The festival of pardons that now features prominently in America’s political life offers a measure of how the republic, in its late-imperial phase, is crumbing.
President Donald Trump signing the pardon for the national Thanksgiving turkeys on Nov. 25 in the Oval Office. (White House /Daniel Torok)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Wandering among the media over the Thanksgiving weekend….
I read that President Donald Trump announced that he has granted a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been serving one year of a 45–year sentence in a federal prison in West Virginia for running an immense, decades-long cocaine-trafficking operation, in cahoots with some of Latin America’s most notorious drug cartels during his term as president of Honduras.
[Hernández was released from prison on Tuesday.]
Plainly proud of himself, the Trumpster boasted of this act of misplaced mercy on his Truth Social digital site in all caps if you please, “CONGRATULATIONS TO JUAN ORLANDO HERNANDEZ ON YOUR UPCOMING PARDON. MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!” Señora Hernández reportedly wept (happy tears) on hearing her husband will soon be free.
Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez has been released from a US prison after being pardoned by President Trump https://t.co/mdUvWWOhk0 pic.twitter.com/2jJu3UWaao
— Reuters (@Reuters) December 2, 2025
Then on Sunday I read that Trump has commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who was serving a seven-year sentence for his part in a scheme that bilked 10,000 investors of $1.6 billion by — the usual thing — lying about the performance of the funds he operated and covering payouts Ponzi-style.
A commutation and a pardon are not quite the same: In the former case the conviction still stands, in the latter it is erased. But who’s counting? Gentile had reported to prison Nov. 14 and was free after serving less than two weeks of his time.
Back to social media, of course: On Thanksgiving Day Trump’s pardon czar — yes, he has one, named Alice Marie Johnson —declared she was “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.”
This Alice Marie Johnson, it is fun to know, was convicted of cocaine-trafficking charges in 1996 and had served 21 years of a life sentence when the Trumpster commuted her sentence during his first term.
Alice Johnson during Trump’s State of the Union Address in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 5, 2019. Jared Kushner, advisor to the president, and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter, on her right. (White House /Andrea Hanks/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Just as I was gathering my thoughts about the Latin American president who flooded the United States with coke and the private executive who got caught defrauding thousands of unknowing investors and the ex-con managing Trump’s clemency operations, news came that Bibi Netanyahu, who was indicted on corruption charges six years ago, asked Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, to pardon him.
This is a very big banana. The Israeli prime minister stands accused of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust in three separate cases and has been dodging justice, lately by prolonging a genocide, ever since his trials began. As has been well-reported, Netanyahu has long attempted to destroy the Israeli judiciary — its independence and integrity — to pervert the nation’s courts in his favor and, so, avoid a guilty verdict.
Demonstrators in Jerusalem Feb. 13, 2023, join a wave of protests against the government’s plan to curb the power of the judiciary. (Oren Rozen/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
And what did Bibi say in his appeal to Herzog? He must be cleared of all charges, he asserted, for the sake of Israel’s “security and political reality.” O.K., this has been his bedrock argument all along. But then the beyond-belief taker-of-the-cake, a reference to Trump’s recent appeals to Herzog in Netanyahu’s behalf:
“President Trump called for an immediate end to the trial so that I may join him in further advancing vital and shared interests of Israel and the United States.”
Pardons, pardons, commutations, commutations. In mid–October Trump commuted the sentence of George Santos, the short-lived Republican congressman, who was serving seven years for an assortment of fraudulent activities.
A few days later it was Changpeng Zhao, the former chief executive of Binance, a cryptocurrency firm, who was given a brief prison sentence and fined $50 million for using Binance to launder money. Binance — so often there is some kind of back story in these cases —turns out to be involved in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency doings. Trump gave Zhao a full pardon on Oct. 21.
President Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao came shortly after Zhao’s company, Binance, helped catapult the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial, into international recognition. The firm is a major source of the Trump family’s fortune. 60 Minutes reports,… pic.twitter.com/dVPVNVj6Zb
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 15, 2025
Yet more. On Nov. 9 Trump pardoned — preemptively, short of any charges filed — 80 people associated with his efforts to reverse the 2020 election result. In a piece published the following day, Forbes lists eight high-profile figures Trump has pardoned so far in his second term. And there are, of course, those convicted or awaiting trial for crimes committed during the now-famous Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the Capitol. On the day of his inauguration, Jan. 20, 2025, Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people.
