Last year, before winning the presidency, Donald Trump retweeted a Benito Mussolini quote about preferring to live a day as a lion rather than a century as a sheep. It was exactly the kind of sentiment a mediocre man such as Trump admires and considers profound.

Why Donald Trump pardoned the unpardonable Joe Arpaio Read more

When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked him whether he regretted it, Trump showed the contempt for democracy, history and other people’s intelligence we all know as his trademark: “I know who said it. What difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?”



This is the same man who pardoned Joe Arpaio last Friday. Presidents weigh the dignity of their office and the specifics of a case before granting clemency; autocrats give their political allies get-out-of-jail-free cards. And we all know how much Trump admires autocrats past and present.



It’s tempting to focus on Arpaio’s long history of crimes, failures, bad decisions, federal investigations and electoral defeat and ask: why support this man? But we know why Trump supports Arpaio and those like him: it buys him a day’s worth of friendly coverage in the rightwing press. We know who these men really are, and turning them or their marriage of convenience into a mystery confuses the real issue here.

The real issue is not Trump’s indifference to the constitution or the destruction Arpaio’s years of lawlessness brought to countless Arizona families. Those stories are upsetting and need to be told, but unfortunately they constitute well-trodden ground at this point.



The real issue is whether any Republicans are willing to do anything about it. So far most of the “cooler heads” we keep hearing about – the generals, the long-time national security professionals, the law-and-order types – haven’t so much as batted an eyelash.

This is a clear message from Trump to every judge that they shouldn’t bother sentencing his political allies

That’s disturbing, because this pardon is a clear message from Trump to every judge in the country that they shouldn’t bother sentencing his political allies. No matter who you voted for in the last election, you need to take what that means very seriously.



If you celebrate or ignore that step from this president, you will have to celebrate or ignore it from every president who follows him, and I sincerely doubt that’s what the American people truly want.



Arpaio was not sentenced for “doing his job”, as his apologists continue to claim in obvious bad faith. (Anyone who tells you that is either ignorant of the case or trying to get a rise out of you, and there’s no reason to indulge them.) He was sentenced for contempt of court for ignoring repeated orders by a federal judge to end his illegal campaign of racial profiling.



For years he simply behaved as though our nation’s laws didn’t apply to him, and that choice finally caught up with him. It’s worth repeating that the very first pardon Trump granted was not to a prisoner of conscience or a man suffering from some unjust sentencing requirement. His first pardon was for an openly racist scofflaw who took the coward’s way out when it came time to face the consequences.

There’s no need to guess how this power could be abused next. Arpaio no more deserved legal clemency than any Trump associate embroiled in the Russia investigation, or some white nationalist who happens to catch Trump on a good day.



Judges – and juries, for that matter – need to know their work still counts for something in this country, and that Trump will respect legal decisions he personally doesn’t like. No one who supports our way of life would expect anything less.



Trump’s latest chief of staff, John Kelly, has been busy cleaning house and trying to enforce some kind of professionalism and integrity in an administration that so far has shown no capacity for either. And yet it was presumably Kelly who sent out Tom Bossert, the president’s homeland security adviser, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos this weekend to defend the indefensible Arpaio pardon.



Bossert offered a truly Trumpian argument: “It was a contempt order and not an issue of his job or not his job. I really don’t know the details of it.” In other words: “I know what Arpaio did. What difference does it make whether it was illegal?”

The Arpaio pardon is a chance for the people in this administration to show they take our laws and our government more seriously than that. History will not forget those who choose career over country.