Trump’s Sinister Attempt to Whitewash History

His spate of pardons is an offense against all of us.

Source: lev radin / Shutterstock.com

The days and weeks bring cascades of constitutional outrages from the Trump administration, and there is a risk that they all pool together. But the downpour of seventy-seven pardons earlier this week, covering nearly the entire band of confederates who willingly put in with Trump to steal the 2020 election, is an outlier and historic outrage even by Trump’s standards.

Just for starters, the pardons covered all the core figures, including the unindicted co-conspirators, who came within view of preventing the peaceful transfer of power to the duly elected Biden Administration. It was a despicable assault on the republic itself, the worst since at least the Civil War and perhaps in the nation’s history. It did incalculable damage to all the people the January 6 insurrection harmed, beginning with the more than 140 officers who were injured during the attack.

The ultimate harm, however, is to all of us. Trump’s shameless design is to whitewash history while lionizing the plotters and terrorists who abetted his attempted coup.

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Trump’s statement announcing the pardons was nothing less than infuriating: he referred to the seventy-seven as “victims of political persecution” who were “targeted for defending the Constitution.” Trump’s proclamation declared that the pardons “end a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continue the process of national reconciliation.”

Of course, the “grave national injustice” was the conspiracy to overthrow an election. The “national reconciliation” is a demand for collective amnesia. In Trump’s retelling, January 6 wasn’t a day of national disgrace but “a beautiful day full of love and peace.”

Meanwhile, Ed Martin, the Trump loyalist now in charge of pardons, posted about the seventy-seven by saying, “No MAGA left behind.”

The goal is not just to escape accountability. It is to invert the moral order—to make loyalty to Trump, not fidelity to law, the measure of patriotism.

Never has the dark side of the phrase “history is the propaganda of the victors” been so starkly apparent. And never has the Constitution’s dedication to a marketplace of truth been so debased.

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The list of the pardoned comprises all the main players who conspired with Trump in his various plots to steal the election. Recall that, for sound strategic reasons—principally to move the case along quickly—Special Counsel Jack Smith named Trump only in his first indictment but included six co-conspirators. There they all were pardoned yesterday: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, Kenneth Chesebro, and Boris Epshteyn.

These are the very people whose betrayal of the public trust is set out in great detail in the first Trump indictment: Eastman, who proposed a coup he knew was illegal; Powell, who claimed to have evidence that voting machines switched votes; Chesebro, who masterminded the lawless “alternate electors” scheme; and Giuliani, whose boundless and buffoonish series of false claims—e.g., the suitcases of phony ballots—he later admitted were false. Even Clark, whom the Supreme Court effectively inoculated in its infamous immunity opinion, got his just-in-case get-out-of-jail-free card.

Among the worst of the beneficiaries was Mark Meadows—Trump’s chief of staff, who operated as mission control on January 6, fielding cell phone traffic from the Hill and watching Trump’s callous glee as the Capitol was overrun. He likely knows more than anyone all the dirty goings-on by Trump during January 6 and the days leading up to it. He had been providing limited cooperation to Jack Smith to escape liability. It’s hard to see how or why he provides more evidence to the country, and the historical record, at this point.

Beneath the headliners sit local operatives and “alternate electors” from swing states such as Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada—figures charged or under investigation for submitting false certifications or harassing election officials. Together, they form the full ecosystem of election subversion, from the Oval Office to the county courthouse.

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The pardon power was conceived as a tool of grace—to temper justice with mercy, to restore dignity to the reformed. Traditionally, it is used sparingly, after punishment has been served and contrition shown. But Trump has turned the concept inside out. From the beginning, he has used pardons as favors and shields, rewarding loyalty and silencing potential witnesses.

Now he has gone further still: wielding the pardon power not as an act of forgiveness but as an Orwellian weapon for bleaching history.

Pardons serve a particular purpose in the U.S. criminal justice system, or really in any evolved criminal justice system. They are not for the innocent or the unrepentant. To the contrary, the traditional legal criteria used by the DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney specify that pardons are for offenders who have shown remorse and accepted responsibility for their crimes and who have, over at least five years since completion of their sentence, demonstrated good character and rehabilitation.

