In early October, Donald Trump chatted briefly with reporters, one of whom asked whether he’s planning to pardon his top aides before leaving office. “It’s not something I’m thinking about now,” the president replied, though he quickly added that he believes he can “do whatever I want.”
A month later, it’s clearly something he’s “thinking about now.”
In the days and weeks that followed the Republican’s brief comments, he told Time magazine that he’s prepared to issue pardons to many members of his administration. Soon after, Trump sat down with Newsmax for a lengthy interview, and when the discussion turned to pardons, he said, “I can tell you this, I don’t want to see my people go through — because these people are lunatics on the, on the left — I don’t want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”
This week, the president went a little further still during a podcast interview with The New York Post’s Miranda Devine.
To be sure, the premise of the relevant question was rather odd. Devine suggested that unnamed Democratic officials are secretly plotting to arrest Republican megadonor Elon Musk, “seize his factories,” and “nationalize” his SpaceX company — an agenda that no Democratic officials or congressional candidates have actually endorsed.
Trump responded that he doesn’t expect any of that to happen, but suggested that a presidential pardon is very much on the table. “We’ll have to protect them,” he said.
Asked about possible preemptive pardons for Musk and others who’ve worked in his administration, Trump replied, “Well, that’s what [Joe] Biden did. He gave everybody a pardon.”
He added, “I would if I needed to, sure. I would not even think about it. I’d do it, I did it for J6,” referring to his Day One pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, including violent convicted felons who clashed with police officers.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