Trump’s misuse of his power to pardon, including the clemency extended to war criminals during his first term, is extravagant by any measure. But he is not setting any records by way of numbers.
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During his years in the White House Joe Biden pardoned, preemptively pardoned or commuted the sentences of 4,245 people. This figure includes 1,500 commutations and 39 pardons the Biden White House announced on a single day, a little more than a month before he left office. Dec. 9, 2024, now marks a record in this line.
“There’s more of a sense of the insider pardon than we’ve seen previously,” Bernadette Meyler, who professes in constitutional law at Stanford University, told NPR after Trump’s Nov. 9 pardons were announced. Will you give us all a break, Professor? Only a card-carrying liberal could possibly make such an assertion. No one who followed the Biden pardons, starting with his son, Hunter, can take it seriously.
Let’s give these numbers a little historical context. During his first term Trump issued 1,700 pardons or commutations. Obama issued 1,927 during his White House years, George W. Bush 200 and Bill Clinton 459.
If you want to go further back in history: Kennedy, 575; Theodore Roosevelt, 981; Ulysses S. Grant, 1,332; Lincoln, 343. Andrew Johnson extended clemency to 7,650 people, but this included many thousands of former Confederate officials and officers and so must be counted an atypical case.
Something has happened these past two administrations, we have to conclude, and I see two ways to explain it. Both, in my view, reflect the state of our crumbling republic in its late-imperial phase.
One, we live amid the radical breakdown of law and the decay of our foundational institutions. Power is ever more — and ever more unconstitutionally — concentrated in the executive branch, and both of the White House’s most recent inhabitants, Biden no less than Trump, have demonstrated an extravagant disregard for the law.
And as the United States collapses into lawlessness, an obvious domestic crisis also has obvious international dimensions. When Trump announces his intention to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández even as the United States prosecutes an unlawful campaign against “narco-terrorists” and threatens to attack Venezuela on the specious grounds its government is a major drug-trafficker, one or another kind of disorder is the only possible outcome.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic,” Mike Vigil, formerly a senior official at the Drug Enforcement Agency, told The New York Times after Trump announced the Hernández pardon, “and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,”
To turn this question another way, would Bibi Netanyahu have cited Trump in his request for a pardon had he, Trump, not made the same appeal — and not backed the Israeli terror machine’s barbaric lawlessness in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in West Asia?
Related to this, there is the progressive sequestration of power that is now evident all around us — certainly in the United States but also among many of its clients, if not most of them. Trump’s pardons and most of Trump’s foreign and security policies betray a supreme indifference to the Constitution and the American electorate and a betrayal of those who voted him into to office.
The exercise of power without reference to its legality, sequestered power and its close cousin, impunity: The festival of pardons that now features prominently in America’s political life is an in-our-faces measures of this. A dysfunction all by itself, the crowded party of pardons is also a symptom of something graver.
Bitter as this may be to recognize, Trump’s regular resort to pardons and commutations also betokens crises that run well beyond the setting free of drug-runners, financial flim-flam artists and assorted other scammers in higher places than they ever ought to be. This is what decline looks like on the ground.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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This article is from ScheerPost.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Kudos, Patrick Lawrence, for once again your even-handed reporting and writing. Those “sainted Democrats” Obama, Biden, Clinton were never called out publicly for the egregious use of Presidential Powers. Narrative control has been around for some time. We, the public, should be hugely grateful to you and other independent journalists who honor and exemplify the profession. Thank you!
Headed toward collapse or headed toward military occupation of every city and power center, every Central American nation, Venezuela, Europe, Syria, Lebanon? Who is going to stop the government paid brownshirts?
Trump is in very big trouble.
The new year will not be a good year for him and most of the rest of us who have no net worth of five million $’s or more.
Register to vote, throw out the authoritarians, the sicko’s, those perverted greed heads. Time to elect younger candidates, energetic, anchored, smart people. Then we have to support them and send the message getting rid of this bunch of ass clowns is job #1!
The problem is the best easiest way to correct the course of action would be to overturn, abolish WTFE the Citizens United vs F.E.C. decision allowing money is the same as free speech. Per Justice Roberts. ( Damn it’s hard to write! )
It must happen, IMHO!
I’m actually allowing myself to consider how much Artificial Intelligence could aid in the configuration of Federal Tech designed for the purpose of. administration of communication. Ensuring everyone is on the same page in the rule book.
