On Monday, President Donald Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 rioters, including those who violently attacked the police and broke into the Capitol building to stop the electoral count. With those pardons, Trump essentially affirmed that he supports the use of violent means to override the rule of law and the processes of democracy so he can keep and hold power.
Vice President JD Vance said the administration would review the cases of violence more carefully and be selective about pardons and commuting sentences. Of course Trump did not do that. Yes, Trump pardoned some who were hapless members of the crowd who broke into the Capitol, but he also pardoned those who beat up the Capitol Police with baseball bats and sprayed them with bear spray. He commuted the sentences of leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, some of whom were convicted of conspiring to use violent force to overthrow the government.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
I had just been sworn in as a member of Congress on that day, and it is possible that one of the only reasons I am alive, along with former Vice President Mike Pence and many other members of Congress, is that some of the most violent, like Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, had been arrested before arriving in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Tarrio was released from a federal prison in Louisiana as news of his commutation broke.
For some reason, Democrats and Republicans who are condemning these pardons are concerned the rioters attacked the police — that’s bad, certainly — but the real reason these pardons cast such a long shadow is that the rioters attacked the police at the instigation of Trump himself. They attacked the police because they were told by Trump to go to the Capitol and stop the certification of an election he claimed was stolen.
Do you see the problem here?
We as a country have always been saved by “institutional forbearance,” which is to say the ethics and restraint of our leaders, particularly our executive leaders, who have always had the capacity to seize more power but have chosen not to. I am not saying Democratic presidents have been saints, but I have yet to see a line Trump won’t cross if it is to his advantage. There are no rules for him.
To some degree, presidents have faced the institutional guardrails of checks and balances. But not one of them has stopped Trump, and it’s hard to imagine they will going forward. Trump couldn’t be held accountable through impeachment; he couldn’t be held accountable through the courts; the Supreme Court delayed his trials and then ruled that he could not be prosecuted for “official actions.” The last guardrail to fall was the power of the electorate to uphold the constitutional order, which it chose not to do.
Meanwhile, former President Joe Biden didn’t do us any favors when he issued “preemptive” and blanket pardons for Hunter Biden and other family members on his way out the door. These are legally suspect, but worse is that they give Trump cover to do what he will.
So here we are.
After Trump’s 2016 election, I was worried about the threat he posed to our democracy. In 2017, I gave up my academic career and ran campaign after campaign to try to flip Georgia’s 7th Congressional District and flip Georgia for the Democrats. Some Republicans — including former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — gave up careers, deep friendships and even the safety of their families to try to stop Trump. Many millions of others also stepped up to run for office, to work on campaigns, to knock doors and raise money in ways they never had before. There was a cost to what we did.
One of the reasons I and many others are so angry with the Democratic Party is that its leaders, including Biden, arrogantly frittered away this effort and goodwill in thrall to identity politics and failed economic theories. Rather than making the hard choices to build a coalition that could endure, many in the party leadership and their partners in the mainstream media and left-wing interest groups chose instead to savage anyone who dared to challenge the direction of the party as “betrayers” of cherished values. In 2024, Trump was not popular. He went into the election with a 44% approval rating. But the American people saw the Democratic Party as worse. Let that sink in.
As I wrote before, I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as it might sound for Trump to seize absolute power, but I never said it wasn’t going to be very, very rough.
As Trump faces the inevitable obstacles to his agenda, as his policies start to exact an economic price, he is likely to reach for more and more dangerous levers of power to impose his will — the power of surveillance, of persecution, of harassment and perhaps even of violence — which are now available to him as they never were before. After all he can just preemptively pardon anyone who might be investigated. And what are our leaders going to do? Impeach him? Sue him? Vote him out of office?
In Trump’s inaugural address, he styled himself as God’s chosen candidate. But as I steel myself for the days to come, I think of Trump as God’s hard question to each of us: Do we really want a democracy? Do we really want freedom? Do we deserve it?
In the days ahead, you and I, Democrat, Republican, independent and everything in between, are going to be tested in ways we never have been before. We are going to have to prove we really want this country that was built with the blood, toil and sacrifice of so many. And though the cost was high in 2016, this time, it is going to be much higher.
Carolyn Bourdeaux is a former member of Congress from Georgia’s 7th District. She is a contributor to the AJC Opinion page.
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