Pete Karmanos thinks Kwame Kilpatrick and Donald Trump were made for each other, and he should know: He's spent more than a decade shilling for both those grifters.

Karmanos, who ran with the Gilberts and Ilitches of the world until the billion-dollar software company he co-founded kicked him to the curb in 2013, isn't the kind of guy who turns his back on friends down on their luck.

And he thinks Trump, who faces an uphill battle to keep Michigan in 2020, could do himself a big favor by pardoning Kilpatrick, who has completed less than a quarter of the 28-year sentence he received after being convicted of 24 felony counts seven years ago.

"If Trump gives him clemency before the election, where do you think he could help Trump's campaign in?" Karmanos asked during a podcast interview that surfaced Sunday. "You don't think that would help him in the black community?"

Ignore the debt, beware the Indians

Karmanos revealed his role in Kilpatrick's campaign for exoneration in a free-wheeling conversation with Charlie LeDuff, the whip-smart showman whose weekly "No BS News" podcast aims to cement his status as the clown-prince of Detroit journalism.

Mainstream media outlets, including the Free Press, jumped on Karmanos' claim that a Kilpatrick pardon would be a win-win for the ex-mayor and the embattled Trump. But it was hardly the most bizarre moment in his hour-long parley with LeDuff, who periodically interrupted the interview to test the tensile strength of various pre-lubricated condoms by stretching them over his head.

Read more:

Peter Karmanos asks Trump to free Kwame Kilpatrick: It was a 'lynching'

Detroit rep's email asks for help to free Kilpatrick — and birthday party donations

Besides championing Kilpatrick's cause, Karmanos held forth on the merits of refusing to honor the national debt ("Nobody knows what happens if we forfeit . . . So, OK: We're not going to pay ourselves back. Tomorrow comes. We're still going to have breakfast") and the perils of entrusting a major building project to inexperienced contractors ("One little slip can cost you two or three years trying to find out which Indians lived there").

But it was his plea on Kilpatrick's behalf that got LeDuff, and everyone else, excited.

The case for clemency

You needn't believe Kilpatrick was an innocent victim of political persecution to acknowledge that his continued imprisonment affords diminishing returns to the taxpayers paying for it. Reasonable people can and do believe that the 28-year-sentence U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds imposed was unreasonably harsh, and that white elected officials accused of similar corruption have negotiated plea deals far more lenient than the one Kilptrick was offered.

But that is not the argument Karmanos makes. Drawing on four centuries of race-based oppression, he charges that Kilpatrick was the victim of a hoax perpetrated by white Democrats (and black enablers like Barack Obama) who saw the charismatic Detroit mayor as a threat to the party establishment.

"What you guys witnessed was a modern-day lynching," Karmanos told LeDuff in the podcast interview. "What we had was an arrogant mayor — a really smart one, by the way . . . He'd done absolutely zero."

When LeDuff and his podcast colleagues undercut that specious claim by citing the overwhelming evidence of Kilpatrick's corruption, Karmanos brushed their arguments aside, insisting that "the black community" privately shares his conviction that Kilpatrick was railroaded, even if most blacks decline to say so publicly.

He likened Detroiters' simmering resentment over Kilpatrick's prosecution to the surreptitious sympathies of voters wary of revealing their support for Trump.

"[Just as] people aren't comfortable wearing MAGA hats anymore, the black community isn't comfortable being out loud about what they [white Democrats] did to Kwame," Karmanos opined.

But if you ask black Detroiters privately about Kilpatrick's assertion that he was "lynched," Karmanos said, "you find out a lot of people really believe that's what it was."

A cynical calculation

This is Trumpism in its purest form — the assertion that whatever irritates the listener can be traced to a sinister conspiracy by elites hell-bent on subverting the people's will. It's the same argument Karmanos and LeDuff deployed elsewhere in their podcast to reject new taxes for road repair, on the grounds that any revenue raised for that purpose would surely be diverted to a less worthy one.

Karmanos' conviction that Detroit voters would reward Trump's decision to pardon Kilpatrick with their electoral support is a dubious one. It seems unlikely that even the ex-mayor's most ardent sympathizers would embrace the president for a single gesture of absolution.

But Karmanos is surely right in surmising that the political calculation is the only one that interests Trump. The day pollsters convince the incumbent president that pardoning Kilpatrick would win him more votes in Detroit than it would cost cost him in Macomb County, the ex-mayor can start packing his bags for the trip home.

Brian Dickerson is the Editorial Page Editor of the Free Press. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.