Since discovering that the constitution gives him the somewhat controversial power to absolve criminals who are also his friends, Donald Trump has pardoned more people and commuted more sentences in his first 18 months in office than any of his three immediate predecessors. The pardoning spree continued on Tuesday, as Trump issued two more before jetting off to Europe to stomp all over NATO, this time clearing the names of father-son arsonist duo Dwight and Steven Hammond, Oregon cattle ranchers whose 2016 fight against the federal government became a conservative cause célèbre. While presidents have historically waited to issue high-profile pardons until their final years in office, Trump—who is continually stalled in enacting his agenda by irritating roadblocks like Congressional approval—has exercised no such restraint. Instead, eschewing such norms as the five-year waiting period customary for pardon requests to be submitted to the Department of Justice, the president has seized on this nearly-unlimited executive power to feed his die-hard base—affirming, in their eyes, his godlike power to set the universe to rights.

For the insurgent right, the narrative of the Hammond family represented the perfect case of government overreach. Though the two men were charged and convicted of setting fire to federally owned land in Oregon, and served time in prison, a federal appeals court later decided that their initial months-long sentences were below the federal mandatory minimum. So father and son were ordered to serve more time—both were ultimately slapped with five-year sentences, of which Dwight has served three years, and Steven four. But their second sentencing happened to coincide with an upswing in public displays of anti-government militant action: the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his sons, who had made headlines for their own armed occupation of federal land in 2014, saw an opportunity to replay their own “rancher-versus-feds” drama and decamped to Oregon to help occupy a national wildlife reserve. The siege ended after 41 days with one fellow militant dead and Bundy and his sons facing criminal charges, all of which were later dropped.

At the time, Trump condemned the Bundy occupation, arguing that Barack Obama should negotiate with the Bundys and their followers. “You cannot let people take over federal property,” he told The New York Times. “You can’t, because once you do that, you don’t have a government anymore. I think, frankly, they’ve been there too long. . . . At a certain point,” he added, “you have to do something and you have to be firm and you have to be strong, you have to be a government.” Yet on Tuesday, the White House argued that the Hammonds’ plight was markedly different, a classic case of big government running amok. “The Hammonds are multigeneration cattle ranchers in Oregon imprisoned in connection with a fire that leaked onto a small portion of neighboring public grazing land,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “The evidence at trial regarding the Hammonds’ responsibility for the fire was conflicting, and the jury acquitted them on most of the charges.” The Obama administration’s decision to appeal their original sentences, the White House claimed, represented an “overzealous” attempt to punish “devoted family men [and] respected contributors to their local community.”

Pardoning the Hammonds is politically safer than going anywhere near the Bundys themselves, who espoused views so racist that even Ted Cruz was forced to recant his support for their cause. (Trump himself would have trouble defending a man who said that African-Americans may have been “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things.”) Instead, Trump gets to solidify support among conservative voters enamored with the frontier romanticism of the Bundy standoff without the taint of the Bundys, themselves. Perhaps most important, the Hammonds pardons signal once again that Trump will use the powers of the presidency as a cudgel in the culture wars. As with other right-wing figures he’s pardoned—pundit Dinesh D’Souza for campaign finance fraud, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal contempt, and ex-Navy sailor and Hillary Clinton e-mail truther Kristian Saucier for leaking classified military information—the Hammonds pardons seems tailor-made to trigger the libs, in the parlance of the day. With the midterms on the horizon, and his base continually hungry for red meat, Trump once again gets to cast himself as the one person who can bring grace to the victims of leftist injustice—or, at least, the ones that got the most airtime on Fox News.