a protest, and bear spray in an officer’s face is comparable to a paperwork error.

This is not a debate. It is a derangement.

The cost is not only moral but brutally material. As congressional oversight has highlighted, the taxpayers remain on the hook for billions in damages from that day, while court-ordered restitution from the perpetrators vanishes with their pardons.

The pardon power, intended as a check on judicial excess, has been weaponized to erase financial accountability for wrecking the People’s House.

Worst of all, this was the opening move. As legal scholars at the Brennan Center have meticulously documented, the Jan. 6 pardons were the cornerstone of a sweeping campaign to use federal power not to protect elections, but to poison them.

It is a campaign of weaponized “task forces,” of threatening election officials, of dismantling cybersecurity defenses, and of rewriting rules to suppress and sow doubt. The goal is not governance, but an inoculated electorate—one confused, distrustful, and easier to overwhelm when the next loss must be explained away.

A year later, the stain is not fading. It is spreading. To pardon an insurrection is to promise the next one. It tells every would-be strongman and every violent aspirant that the pillars of the republic are not stone and law, but fear and favor.

We are told to move on, to let the healing begin. But one cannot heal a wound that is still being actively salted.

The pardons of Jan. 20, 2025, were not an end to a tragic chapter.

They were a prelude. The democracy they sought to destroy on Jan. 6, 2021, is now being methodically hollowed out from within, one corrupted pardon, one malicious lawsuit, one threatened official at a time.

The record is written. The question now is whether, a year from this day, we will still recognize the country that bears its scar.

The cost is measured in more than the $2.7 billion taxpayers owe for the damage of that day, now uncollectible from the pardoned.

It is measured in the poisoned trust of a nation. When a president transmutes insurrectionists into martyrs with a signature, he does not heal a wound.

Trump injected a toxin directly into the body politic, one that convinced his followers that the system is theirs to break, and assured his opponents that the system is already broken.

State legislatures in Michigan, Colorado, and Minnesota recognized this betrayal, passing resolutions of condemnation that were met not with Republican contrition, but with cynical deflection. This, too, is part of the poisoning.

The debate is no longer about the gravity of the crime, but about the partisan identity of the criminal.

As detailed by legal scholars, those Jan. 20 pardons were the opening salvo in a broader campaign to dismantle electoral integrity from within.

It is a campaign that now sees the federal prosecutorial power – the machinery of the Justice Department – being retrofitted not to pursue justice, but to hunt perceived enemies and intimidate election officials. The power to charge becomes the power to chill.

One year later, the pardon pen has proven mightier than the sword, and far more destructive to the republic.

It has drawn a line through the principle that no one is above the law and written in its place a new, grim rule: for the loyal, the law is beneath notice.

We are left to witness the consequences of a prosecutorial power turned inward against democracy itself, and to wonder what remains of a nation when its ultimate legal authority is used first to pardon an attack on its own foundations.