It’s not every day you see a nursing home executive, a reality TV star, and a convicted drug lord all lumped into the same headline. But that’s exactly what happened after President Donald Trump issued a new wave of controversial pardons that’s got people talking — and not in a good way.
Since stepping back into office this January, Trump’s been handing out pardons like party favors, and some legal experts are alarmed. “The pardon power has always been a little bit problematic because it’s this completely unconstrained power that the president has,” Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told AFP. He added, “Most presidents have issued at least some pardons where people look at them and they say: ‘This seems to be self-serving’ or ‘this seems to be corrupt in some way.’” But when it comes to Trump, Roosevelt says he’s taken it “in a bigger, more aggressive way with sort of no sense of shame.”
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The list of people getting a second chance under Trump reads like a strange political reality show. Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive convicted of tax crimes, made the list. What’s raising eyebrows? His mother attended a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago back in April. Then there’s Todd and Julie Chrisley, the reality TV couple convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion. Their daughter Savannah has been vocal in her support of Trump and even spoke at the Republican National Convention last year.
More than half a dozen former Republican lawmakers, a Virginia sheriff who took $75,000 in bribes, and even Ross Ulbricht — the man behind the infamous “Silk Road” online drug marketplace — were also pardoned. Ulbricht had been serving a life sentence before Trump gave him a get-out-of-jail card on just his second day in office.
While presidents from both sides of the aisle have faced criticism over questionable pardons — think Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon or Bill Clinton’s pardon of a major donor’s husband — some experts argue Trump’s approach is on another level. Barbara McQuade, a former prosecutor and now law professor at the University of Michigan, didn’t mince words in a Bloomberg opinion piece. “Trump is in a class by himself in both scope and shamelessness,” she wrote. “To him, pardons are just another deal. As long as a defendant can provide something of value in return, no crime seems too serious.”
Democratic lawmaker Jamie Raskin also isn’t staying quiet. In a letter to Ed Martin, Trump’s pardon attorney at the Justice Department, he asked what standards were being used to decide who gets pardoned. “It at least appears that you are using the Office of the Pardon Attorney to dole out pardons as favours to the President’s loyal political followers and most generous donors,” Raskin wrote.
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Martin, for his part, isn’t denying the partisan tilt. After Trump pardoned the Virginia sheriff, he posted “No MAGA left behind” on X, doubling down on the Trump campaign slogan.
And as Lee Kovarsky, a law professor at the University of Texas, warned in the New York Times, Trump’s actions could set a dangerous new precedent. He called it “patronage pardoning,” adding that by reducing the consequences of criminal acts, Trump is making a “public commitment to protect and reward loyalism, however criminal.”
So whether it’s celebrities, donors, or politicians with sketchy pasts, one thing seems clear: if you’re in Trump’s corner, there might just be a pardon in your future.