Trump’s Obscene Jan. 6 Pardons Will Live in Infamy

Sanctioning violence is what authoritarians do

On Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned around 1,500 individuals, and commuted the sentences of over a dozen others, in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

As Inauguration Day neared, Donald Trump and his associates put out a reassuring message: while the new president would pardon many Jan. 6 rioters, as he had promised supporters, he would do so in a responsible and prudent way.

As CNN summed up the president-elect’s remarks in his high-profile November interview with Time magazine:

[Trump] told Time he plans to look at “each individual case” and will begin reviewing possible pardons “in the first hour that I get into office.” He said he’ll be looking to pardon people whose cases “really were out of control.”

“I’m going to do case-by-case, and if they were non-violent, I think they’ve been greatly punished,” he said. “I’m going to look if there’s some that really were out of control.”

Other figures in the new administration echoed the themes. “The president does not like people who abuse police officers, either,” said Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi. Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said he would “pardon Americans who were denied due process and unfairly prosecuted.”

Vice President JD Vance said he and Trump would “look at each case” and named, as the sorts of defendants who could expect favorable consideration, “people provoked” and “people who got a garbage trial.” “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” he said elsewhere.

Getting Away With Murder

If you believed any of this, you got fooled. The actual order of clemency Trump signed extends to every Jan. 6 rioter, no matter how violent or premeditated the conduct. It makes no concession to individualized consideration of the seriousness of offenses, the quality of legal process, or the reformed-or-otherwise state of mind of the offender. It directs the dropping of federal charges against those not yet brought to trial, again with zero consideration of individual circumstances. The only distinction it makes is to separate out a short list of relatively high-level participants, dominated by Oath Keepers, who got their sentences commuted to time served and may yet get full pardons in the future. All the rest got unconditional pardons, which means they will not have to check in with parole or probation officers and can go back to owning and practicing with guns.

There’s no way around it. The thugs who broke cops’ bones, the creeps who used bear spray against the Republic’s defenders, the ones who express no remorse and say they’d do it all again, the ones judges warned about as at risk for reoffending if freed—they’re all walking free. And they’re walking free for one reason only: because they did it for Trump.

It’s a sad day for America. It deserves lasting infamy.

The Proper Scope of Pardons

Pardons of politically charged offenses, even when the crimes were serious and the offenders unquestionably guilty, have served an important need through history. They can heal the wounds of civil war or draw disaffected insurgents back into the bonds of civil society. They can constitute a gesture of graciousness by a winning side toward a losing one, or be part of a peace deal turning down the temperature in a civil dispute that has no clear winner. They can be part of a recognition that, in times of prolonged civil strife, civil peace requires some forgetting, even though there are people on both sides who have misbehaved and people on both sides who were gravely injured as a result.

Despite a passing nod to national “reconciliation,” it’s hard to see Trump’s action as serving any of these goals. The new president expressed no dismay or regret about political violence perpetrated by his supporters, let alone about their goal: overturning an election he had lost. Rather than acknowledging that his adversaries had any legitimate concerns at all, he used the occasion to attack once again their motives and actions.

Overall, his actions seemed calculated to send a pair of messages. One was to his political opponents: you lost, you can’t stop me from doing this, and I’m going to rub your noses in it. The other was to the most zealous and violent of his supporters: you did nothing wrong that day, and I am the one who can protect you from consequences, now and in the future.

The Travesty of Mass Pardons

There are of course good reasons for an ideal of making pardon decisions highly individualized. People are infinitely various, even if their offenses and punishments have to be slotted into standard legal categories. On the process side, even most of us who found the Capitol assault an unforgivable attack on the constitutional republic were open to the idea that particular defendants might have been overcharged by prosecutors, poorly represented by counsel, maneuvered into a bad plea bargain, and so forth. Then, too, people’s characters also change after sentencing in unpredictable ways. Some develop remorse and greater understanding of the harm they did. Some become rehabilitation success stories to the point where the chance that they will reoffend appears scant. Others, meanwhile, head in the opposite direction: toward becoming more vengeful, more violent, more likely to offend again. These are questions a governor or president will naturally want to consider when a pardon request comes up.

None of this mattered here. Trump wasn’t going to waste his time on individual consideration. As he had said, it had been a “day of love“ at the Capitol. The convicted defendants, even the ones sentenced to 10 years or more for assaulting police, even the ones who had planned things out well in advance, were “patriots,” “hostages,” and “political prisoners.”

