Editors’ Blog

I’ve written a few times recently about Donald Trump’s ability to stake out and hold territory in the public mind, the public attention span, with threats that he likely (though not certainly) can’t make good on or won’t even have the attention span or care enough to focus on. So he’ll end birthright citizenship or he’ll jail his opponents. Or maybe not. It’s part of his ability to always be taking the initiative on that mutable and uncanny territory where media narratives and old fashioned reality become a common fabric. He acts and keeps acting and his opponents react and keep reacting.

Today President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 Americans and issued pardons for 39 persons convicted of non-violent crimes. For the remainder of Biden’s term, any use of the pardon power will be shadowed or seen through the prism of his pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. But I wanted to take this opportunity to say something broader about the pardon power. And I want to be clear that this isn’t an opinion that is downstream of or related to the Hunter Biden pardon. I’ve made similar arguments a number of times going back probably 20 years.

Put simply, we don’t have anywhere near enough pardons: both at the federal and the state level.

In fact, much of what passes for pardons or clemency today aren’t really pardons at all. They’re basically fake clemency. Set aside the controversial pardons of recent years. Most presidents at the end of their terms issue pardons to a range of meritorious individuals. They each come with a backstory of bad choices later redeemed by selfless altruism, service or other exemplary conduct. Or they simply turned around their life against the odds. But in almost every one of these cases the recipients have already done their time! They took responsibility; did their time; expressed remorse and then went on to live an exemplary life. What they get is an almost entirely symbolic record wiped clean. That’s not nothing. It’s a nice recognition. It’s also entirely different from an innocent person having a wrongful conviction overturned — a vindication of factual innocence. That remains a big deal even for someone who has already served a lengthy sentence. But it doesn’t free any one from jail.

It is at best a thin, thin clemency.

I want to share with you this note from TPM Reader PP. But context is important. I received it on November 7th — two days after the election. So you need to understand it in that moment. But it’s been rattling around my head ever since. I’d actually intended to publish it at the time. I just didn’t find the right moment. What he says doesn’t mean the conversations about new ecosystems are wrong. They’re not at all. That’s not my takeaway. But if you’re serious about building up alternative media that isn’t dominated by right-wing voices and politics-adjacent channels dominated by right-wing ideas, I don’t think you can succeed or even have a plan to succeed without starting with the premises PP is articulating.

I have read TPM for just more than half my life, and the entirety of a 20-year career in political campaigns and consulting that I decided to wind down earlier this year to pursue a very different and unrelated career.

I’m writing now somewhat in response to the broader conversation about Democrats/men/algorithms/media and somewhat in direct response to TPM’s recent article about Democrats adapting to the “new media landscape.”

As the clock winds down on the Biden presidency, Democrats and the Democrat-adjacent are hashing out, often awkwardly and painedly, what stance to take toward the second Trump presidency. I’ve already discussed this issue in the piece I wrote back on November 14th: “The Most Pernicious Anticipatory Obedience Hides in Plain Sight.” As I wrote in that post, there’s a species of Democrat who imagines there’s “some power or badassery or even a species of courage in” declaring constantly that Trump is all-powerful and everyone is powerless before him. Today this is playing out over Trump’s threat to jail the members of the Jan. 6th committee after pardoning the insurrectionists themselves.

For myself, I’m with former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, whose response to Trump was “bring it on.” This isn’t just about the personal and aesthetic importance of standing or going down fighting rather than cowering. (And yes, obviously it means much less coming from me than Kinzinger.) There’s also the deeper issue I discussed in that November post, which is how much fuel anyone should give Trump, how large a penumbra of fear and shock we should allow Trump to cast with boasts he probably lacks the courage to make good on and would probably struggle to make good on if he were up to trying. This isn’t the same as ignoring these crazed and degenerate threats. And it doesn’t mean these threats couldn’t come to pass. Managing that balance is at the heart of this period we are living through.