Four years ago on an otherwise quiet workday in January, the few people who were watching the lead-up to President Joe Biden’s presidential certification in the House of Representatives live might have had an inkling that something out of the ordinary was about to take place. Even so, those who had tuned in on C-Span or one of the networks were as stunned as anyone else when a mob summoned by Donald Trump charged to the Capitol and attacked police officers guarding the vote certification process.
Now, as his second term in the White House approaches, the president-elect has said he might pardon the nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants on day one of his new administration. If he does, this would be yet another bad day for the rule of law and a thumb in the eye of support for law enforcement in the United States.
Mr. Trump’s planned pardons are not popular, except among his base. Two-thirds of Americans polled last month said they opposed pardons for people convicted of crimes in the riot. But even though many Trump voters remain motivated in opposition to calls to “defund the police,” six out of 10 disagreed with the polling majority and said they believed that the rioters should have their convictions tossed out.
“Back the blue,” they declare on their bumper stickers, but ignore the more than 140 police officers injured in the attack, an officer who suffered strokes related to the stress of the attack, three people who died as a result of medical emergencies during the riot, one rioter who was shot by police, and four police officers who later died by suicide. The contradiction in these two positions is stunning and points to a taste for violence that has gripped large swaths of the United States populace.
Adam Serwer neatly encapsulated this observation in his 2021 best seller “The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America.” A central point of the essay collection, “cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion,” sums up a time in which people on both sides of the political divide have an increased tolerance — eagerness, even — for increasingly inhumane ideas. For evidence of this, we need look no further than to the bipartisan support for a new anti-immigration bill that would have the federal government deport unauthorized noncitizens after they are simply charged with a crime — not convicted. Forty-eight Democrats joined the entire Republican House in voting for the measure, named for a tragedy in which a 22-year-old nursing student was killed in Georgia by a man who had entered the U.S. illegally who had been charged with shoplifting, but was not detained, before her murder last year. As heartbreaking as the student’s death is, it does not justify throwing out the core concept of law — innocent until proven guilty. Yet in Donald Trump’s America that will be just the beginning, starting with the Jan. 6 pardons.