The truth is that “America’s toughest sheriff,” as Arpaio liked to call himself, was an incompetent buffoon, a sour mash of cruelty and inattention that cost his county hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, fees and legal settlements. The only thing he accomplished in his decades in power was to become, first, a national symbol of brutality toward jail inmates and, later, a poster child for anti-immigrant racism. But pardon decrees cannot say any of that. They cannot say: “Because no one can stop us we are today rescuing a sheriff who violated his oath of office and broke the law and never apologized for doing so.”

Trump’s pardon makes sense only as a raw act of self-perpetuating power designed to give succor to those caught in the middle of the investigation into the Trump team’s ties to Russia, and to encourage other lawless law officers to ignore those court orders with which they disagree.