The president's pardon power is thought by many to be virtually unlimited. As he heads out the door, President Trump's pardoning of criminals who lack remorse and cronies who lack conscience challenges us to reexamine that belief.
The unadorned words of the Constitution seem to place no limits on the pardon power except in the case of impeachment. But skeptics may be forgiven for asking why the Constitution should permit pardons for murderers, thieves, tax-cheats, fraudsters and secret foreign agents — or those who have obstructed justice, lied to the FBI, abused immigrants, used campaign and corporate cash for improper purposes, disguised personal expenditures as charitable contributions and used prostitutes to entrap enemies.
Pardons like these undermine the entire criminal justice system. If you're a Trump crony or someone who obstructed justice to protect him, crimes are not really crimes. They are a sordid badge of honor.
There are two systems of justice in this country, one for the rich and well-connected and the other for everyone else. Trump's pardons create two more categories, one for those in the president's favor and another for those who are not. Criminals in the president's favor go free. The rest end up in jail. There is little wonder why cynicism runs rampant.
Cynicism will be one of the lasting legacies in Trump's parade of horrors. And it pervades much more than the administration of justice.
Consider: Use of the White House to enrich the president and his family, use of the Justice Department to protect the president personally and punish the president's enemies, interference with congressional oversight responsibilities by withholding information or prohibiting witnesses from testifying.
Consider also retaliation against whistleblowers, governing by executive order instead of congressional enactment, trashing international agreements, encouraging violence, failing to protect the public from a health crisis for fear of hurting the stock market — and, at the end, throwing the country into turmoil by falsely challenging the legitimacy of presidential elections.
We used to think it cannot happen here. Well, it has been happening here, and the country must do something about it. We cannot afford simply to hope that another Trump will not reappear in the Oval Office. Human nature has not changed. Greed, the seduction of power, and lack of moral principle lurk in the shadows, ready always to pounce. Future Trumps may be more skilled than the original in stealing democracy.
Tackling the unfettered exercise of the pardon power should be among the first orders of business in the new Biden administration. The Constitution must not be allowed to become a death warrant when politicians behave as if it contained no constraints.
The pardon power has been used by President Trump to create a class of citizens who are above the law. It has been bad enough when Trump issued a pardon after a conviction or guilty plea. It has been even worse when he has telegraphed in advance that pardons for future illegal behavior are likely. That is nothing more than a license to ignore the law. And when a president pardons those who commit crimes in service of his interests, he licenses his own wrongdoing as well.
Richard Nixon one haughtily proclaimed that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Trump once said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and no one would stop him. A president who wields the pardon to shield his own criminality would be out-Nixoning Nixon.
The fact that the Constitution appears to place few restrictions on the exercise of the pardon power should not be an insuperable obstacle to reform. Many matters on which the Constitution is silent are dealt with through legislation to fill in gaps or reconcile conflicting provisions.
Among the many examples are constraints imposed by legislation on the use of firearms despite the absence of constraining words in the Second Amendment. Another is the permission enshrined in law to sue for libel or provide government support for religious-run schools despite the absence of constraining words in the First Amendment.
It is hard to imagine any good argument for permitting pardons as personal or political favors or to cover up a president's wrongdoing. It is equally hard to imagine a good argument against constraining the pardon power to cases of recognized injustice or situations of compelling mercy.
Some say that there are difficulties under the Constitution in trying to restrict the president's pardon power or defining when pardons are appropriate. Some also say there are difficulties in tackling other presidential abuses of power.
But difficult issues are difficult because of their importance. A hope that the depredations of the Trump administration will disappear when Trump is out of the Oval Office is naïve. Abuses of presidential power have been accumulating for decades. Reform of the pardon power is an essential starting point despite the challenges because the corrupt forgiveness of criminality is the rot that will eventually destroy the Constitution itself and render other reforms irrelevant.
In Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," Portia instructs that "the quality of mercy is not strained" and that mercy blesses the giver as well as the receiver. A corrupt pardon dressed in robes of phony mercy blesses neither. It diminishes both giver and receiver and threatens the rule of law that is the bedrock of American democracy.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.