Shameless Trump’s Last Act Is Pardoning Crooks and Creeps
Pardons have become Donald Trump’s favorite sport, after golf. Oh the fun of ‘You get a pardon, you get a pardon’ with nobody to stop you, the kind of absolute power Trump wished he had in all aspects of the job over these last four years ending today.
The list of those getting final-day grants is a rogue’s gallery: of felons who can pay to play, witnesses who might rat, Republicans who might fund his afterlife, and any old body who might be good for a loan, an invitation, or paying up to join one of his ailing clubs.
The surprise on the list was a pardon, up in the air to the very last minute, for the famously disheveled chief of staff Steve Bannon, banned from Twitter for wanting to put Anthony Fauci’s head on a pike, and before that banished by Trump for dissing Ivanka and Jared in the press. He finally inched his way back into Trump’s good graces by amplifying the losing president’s preposterous argument that he’d won. Bannon promoted the lie on his podcast and encouraged “patriots” to join the insurrection to correct it that he compared to the American revolution. Bannon’s is a preemptive pardon, meaning he won’t even have to go to trial over charges that he underwrote his lavish lifestyle by stealing money—get this—from Trump supporters for a fake border wall.