The revanchist culture war Donald Trump has declared on liberals, the mainstream media, and most members of Congress in his own party may only be beginning. On Friday, the president pardoned Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff convicted of defying a court order not to racially profile Latinos.

“I am pleased to inform you that I have just granted a full Pardon to 85 year old American patriot Sheriff Joe Arpaio,” the president tweeted as a Category 4 hurricane bore down on the coast Texas. “He kept Arizona safe!” Arpaio promptly thanked Trump and renewed a call for donations to his own legal defense fund.

In the days leading up to his Phoenix rally, Trump dropped hints that he was considering the move. “I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio,” he told Fox News on August 13, while on a “working vacation” in Bedminster, New Jersey. “He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him.” Arpaio, known for housing inmates in tent camps in the desert, where average temperatures soar above 100 degrees in the summer, and for bringing back chain gangs, is as much a hero to factions on the right as he is a villain on the left. (A rap sheet of Arpaio’s worst hits, including flubbing hundreds of sex crimes investigations, is available here.)

But Arpaio’s pardon seems a cut above—or below, really—the type of dirty politics in which Trump delights. In a bluntly titled column for Bloomberg, Noah Feldman wrote that the pardon shows “a contempt for the Constitution.” Feldman, who wrote the column in anticipation of the actual pardon, is a professor of constitutional law Harvard University.

Arpaio’s conviction was for failing to comply with a court order to stop the so-called “saturation patrols,” during which Arpaio’s officers would simply stop anyone who looked Latino and detain anyone with unsatisfactory immigration status. By refusing to comply with a federal judge’s order, Arpaio demonstrated contempt for the rule of law as it is delineated in the United States. “Arpaio didn’t just violate a law passed by Congress,” Feldman wrote. “His actions defied the Constitution itself, the bedrock of the entire system of government.”

In the weeks since white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Donald Trump fluctuated wildly in his public position on racial terror. Under duress, the president denounced the violence that resulted when a group of neo-Nazis clashed with counter-protesters, but couldn’t resist ad-libbing that fault lay on “many sides.” A follow-up statement specifically condemning groups like the Ku Klux Klan was quickly followed by an impromptu press conference in which Trump once again directed his anger at the left, while asserting that there had been some “fine people” among the tiki torch-bearing mob gathered in defense of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Hours before he read a carefully worded speech Wednesday calling on Americans to seek “unity based on the common values that unite us,” he went on an unscripted rant in Phoenix, accusing the media of fomenting racial panic and warning his supporters that “they are trying to take away our history and heritage.”

Few decisions by the president are as polarizing as pardoning a law enforcement officer convicted of breaking the law to advance a nativist political agenda. Which is presumably why Trump appeared to do it. CNN reports that the White House has already prepared the paperwork to pardon Arpaio and written talking points defending the decision, if and when Trump pulls the trigger. Not all of his advisers were so eager. Reports indicate that the Department of Justice was entirely cut out from the pardon process, yet another breach of norms. And, according to CBS News, Trump’s legal team had suggested he wait to make a decision until Arpaio is formally sentenced, since the sentence could be lenient (Arpaio is 85 years old), or because his contempt conviction could be overturned on constitutional grounds. Either scenario would have allowed the president to avoid what is a contentious, inflammatory move in the wake of Charlottesville.