I’ve been thinking about crimes and pardons and sinking ships.
Let’s start with the latter. There are two sinking ships right now: The kind that Trump and his incompetent lickspittle of a Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, are bombing, probably illegally; and the administration itself, led by an apparently ill and certainly befuddled autocrat, from which former loyalists are now distancing themselves. As I’ve been saying for several weeks, we’ve now reached The Terror phase of this Revolution, where the MAGAtts are devouring each other.
Some are even saying the quiet part out loud: that this administration’s hard-partying criminality is going to bite a lot of people in the ass. As JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told Erin Burnett, explaining why his company didn’t contribute to the destruction of the White House’s East Wing: “We have an issue, OK? Anything we do — since we do a lot of contracts with governments here and around the world — we have to be very careful how anything is perceived, and also how the next DOJ is going to deal with it.” Or, as Indiana Republican State Senator Greg Walker said recently, explaining his opposition to Trump’s pressure to redraw the state’s Congressional districts: “It’s so that he’s not impeached again. That’s all this is about.”
Which got me to think about crimes and pardons. Obviously, Trump will pre-emptively pardon anyone in his orbit who might have committed a crime. That’s a lot of people, but such sweeping pardons have precedent. Still, how might he do it… and when? Does he pardon Hegseth now for his (possible) murder of non-combatants in the Caribbean? Does he pardon Kristi Noem now for her potential contempt judgment in defying a Federal judge’s order to halt illegal deportations? What about all the other people down the line who participated in the jailings, deportations, killings, bribes, thefts, etc.?
Here’s the problem: A Presidential pardon only pertains to crimes someone may have committed in the past. So any pardons of serial miscreants like Noem, Hegseth, Witkoff, Kushner, et al would have to be issued toward the end of his tenure, to cover the skein of illegalities that are certain to continue.
I also have been wondering how he might cast the net wide enough to cover anyone in his administration or among his supporters who might have committed a crime. I concluded that the only way he might do that is to offer a blanket pardon to all registered Republicans in the United States. But I concluded that this would violate the Supreme Court’s ruling in Schick v. Reed, which recognized that an exercise of clemency may include “any condition which does not otherwise offend the Constitution,” suggesting that the President may not make clemency subject to a condition that is prohibited by another constitutional provision. (A blanket pardon by party affiliation would be a clear violation of the First Amendment.)
But there’s a more immediate problem for Trump’s Legion of Super-Villains: What if Trump dies in office? What if those swollen ankles, purple hands, MRI, narcolepsy, and incoherence are indicators of a health failure, and he expired before he can take his Sharpie to the pardon petitions?
Here’s my point: The reason you’re seeing these increasing breaks with Trump is not just the awareness that he’s a lame duck. It’s that people who actively or passively participated in crimes against the United States are trying to distance themselves from the shitshows that are certain to follow: pardons, investigations, takedowns, and jailings that’ll make Watergate look like a tempest in a Teapot Dome.
Randall Rothenberg is a former media and marketing reporter, advertising columnist, and science and technology editor for The New York Times; CEO emeritus of the IAB, the digital marketing industry trade association; and the author or co-author of several books on politics and media, including It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change, with U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (Grand Central Publishing, 2025).
