Pardons Become the Latest Trump Flex

New York Times

28-05-2025

Before he left office in 1953, President Harry Truman handed out a number of pardons to politically connected convicts — and, perhaps to avoid blowback, he did so entirely in secret.
In 2001, Bill Clinton waited until the final day of his presidency to issue a pardon he knew would go off like a political bomb: to Marc Rich, the oil trader and fugitive indicted in a sprawling tax evasion case, whose former wife had made donations to the Clinton presidential library and the Democratic Party.
And around Christmas in 2008, President George W. Bush rescinded a pardon he had granted to a Brooklyn developer, Isaac Toussie, after The New York Post reported that Toussie's father had donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee and another $2,300 to Senator John McCain.
'This is a good decision,' a Justice Department lawyer told the White House aide who went to retrieve Toussie's pardon grant before it could be delivered to him, according to my colleague Peter Baker's book on the Bush presidency, 'Days of Fire.' 'Because I don't know if anybody could survive this.'
The power of the pardon is so absolute that the only way to punish a president for how he uses it is to impeach him or to vote him out. Most presidents have wanted to avoid those things. So they've granted pardons carefully, even furtively, often saving what might prove scandalous until the very last days of their terms.
'The pardon power for a president is virtually unlimited,' said Alberto Gonzales, who served under Bush as White House counsel and then as the attorney general. 'In almost every case at the federal level, the question is not a concern over the authority to grant clemency, but whether clemency is appropriate given history, the circumstances of the offender and the politics.'
This week, though, President Trump has shown he has no intention of allowing such an unchecked executive power to go unexploited over as trifling a concern as the ordinary rules of politics. Rules that say, among other things, that doling out favors to donors and allies might carry an odor of impropriety.
Today, Trump pardoned former Representative Michael Grimm, a Republican from New York who pleaded guilty in 2014 to felony tax evasion. Grimm has been a vigorous and public Trump supporter.
My colleague Ken Vogel reported Tuesday that the president had pardoned Paul Walczak, a convicted tax cheat, after Walczak's mother raised millions of dollars for Trump's presidential campaigns and those of other Republicans.
The same day, the White House announced pardons for two reality-television stars, Todd and Julie Chrisley, who had been convicted of evading taxes and defrauding banks of more than $30 million, after their daughter depicted them as persecuted conservatives in a speech at last summer's Republican National Convention.
And this week, the president's new pardon attorney, Ed Martin, told The Wall Street Journal that he had personally fast-tracked a pardon for Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff convicted of bribery who has been an outspoken supporter of Trump's immigration agenda.
This is scarcely the first time Trump has defied political gravity. But it still represents something new.
Trump knows that his first-term pardons of political allies like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn didn't cost him much if any political support.
Since that first term, he has pressed so hard and for so long to demonize and undo the work of the Biden administration's Justice Department — claiming that it was weaponized against him and his supporters — that he may have conditioned much of the public to believe him if he says that the recipient of a pardon was indeed a fellow victim.
He appears to be counting on his having changed the weather, hoping that the old rules won't apply to him in this term, either.
Are Trump's approval ratings rising?
My colleague Ruth Igielnik, a Times polling editor, looks at a key number that helps explain the political moment. Today, she has a temperature-check on how voters feel about President Trump.
Donald Trump came into office in January with the lowest approval rating of any modern president — except for his own at the start of his first term.
Over the first 100 days of his second term, Trump's approval rating steadily declined, similar to what Barack Obama and Bill Clinton faced in their first months as president. The difference is Trump's lower starting point: Unlike his predecessors, he quickly found himself underwater, with more Americans disapproving of his job performance than approving of it.
But since the beginning of May, Trump's job approval has stopped dropping. It might even be improving ever so slightly — although the few high-quality polls we have seen recently show little change.
One possible explanation: Trump may have already lost all of the tentative or hesitant support he once enjoyed among independents, and he can't drop much more because of his rock-solid Republican support.
In our last New York Times/Siena College poll, conducted in late April, 86 percent of Republicans approved of Trump's job performance, while 92 percent of Democrats disapproved of it. So Trump is not losing many Republicans, and Democrats disliked him from the start. But among independents, just 29 percent approved of his performance.
For a finer-grain look at his bleeding among independents, consider two polls by Quinnipiac University: In January, more independents viewed Trump unfavorably than favorably by a difference of five percentage points. In April, Trump was underwater with independents by a margin of 22 percentage points.
What Iowa tells us about Trump's America
Over the weekend, my colleague Shane Goldmacher published a report showing just how much President Trump has realigned the American political landscape. He found that 1,433 counties were 'triple-trending' Republican — that is, they shifted toward Trump in each of the last three presidential elections — while only 57 counties trended Democratic in that way. I asked him to tell us about one state that tells the story.
President Obama won Iowa in 2012, but the state has since completely fallen off the battleground map. And while Iowa is too white to truly show the racial changes in the political coalitions of the two parties, it shows vividly how Trump has made inroads with the working class, while Democrats are inching up only in the richest and most educated enclaves.
All told, 69 of the state's 99 counties were 'triple-trending' toward Trump — and by wide margins, with none shifting by fewer than 15 percentage points and nearly two dozen shifting by 40 or more.
Not a single county in Iowa trended steadily toward Democrats between 2012 and 2024.
Two Iowa counties did vote more Democratic in 2024 than they had 2012, however. But the demographics of those pockets were as revealing as the Trump bump across the rest of the state.
One was the state's wealthiest county, Dallas, a suburb of Des Moines. It's the only Iowa county with a median household income above $100,000.
The other was the most educated county in the state, Johnson, home to the University of Iowa.
Democrats point to a handful of close House races in recent years to insist that they still have hope in Iowa, though notably Republicans currently hold every congressional seat in the state. If Democrats are ever going to make the state competitive again, it will require improving in a lot more counties than two.
Not a taco fan, it would seem
My colleague Shawn McCreesh sends this dispatch from the White House beat.
President Trump learned a new acronym today.
He was holding one of his marathon question-and-answer sessions with journalists in the Oval Office when one reporter asked him about a new term of art being used on Wall Street.
Taco.
It stands for 'Trump Always Chickens Out.' Coined by a columnist for The Financial Times, it captures the belief — held by an increasing number of traders and analysts — that Trump never really follows through with his tariff threats in the end, and implies a warning to buy or sell accordingly.
Evidently, this was the first time Trump had heard the term, which immediately sent him into a state of high dudgeon.
'Oh, isn't that nice,' he started to say. 'I chicken out? I've never heard that.' He offered a defense of his trade maneuvering. But he seemed as annoyed by the question as by the term itself.
'Don't ever say what you said,' he said to the reporter who had said what she had said. 'That's a nasty question. To me, that's the nastiest question.'
It had seemed like sort of an inconsequential question compared with others he was getting on Wednesday. There were lots of big, scary, thorny, inconvenient questions, about Russia and Iran and Gaza and nuclear weapons, and about how Elon Musk dared take a swipe at Trump on CBS. But this was the one that clearly unnerved him.
And there was a pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain kind of quality to the exchange: What will it mean if Wall Street and the world stop believing in the power of the tariff wizard? Taco is both a serious matter — Trump has, indeed, retreated from many of his trade threats — and what sounds like a joke. Made at his expense.
And that clearly made an impression.
Just before the press was ushered out, Trump alluded to the new term all on his own. 'They'll say, 'Oh, he was chicken, he was chicken!'' he said while riffing about continuing negotiations with China. 'That's so unbelievable,' he said, sounding perhaps a little bruised. 'Usually, I'm the opposite. They say, 'You're too tough.''