The Daily Fuckup

By Dec. 15, 2020, the conversation around Donald Trump’s clemency power had already started to feel less like a sober exercise of presidential mercy and more like a test of who still had access in a collapsing administration. The final holiday wave of pardons and commutations had not yet landed, but the atmosphere around them was doing plenty of damage on its own. In and around the White House, the last weeks of the Trump presidency increasingly looked like a scramble in which proximity, loyalty, and personal usefulness mattered more than any coherent principle. That is a corrosive way to handle one of the Constitution’s most extraordinary powers, because the public is supposed to believe that clemency is reserved for justice, mercy, or exceptional circumstances. Instead, the mood inside Trump’s orbit suggested a political economy in which favors could be traded, relationships could be cashed in, and access itself could become a kind of currency.

That matters because clemency is not a decorative power or a footnote to the job. It is one of the most personal authorities the president holds, and that personal character is exactly why it requires public trust. A pardon can be justified in real cases of injustice, in situations where a prosecution was excessive, or where a sentence no longer serves the broader interests of fairness and mercy. But when the process starts to look like a backstage lobbying contest, it stops feeling like an act of judgment and starts feeling like a private transaction wrapped in official language. Trump had spent much of his presidency blurring the line between public office and personal loyalty, so it was not surprising that the pardon environment in the lame-duck period fit that pattern. By then, the assumption seemed to be that the right connection, the right message, or the right political value could matter as much as the merits of the underlying case. That is not how a healthy system is supposed to work, and the fact that so many people were already behaving as if it did work that way was part of the problem.

The danger was not limited to any one controversial pardon or one especially dubious request. The deeper issue was the climate that surrounded the process. Allies, donors, lobbyists, former officials, and other well-connected figures had every reason to believe that the final stretch of the Trump presidency could become an open season for influence. Even if the specifics of each request were opaque, the basic structure of the moment encouraged speculation that the last month in office might reward the people who knew how to get attention, or who had something useful to offer. That kind of environment is toxic because it teaches everybody involved the wrong lesson. Instead of asking whether a case is meritorious, people start asking who can reach the president, who can reach the people around him, and who can make a request seem politically advantageous. Once that logic takes hold, the public is no longer looking at an impartial system of justice but at a market for access. And when a White House begins to look like an access brokerage, the distinction between public service and private deal-making gets badly blurred.

The larger political backdrop made the whole situation even harder to defend. Trump had lost the election but was still refusing to behave like a normal outgoing president, and he remained surrounded by advisers and allies who were eager to preserve influence inside a shrinking window of time. At the same time, he was still pushing a relentless effort to undermine the election result, which cast a shadow over everything else the administration was doing. In that context, clemency could easily be read not as a separate civic act but as part of the same operating code: reward loyalty, protect friends, and treat government power as something to be used by insiders for insiders. That impression is damaging even when the actual final decisions have not yet been announced, because it signals how the outgoing administration understands authority. If people close to the president believe the last weeks are a chance to secure protection, payback, or favors, then the message to everyone watching is unmistakable. Institutions are flexible, rules are negotiable, and access is the real measure of worth. That is a cynical way to end a presidency, and cynicism has a way of sticking around long after the headlines move on.

Institutionally, the problem goes beyond one president’s taste for controversial pardons. The pardon power is important in part because it is discretionary, but that same discretion makes abuse especially visible and especially harmful. If the public comes away believing that accountability can be negotiated by the well connected, then the damage does not stop with one administration. It changes how lobbyists behave, how insiders pursue their goals, and how future presidents imagine the boundaries of the office. It also leaves ordinary people with a much uglier lesson about how the system works: fairness is for some people, and influence is for others. Trump’s final weeks had already become a stress test for the presidency’s ethical guardrails, and the clemency chatter made it plain those guardrails were not holding up particularly well. Even before the later pardons and commutations arrived, the smell test was bad. The presidency was supposed to represent the public interest, but in Trump’s lame duck it increasingly looked like a place where access could be turned into advantage and power could be turned into protection.