The Daily Fuckup

The pardons and commutations Donald Trump issued on Dec. 22, 2020 were not just another late-year clemency batch. They were another sign that, by the end of his term, the pardon power had started to look less like a constitutional safety valve and more like a political instrument with a very loose moral code. The Justice Department’s pardon records for that date show relief for Weldon Angelos, Otis Gordon, and Phillip Kay Lyman, among others, and the names themselves tell only part of the story. Angelos’s case, in particular, fit a familiar mercy argument: his original sentence had long been criticized as brutally excessive, and there was a straightforward human case for reducing it. But even where compassion was easy to defend on the facts, Trump’s broader clemency practice had become so politicized that each grant was difficult to evaluate in isolation. By that point, the process itself had become part of the controversy.

That is the core problem with how Trump used clemency. A president’s pardon power is supposed to be one of the system’s most carefully held checks, a place where mercy, justice, and public confidence are supposed to meet without one swallowing the others. In theory, it can correct obvious sentencing excesses, acknowledge rehabilitation, or account for unusual circumstances that a rigid legal system may miss. In practice, Trump’s clemency operation repeatedly seemed to collapse into something far more personal and far less predictable. The grants were often wrapped in the language of second chances or humanitarian concern, but they landed inside a larger pattern that invited suspicion: favoritism, loyalty tests, and political signaling. By Dec. 22, that pattern had already been visible for some time, and the day’s records only sharpened the impression that clemency had been absorbed into the administration’s transactional culture. Even when a given recipient had a compelling case for relief, the surrounding machinery made it harder to trust the motive behind the act.

The optics mattered because they were not happening in a vacuum. Trump was finishing a presidency defined by the collapse of any serious distinction between public office and private interest, and the clemency operation fit that same mold. Critics had been warning for months that the White House was treating the ordinary Justice Department review process as optional, or at least easily bypassed, and replacing a standard institutional pipeline with something closer to a bespoke service desk for the connected and the useful. That concern did not require proving that every pardon was corrupt or that every recipient was selected for political reasons. The deeper issue was the repeatable pattern. When clemency keeps landing on people with strong personal, financial, ideological, or political ties to the president’s orbit, public confidence erodes even if some individual cases deserve sympathy. It creates a sense that the real criteria are not fairness or rehabilitation, but proximity and usefulness. That kind of uncertainty is corrosive because it teaches the public to read the pardon power as a reward mechanism rather than a solemn constitutional judgment.

By late December, that lesson had become hard to ignore. Legal scholars and ethics watchdogs had been raising alarms that the administration was shrinking the normal guardrails around clemency and normalizing a process that should have remained exceptional. The public record of pardons and commutations kept accumulating examples that seemed to fit the same broad template: controversial cases, personalized interventions, and decisions that immediately prompted questions about who benefited from access to power. The fact that some individual grants may have been justified on their own terms did not resolve the larger problem. A pardon system does not have to be controversy-free to function, but it does have to be legible as principled. When the governing impression becomes “who do you know?” instead of “what is fair?”, the institution starts to resemble a favor bank with a seal on it. That perception is damaging not only to the White House holding the power, but also to the idea that the power can be trusted in future administrations. The damage is cumulative, and the more often the process appears personalized, the harder it becomes to separate legitimate mercy from political insulation.

That is why the Dec. 22 clemency actions mattered beyond the specific people on the list. They were part of a broader end-of-term pattern in which the administration kept using presidential authority in ways that blurred the line between legal power and personal preference. The immediate fallout was mostly reputational, but reputational damage is not trivial when it comes to the pardon power. Every time a grant appears tailored to a loyalist, a celebrity, a donor, or someone with a politically useful storyline, it weakens the assumption that the same rules apply to everyone else. It also sends a message to allies and associates that access can bend institutions in their direction. Trump’s defenders could point to Angelos and other recipients and argue that mercy was being served, and in some instances that may well be true. But the larger story was that the machinery producing those outcomes had become so suspect that even legitimate compassion was being absorbed into a much uglier political logic. By the time Trump was down to his final weeks in office, clemency no longer read like a solemn act of executive judgment. It read like another arena where access, loyalty, and image management were doing far too much of the work.