In one of the earliest acts of his second term, Trump signed a proclamation issuing a “complete and unconditional pardon” to all but 14 people convicted for any offenses related to the attack at the Capitol as his first term drew to a close. He cut short the sentences for the other 14 — nine members of the Oath Keepers and five members of the Proud Boys.
President Trump, Who Condemned Black Lives Matter As Violent, Pardons All But 14 Jan. 6 Defendants
President Donald Trump shows an executive order he signed at Capital One arena in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. | Source: Xinhua News Agency / Getty
Newly sworn-in President Donald Trump’s first act as commander-in-chief was to remind America — as if it needed reminding — that with his new administration comes the blanket normalization of white nationalism, including but not limited to the blanket pardoning of perpetrators of acts of white terrorism.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of white terrorists stormed the U.S. Capitol with the expressed purpose of preventing lawmakers from certifying the legally cast votes that named Joe Biden president. They brutally attacked police officers. They brought down barricades, scaled walls and broke U.S. Capitol building windows. They threatened legislators and unlawfully occupied their offices. On Monday night, just hours after his inauguration, President Donald Trump decided that more than 1500 of them — all but 14, in fact — had done nothing wrong and should be given full pardons.
From the Washington Post:
That means everyone prosecuted by the Justice Department, from the plotters imprisoned for seditious conspiracy and felons convicted of assaulting police officers to those who merely trespassed on the restricted grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, will soon be released from incarceration, if they were still in federal custody.Trump ordered his attorney general to make sure that those who are “currently held in prison are released immediately” and also to dismiss all pending indictments.“We hope they come out tonight, frankly,” Trump said as he signed the order.
Protesters gather on the second day of pro-Trump events fueled by President Donald Trump’s continued claims of election fraud to overturn the results before Congress finalizes them in a joint session of the 117th Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. | Source: Kent Nishimura / Getty
Trump spent virtually his entire first term as president condemning the Black Lives Matter movement. He even advocated for the military to shoot George Floyd protesters in the streets. It didn’t matter that the overwhelming majority of anti-police racism protests that erupted in the summer of 2020 were nonviolent. Because riots did break out, anyone who was even loosely associated with the movement was considered a thug and at least a potential terrorist.
Conservatives have often made the loud, wrong, white and fragile argument that Jan. 6 rioters were being prosecuted while BLM rioters were not, but, in fact, hundreds of demonstrators were charged with federal crimes in 2020 and thousands were arrested. Trump, who has been praised by some Black people for pardoning federal inmates during his first term, never even put the words “pardon” and “rioter” in the same sentence when it came to BLM protests, which were broadly characterized by Trump and other white conservatives as events that put police officers under attack. Meanwhile, video footage shows Jan. 6 rioters beating officers with flagpoles and shocking them with tasers.
Of course, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Trump instigated the criminals he is now pardoning. It’s almost ironic that he gets to be the president to absolve domestic terrorists of crimes they wouldn’t have committed if not for the months he spent conjuring baseless and factless propaganda about the 2020 presidential race being stolen from him.
Donald Trump is pretending to usher in a new era of law and order, but, really, it’s an era where crimes committed by him, on his behalf or in service of MAGA nationalism aren’t really crimes at all.
This is America — once again.
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