The Daily Fuckup

Christmas Eve 2020 found Donald Trump doing what he had increasingly made a habit of in the final stretch of his presidency: using the pardon power in ways that looked less like a sober review of justice than a reward system for people with the right connections. By that point, the White House had already been moving through a late-year burst of clemency actions that drew attention precisely because of who benefited and how those decisions appeared to be made. The pattern did not suggest a broad, public-spirited sweep through deserving cases so much as a selective coda to a presidency that had long blurred the line between personal loyalty and official judgment. Even on a holiday usually associated with restraint and family, the White House project seemed to be proceeding at full speed. The result was a familiar Trump-era contradiction: an office with enormous constitutional power being used in a way that made its exercise look narrow, transactional, and politically saturated.

That matters because pardons and commutations sit in one of the most discretionary corners of presidential authority. The Constitution gives a president wide latitude to grant mercy, and in principle that power can be a useful corrective when the justice system has been too rigid, too harsh, or simply wrong. In the right hands, clemency can repair old injuries, shorten sentences that no longer fit the offense, or give deserving people a fresh start. But discretion also creates vulnerability, because there is only so much public scrutiny that can be applied to decisions made behind closed doors. When clemency repeatedly lands on people who are politically connected, personally familiar, or otherwise useful to a president’s orbit, the public is left to wonder whether the decision was based on justice at all. The concern was not that every recipient lacked a legitimate case. It was that the overall pattern pointed to a selection process shaped by status and proximity, not by a principled review of need or fairness. That distinction is crucial, and in Trump’s final weeks it became harder and harder to ignore.

The critique was especially sharp because the late-December clemency push landed in a political atmosphere already thick with mistrust. The country was still wrestling with the aftermath of the election, still waiting for Trump to accept an outcome he refused to recognize, and still trying to get straightforward answers about what the administration would do next. At the same time, Congress and the public were dealing with government funding questions and the broader pressure of a pandemic winter that was already punishing households, businesses, and public institutions. In that context, a burst of pardons and commutations for people inside or near Trump’s political world did not feel like a detached act of mercy. It felt like one more demonstration that the president’s attention and instincts were pointed inward, toward his own network and narrative. That framing matters because the symbolic power of clemency is not limited to the people who receive it. It also tells the country what kind of standard governs the exercise of authority. If the standard looks like loyalty, then the presidency starts to resemble a patronage machine, and public confidence in the institution takes another hit.

The administration’s defenders could argue that the president was simply exercising lawful authority in a way many presidents before him had done, and that some recipients of clemency had plausible grounds for relief. That is true as far as it goes. The issue is not that the pardon power exists or that it must never be used. The issue is how it is used, who seems to benefit, and whether the process gives the appearance of serving public justice rather than private allegiance. By the end of December 2020, Trump had already drawn sustained criticism from ethics watchdogs, former prosecutors, and lawmakers who saw a pattern of favoritism in the clemency process. That criticism was not just moral theater. It reflected a deeper institutional worry that when clemency becomes predictable only in its proximity to the president’s political and personal circle, it stops feeling like a corrective to the legal system and starts feeling like another tool of influence. On Christmas Eve, that problem was on full display. The timing may have been festive, but the underlying message was stark: in Trump’s White House, mercy still seemed to flow most reliably toward allies, and that is a dangerous way to run a power meant to serve the nation as a whole.