On the topic of rubbing noses in what he had done, Trump named a vocal defender of the Jan. 6 rioters, Ed Martin, as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, where he will oversee many of the career attorneys who carried out the prosecutions for the attack. According to NBC’s Ryan Reilly, Martin is “a prominent member of the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement”:

On Jan. 6, Martin tweeted that he was “at the Capitol” and said the crowd was rowdy “but nothing out of hand,” and he then tweeted, “Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith, and joy.” At the time of Martin's tweet, rioters had breached the building and Ashli Babbitt had been shot; on the other side of the Capitol, a Jan. 6 rioter would soon drive a stun gun into an officer’s neck during the brutal battle at the lower west tunnel.

It was a truculent clemency, if you will. Not for nothing did some of his most loyal supporters carry a banner on the streets of Washington Monday: “Proud Boys did nothing wrong.”

Coming Violence

The best-case scenario is that the defendants fade back into private life. But early reporting suggests that many released attackers have other things in mind: getting revenge against those who put them behind bars, and sometimes entering or re-entering the world of Proud Boys-style street action. And that’s when you should bear in mind what Grant Tudor recalls in a Bulwark article: authoritarian leaders through history have regularly pardoned crimes by their supporters, especially crimes committed in paramilitary or irregular fashion on the road to power. Meanwhile, the lesson of impunity pulls in other young and restless recruits who might have been reluctant otherwise.

If it happens that second way, how many of us will really be surprised? Federal prosecutors say the Proud Boys began planning their role in the Jan. 6 attack not long after Trump’s widely publicized call for them to “stand back and stand by.”

Polls indicate that the pardons are likely to be unpopular with the public, but they drew hardly any dissent from Republican officials or talk-show rightists, most of whom resorted to whataboutism when they did not simply fall silent. One welcome exception was the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which noted that Trump was unconditionally pardoning “those convicted of bludgeoning, chemical spraying, and electroshocking police to try to keep Mr. Trump in power” and added:

The conceit is that there are hundreds of polite Trump supporters who ended up in the wrong place that day and have since rotted in jail.

Out of roughly 1,600 cases filed by the feds, more than a third included accusations of “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement.” The U.S. Attorney’s office said it declined “hundreds” of prosecutions against people whose only offense was entering restricted grounds near the Capitol. Of the 1,100 sentences handed down by this year, more than a third didn’t involve prison time. The rioters who did get jail often were charged with brutal violence.

It follows with a compendium of brutalities, similar lists of which can be found here and here.

At National Review, Noah Rothman calls the pardons a “brazen subversion of the rule of law” and noted that the stain extended beyond Trump personally to his party: “during the 2024 Republican primaries, GOP voters were treated to a raucous debate over which of the Republican Party’s presidential prospects would pardon the Jan. 6 protesters faster and with the utmost zeal. “Among the top contenders angling for J6er favor: Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy.”

The Immutable Truth

In the days after the order, several federal trial court judges in Washington, D.C. used the orders they wrote dismissing cases, as entailed in Trump's order, to speak to the history books about what had just happened. As part of such an order dismissing pending charges against one defendant, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly included this passage for the ages about how historical truth can be affirmed even if legal process is stopped in its tracks:

Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens. Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.

What role law enforcement played that day and the heroism of each officer who responded also cannot be altered or ignored. Present that day were police officers from the U.S. Capitol Police and those who came to their aid when called: the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, Montgomery County Police Department, Prince George's County Police Department, Arlington County Police Department, and Fairfax County Police Department. Grossly outnumbered, those law enforcement officers acted valiantly to protect the Members of Congress, their staff, the Vice President and his family, the integrity of the Capitol grounds, and the Capitol Building—our symbol of liberty and a symbol of democratic rule around the world. For hours, those officers were aggressively confronted and violently assaulted. More than 140 officers were injured. Others tragically passed away as a result of the events of that day. But law enforcement did not falter. Standing with bear spray streaming down their faces, those officers carried out their duty to protect. All of what I have described has been recorded for posterity, ensuring that what transpired on January 6, 2021 can be judged accurately in the future.

May posterity long remember.

© The UnPopulist, 2025

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