The population of this country has grown to a point where the demands of running and holding office (fund raising) verses adequately representing constituents are in direct conflict. Something, in my opinion, which wields undue impetus on buying an elected position rather than winning it straight out.
The process creates exaggerated excessive unjustified inequity distinctly exhibited by the pries paid by the highest bidders. No one thinks this is the way the Constitution would have us elect our leadership. What is clear is that the Ad Money money paid to news organizations is not going into providing any viable product product with respect to straight quickly provided information which has not been vetted by ownership and the government.
This must change if we expect to improve our society and the lives of. citizens.
Hopefully DJT is feeling the ghost walls of the East Wing closing in on him.
No good will from me. for the enemy! He is. garbage throw him out! ;~|
No one thinks this is the way the Constitution would have you elect your leadership? The Funding Fathers were careful to frame it in such a way that men such as themselves – men of means, often as not slaveowners – would hold the reins of power. Democracy had to be contained and restricted, lest the rabble get ideas above their station.
Could be pardoned unless to unfit like the Big Guy then no charges are incoming .
Dr. Ooze
That’s Orwellian justice eh, pardon fraudsters, thieves, murderers and drug-dealers while supporting genocide, and the mass slaughter in West Asia. Falsely accuse Maduro and others of crimes you are committing and murder innocent fishermen off the coast of Venezuela. I would bet a large sum of money that the CIA is involved with the drug cartels. So yes, project your sins onto others and engage in gross hypocrisy – that’s dirty politics and abuse of power.
The rule of law has become a cruel joke. Taxes and the law are only a cudgel to beat down “the little people”. The republic died along time ago, and yes the US is now a desperate, reckless and dangerous empire in decline. We may not be exactly the same as the decline of the western Roman empire, but things have a certain rhyme. We can only hope the decline is slow and steady, and not a sudden collapse.
I have heard that empires usually collapse from internal stress and contradictions, rather than from outward pressure and assaults.
It appears that the US Empire fits the historical pattern.
Thank you, Mr. Lawrence, for another excellent analysis.
Anyone, absolutely anyone who in any way shape or form supports or cheerleads an impending attack on Venezuela or Maduro is scum, trash, repulsive.
Trump still hasn’t pardoned himself, something there were rumours he might do, though the Supreme Court has ruled he’s immune from prosecution for anything he does in his official capacity.
When you can commit any crime you want because you have friends in high places, your country has become completely corrupted and is headed for collapse.
I find there is a blind spot that few are discussing in the context of high level lawlessness. Mr. Lawrence is an astute observer, but he seems at a loss to explain why, now in our history, there is so much lawlessness in the upper echelons of society. I think the blind spot comes from being immersed in an unregulated capitalist system for so long that one no longer sees what is right in front of them. The wealthy have never, ever had so much wealth in the past, and that is the defining difference. When has any one person had the equivalent of $400 billion dollars at their disposal? What kind of power comes from that much wealth? Trump takes many of his marching orders from his big donors like Miriam Adelson and others. Eccentric, sociopathic billionaires now fully control who gets into office, and what their agendas are. So in effect, sociopathic billionaires run the corrupt system, and people like Trump are just instruments of power. It is why I have said that to start the healing process, this country needs to immediately institute a 95% billionaire wealth tax. If you take the money away from the sociopaths pulling the strings, they can’t do what they are doing now anymore.
“John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), one of the most remarkable individuals to define the landscape of American business. Rockefeller’s estimated $1.4 billion net worth in 1937 was equivalent to 1.5% of U.S. GDP. According to this metric he was (and still is) the richest individual in American business and economic history.”
hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=47167
“John D. Rockefeller: The American industrialist who founded Standard Oil is the wealthiest American in history. At his peak in 1913, his net worth was estimated at $900 million, which equates to an inflation-adjusted personal fortune of approximately $400 billion in today’s money, and by some calculations based on economic share, over $600 billion.”
Google’s AI Overview (also says Mansa Musa I, the 14th-century ruler of the Mali Empire, is widely considered the wealthiest person in history).
Yes, and how did that work out back then? Also, how many inflation-adjusted billionaires were there back then, compared with now? You have made my point for me. Every time that too much wealth is accumulated in the hands of a few narcissistic sociopaths, the system falls apart and everyone else suffers.
I don’t deny what you say, but it was you who asked, “When has any one person had the equivalent of $400 billion dollars at their disposal?” My reply was in answer to that, and in no way a claim that such inequality is of no consequence.