Donald Trump has just issued pardons for several people we’ve all heard of. One was once the Governor of Illinois. One was New York’s police commissioner, and nearly became head of Homeland Security. When engaged in massive financial irregularities on Wall Street.
All of them were convicted of committing crimes.
Why should people like this get the pardons? It would seem that they are more criminal-minded than the guy who turns to crime as a route out of poverty, or at least a way of making a living. I say more criminal-minded because someone who is the Governor of Illinois is in one of the most advantageous positions this nation has to offer. Yet he felt he had to break the rules in order to line his pocket by selling a Senate seat.
Blogojevich had very good options in front of him, always, in which he could have been law-abiding. But such was the weakness of his moral side, and such was his greed, that even though his position was cushy he was willing to corrupt our democracy to line his pocket.
The young man who robs some 7/11 had nothing like that degree of simultaneous legitimacy and well-being available to him. He didn’t need so deeply corrupt a moral structure as Blogojevich clearly has to turn to crime.
So when Trump issues these pardons to people who committed crimes despite having such a privileged place in the world, and doesn’t pardon the young man who robbed the 9/11, Trump is supporting the more wholly criminal over the less.
But it shows that he really doesn’t care a whit about anyone’s criminality. Most of his best friends are criminal, and he’s been a con man and fraud for decades. And it shows that it is only the people who are face-cards in the deck of Americans — not the average people, not the marginal who struggle in obscurity — so he dramatizes his own character when he deals onto the table these face-cards who don’t hesitate to embrace corruption and do the crime.
Affirming, therefore, people like himself.