The pardons of the January 6th rioters and coup plotters are the greatest single betrayal by an American president in our history. It doesn’t matter how many people voted for Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter that there’s no hope of real accountability with Republicans controlling Congress and the Constitution, making removal impossible with today’s Republican Party. Democrats should still obviously introduce articles of impeachment, as explained, with all of his chest.
They should do this because it’s the right thing to do.
They should do it because no matter how bad you think January 6th was and the role the people he just pardoned played in that attack on your ability to rule yourself, it was worse.
They should do it because the men Trump pardoned will do horrible and illegal things likely involving horrible violence, for that’s what they were pardoned to do.
But they should also do it because of the pardons that will inevitably come that could "legalize" now unthinkable atrocities.
You’ve probably seen references on social media to the mass amnesty granted on March 21, 1933, for “penal acts committed in the national revolution of the German People,” which would have pardoned everyone who participated with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s first attempt to seize power in 1923. That landed him in jail, where he wrote Mein Kampf, in which he transmuted that violent failure into designs for a “legal path” to domination.
I think people are getting this history from this Atlantic piece, “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days,” which I imagine is being passed around Maralago as a cookbook:
[On] Tuesday, March 21, an Article 48 decree was issued amnestying National Socialists convicted of crimes, including murder, perpetrated “in the battle for national renewal.” Men convicted of treason were now national heroes. The first concentration camp was opened that afternoon, in an old brewery near the town center of Oranienburg, just north of Berlin. The following day, the first group of detainees arrived at another concentration camp, in an abandoned munition plant outside the Bavarian town of Dachau.
That mass amnesty coincided with a blitzkrieg of power grabs Hitler carried out unimpeded by the goober who appointed him, President Paul von Hindenburg, around what I now know as the Day of Potsdam, when the convenient crisis of the Reichstag Fire was transmuted into the Enabling Act of 1933 that effectively ended democratic law-making in Germany. This is, of course, a path we are on ourselves with the appointment of Project 2025’s Russ Vought to the Office of Management and Budget. (Vought believes neither the Senate is required to confirm him nor the House has any power to prevent Trump from ruling like a king.)
But there’s another set of Nazi pardons we must be thinking about right now, Andrea Pitzer reminds us in this week’s Next Comes What:
Back in 2017, I talked to Chris Hayes about a time, a year into Hitler’s rule in Germany, when state’s attorneys still sometimes tried to take action based on the law. Some two dozen paramilitary concentration camp guards were charged with torturing detainees in clearly illegal acts. They were sentenced in 1935.
Hitler pardoned them. Soon, these kinds of cases would no longer be brought at all. The message had been received.
You can read more about these pardons in Andrea’s post that inspired this episode. (Please subscribe to her Degenerate Art newsletter to keep Next Comes What humming.)
We—the people who’ve followed Ball of Thread—know what happens if Democrats do not immediately explain the stakes and harm of what Trump is doing and then take a disciplined approach to repeatedly re-informing the public of the dangers of these pardons in any way possible. Trump will weaponize his grievance myth to prosecute and persecute those who treated January 6th like the coup it was, regardless of what any pardons say. Those who received the pardons will be lionized and encouraged to break the law repeatedly until no law is left.
America doesn’t seem to understand the kind of emergency we are in. Worse, elected and prominent Democrats don’t seem particularly interested in describing what’s at risk, for instance, when Trump appoints a Secretary of Defense who has called for the military to take sides against American citizens, knowing there will never be 67 votes to remove him.
These are still high crimes, and the Constitution still exists. The traitors want to make treachery “lawful.” We must say, “Never.”
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