An act of civic arson
U.S. President Donald Trump put a blot on his reputation that may never fade with the appalling impromptu news conference last week in which he declared a lot of “very fine people” participated in a white supremacist, anti-Semitic protest replete with Nazi imagery in Charlottesville, Va.
Now Trump may build on his image as a president who stokes racial and ethnic tensions by pardoning Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff in Maricopa County, Ariz. In July, Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt of court for defying a federal judge’s 2011 order that his Sheriff ’s Department end its unconstitutional policy of targeting Latinos — without probable cause — with warrantless traffic stops and detention. Trump’s past remarks about a pardon seemed more like a trial balloon than anything else — until CNN’s report Wednesday that the Arpaio paperwork was ready to go.
Arpaio’s hardline tactics in fighting illegal immigration made him a Tea Party and Fox News favourite. Some on the right may not mind a sheriff who engaged in unconstitutional racial profiling; who is proud that temperatures routinely top 120 degrees every summer in his tent jail; who goes after humans being smuggled instead of their smugglers; and who arrests unauthorized immigrants at factories and farms but not their employers.
But those who are able to rationalize this away and who actually care about democratic norms should be appalled with the grotesque ways Arpaio used his power to bully his critics. Last November, Maricopa County voters had had enough. Arpaio was easily defeated in his bid for a seventh term by political unknown Paul Penzone, a retired police sergeant.
The Trump administration wastes a ridiculous amount of time putting out fires caused by a president who likes to say what’s on his mind and then reflexively defend his remarks and trash his critics. But pardons of people found guilty of federal crimes are in a different category. Arpaio was a tyrant who abused his power to torment his critics. If Trump uses his power to free such a criminal from the consequences of his actions, it will be an act of civic arson — one even worse than his remarks about the Charlottesville tragedy.