Trump’s Opening Act of Contempt

 

Opinion

The Editorial Board

Trump’s Opening Act of Contempt

Jan. 20, 2025

By The Editorial Board

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/opinion/trump-jan-6-pardons.html

 

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

 

On Jan. 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, a former Republican district leader in Queens, jumped through a broken window at the U.S. Capitol with a megaphone. He pushed his way past a line of Capitol Police officers and opened the exterior doors of the Rotunda to allow other rioters to enter the building and trash it. “We stormed the Capitol!” he exulted on video, and was seen smoking marijuana and high-fiving other Donald Trump supporters who were fighting the police. “We shut it down! We did it!”

 

Nearly three years later, a federal jury convicted Mr. Grillo of multiple offenses. But he did not lose heart: Last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison, he had a special taunt for the federal district judge who sentenced him, Royce Lamberth.

 

“Trump’s going to pardon me anyways,” he yelled at the judge, just before he was handcuffed and led away.

 

He was right. On Monday evening, several hours after President Trump was inaugurated, he fulfilled a promise he had repeatedly made to pardon nearly all the rioters who attacked and desecrated the Capitol in 2021 to prevent Joe Biden’s victory from being certified. Mr. Grillo and about 1,500 other rioters received full pardons from Mr. Trump, while 14 others received commuted sentences.

 

A presidential pardon for Mr. Grillo not only makes a mockery of his jury’s verdict and of Judge Lamberth’s sentence. Mr. Trump’s mass pardon effectively makes a mockery of a justice system that has labored for four years to charge nearly 1,600 people who tried to stop the Constitution in its tracks, a system that convicted 1,100 of them and that sentenced more than 600 of them to prison.

 

Most important, the mass pardon sends a message to the country and the world that violating the law in support of Mr. Trump and his movement will be rewarded, especially when considered alongside his previous pardons of his advisers. It loudly proclaims, from the nation’s highest office, that the rioters did nothing wrong, that violence is a perfectly legitimate form of political expression and that no price need be paid by those who seek to disrupt a sacred constitutional transfer of power.

 

The presidential pardon system is usually abused in modern times by departing presidents giving a final gift to cronies, donors or relatives, and those breaches of trust were bad enough. Mr. Biden issued dubious pardons to his son and, as he walked out the door, several other family members, as well as pre-emptive pardons to an array of current and former government officials for noncriminal actions, all to protect them from potential Republican retribution — an expansive use of pardon power that further warps its purpose.

 

But what Mr. Trump did Monday is of an entirely different scope. He used a mass pardon at the beginning of his term to write a false chapter of American history, to try to erase a crime committed against the foundations of American democracy.

 

To open his term with such an act of contempt toward the legal system is audacious, even for Mr. Trump, and should send an alarming signal to Democrats and Republicans alike. Members of both parties had to protect themselves that day from the mob, which made little distinction in political affiliation or ideology as they called for the execution of Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House. In this pardon, Mr. Trump forgave and thus provided encouragement for domestic terrorists who put members of Congress in danger of their lives; the long-term cost will be paid by the entire political system, not just his critics.

 

For four years, he has tried to stage-manage the erasure of his role in inspiring the assault. It was only hours after the attack that his allies in the House and on Fox News began sowing doubt about the motivation for the rioters, claiming it was organized by leftists masquerading as Trump supporters. By 2022, when he was under investigation by the House Jan. 6 committee, he began referring to the rioters as “political prisoners” persecuted by Democrats and openly suggesting that the F.B.I. had helped stage the attack. By the time his presidential campaign was in full swing last year, he had completely transformed the day’s monstrous bloody fury into what he called a “day of love” and insisted falsely that none of his supporters had brought guns to the Capitol.

 

But Mr. Trump’s dense fog of misinformation can’t change what really happened on that terrible day, which, as the Times editorial board wrote at the time, “touched the darkest memories and fears of democracies the world over.” It was a sentiment in the early aftermath of the attack echoed even by senior Republicans, some of whom would go on to vote to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in instigating it.

 

At least 20 people who joined the attack did carry firearms onto the Capitol grounds, including Christopher Alberts, who wore body armor containing metal plates and carried a 9-millimeter pistol loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition, along with a separate 12-round holster that included hollow-point bullets. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison after a jury convicted him of nine charges, including assaulting law enforcement officers, but received a full pardon on Monday. More than 140 police officers were assaulted that day; Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer, was killed, and other officers were smashed in the head with weapons; they were bruised, burned and lacerated; four later died by suicide.

 

“My concern is that people are going to believe that if they attack me or members of my family physically that Donald Trump will absolve them of their acts,” Michael Fanone, a former police officer attacked by the crowd on Jan. 6, told The Times. “And who is to say he wouldn’t?”

 

For many of the officers who were pepper-sprayed or hit with two-by-fours or beaten that day, the thought that the nation’s chief executive would forgive such actions is despicable. “Releasing those who assaulted us from blame would be a desecration of justice,” Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant who suffered lasting injuries in the riot, wrote in a Times Opinion guest essay this month. “If Mr. Trump wants to heal our divided nation, he’ll let their convictions stand.”

 

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, which helped organize the assault, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after being convicted of seditious conspiracy for assembling $20,000 worth of assault weaponry intended to be used at the Capitol. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who sentenced Mr. Rhodes, called him “an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the Republic and the very fabric of our democracy.” Judge Mehta later said he was appalled by the idea that Mr. Rhodes could receive a pardon.

 

“The notion that Stewart Rhodes could be absolved is frightening and ought to be frightening to anyone who cares about democracy in this country,” the judge said last month.

 

Mr. Rhodes was not pardoned, but his sentence was commuted, and he was scheduled to be immediately released.

 

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys militia, was described by a federal judge as the “ultimate leader” of the rebellion, though he was arrested and barred from Washington as soon as he arrived there and didn’t enter the Capitol. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison after the Justice Department said that by “inflaming the group with rage against law enforcement and then turning it loose on the Capitol, Tarrio did far more harm than he could have as an individual rioter.” Two weeks ago, on Jan. 6, his lawyer wrote to Mr. Trump asking for a pardon, describing his client as “nothing more than a proud American that believes in true conservative values,” and his request was granted on Monday.

 

Judge Lamberth, a senior federal judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the D.C. District Court, has been on the bench since 1987 and has seen it all, having served with the Army’s Judge Advocate General Corps in Vietnam and as a federal prosecutor in Washington during the 1970s. But in pronouncing one sentence against a rioter last January, he said he had never seen such a level of “meritless justifications of criminal activity” in the political mainstream.

 

“I have been dismayed to see distortions and outright falsehoods seep into the public consciousness,” he wrote. “I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved ‘in an orderly fashion’ like ordinary tourists or martyrizing convicted Jan. 6 defendants as ‘political prisoners’ or even, incredibly, ‘hostages.’ That is all preposterous. But the court fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.”

 

On his first day back in public office, Mr. Trump provoked the danger that the judge dreads, setting loose hundreds of people found guilty of participating in a violent assault on the nation’s Capitol — not because they committed no crimes but because they committed their crimes in his name. In doing so, he invites such crimes to happen again.