Rays of Hope

Those criteria have been put through the shredders at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue. And the shredder feeder is none other than Ed Martin Jr., perhaps as ruthless and politically minded an operator as currently exists in the Department of Justice—which is saying something.

And the scope of the pardons is everything that Trump could possibly get away with. They extend to “all conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support … of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential Electors in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election.” In one stroke, the man who led a conspiracy to overturn an election has bleached the records of the many loyal traitors who made it possible.

This is not clemency. It is an act of historical vandalism.

Nor is there any prospect that the pardons will be narrowed or struck down despite their extraordinary reach. The pardon power is rarely subject to judicial review; typically, no one has standing to challenge it. Instead of a body of case law, there exists a kind of common-law understanding built on precedent.

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Here, the most pertinent precedent is likely President Ford’s pardon of disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon for “all offenses against the United States which he … has committed or may have committed or taken part in during his Presidency.” Nixon may well have insisted on such breadth as an insurance policy against prosecutions for crimes beyond those forming the basis of the proposed Articles of Impeachment.

So here, the seventy-seven likely skate for any offenses they may already have committed. A good example would be perjury, which is frequently a sort of tag-along crime.

The pardon doesn’t, of course, cover crimes they may commit going forward. And perhaps more importantly, it can’t cover state crimes—meaning states such as Georgia can pursue investigations and charges for some of the same conduct that they now know can’t be charged federally. But Trump’s offenses were first and foremost against the nation and the federal Constitution, and he has now paralyzed the ability of those forces to respond.

It’s beyond galling to consider that our government has now reconfigured terrorists as patriots and an attempted insurrection as a love-in.

It’s no less perverse than a presidential proclamation declaring Lincoln “an upstart, buffoon, and boor,” or Aaron Burr “a man of lofty spirit and scrupulous honor,” as political antagonists of the past once insisted. The goal is not just to escape accountability. It is to invert the moral order—to make loyalty to Trump, not fidelity to law, the measure of patriotism.

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For all the unfairness to the many victims of Trump’s crimes, the greatest injustice is to history, the American identity, and each of us.

From a convergence of freakish circumstance, Trump dodged the accountability of criminal law. That entirely righteous effort is now almost certainly moribund. Donald Trump, perpetrator of a series of grave crimes against the nation and a longer series of lies about those crimes, will almost certainly escape all meaningful punishment.

So be it. But the events of January 6 remain a critical part of history, and so long as we indulge the gross fictions that Trump and his allies maintain, we can never come to grips with them.

It was a necessary part of absorbing the past and learning from our mistakes that we convened national commissions for the Kennedy assassination, for 9/11, and even—though it went off the tracks—for the Russia scandals and the Mueller Report.

We gave each of those events our full focus as a nation, with government investigations—subpoenas, grand juries, sworn testimony—to get to the bottom of what happened, or as close as we could.

Here, the events happened in plain sight, and Trump’s efforts to paint completely over them are ultimately doomed to fail. But there remain hundreds of unsettled details that will leave lacunae in the historical record where a comprehensive investigation could have provided clarity.

And because these pardons arrived before prosecutions were complete—or even begun—their most devastating effect is epistemic: they rob the nation of its right to know. The investigations that might have mapped the full conspiracy are now legally foreclosed. It’s like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when we see the Ark lost to obscurity in a government warehouse.

Historians will try. Congressional committees will issue reports. But the core record of what happened—sworn testimony, evidence tested in court—will not be able to take root. And that void is where myth takes hold. The coup becomes a “controversy,” the insurrection a “protest,” and the law itself a matter of opinion.

The result is a dual collapse: of accountability and of memory. Our children and grandchildren will inherit an official history in which the peaceful transfer of power was a “debate,” not a sacred principle. That is how authoritarian societies begin—not with just censorship, but with selective forgetting.

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We should all be fuming today—not just because justice has been denied, but because the very notion of accountability is being hollowed out. The system cannot survive if truth is optional and loyalty is rewarded above law. The pardons complete the project begun on January 6: not merely to seize power, but to erase the evidence that power was ever stolen.

Talk to you later.

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