The celebrity pardoner

In August 2012, Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative author and polemicist, persuaded two people to make illegal campaign contributions to the U.S. Senate bid of New York Republican Wendy Long. This was no nickel-anddime operation: D’Souza reimbursed two “straw donors” $10,000 each for making donations by themselves and their spouses. It was illegal because D’Souza had already reached the federal limit with his own contribution.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump pardoned D’Souza, claiming he “was very unfairly treated.” Trump has constitutional power to do this, and he is hardly the first president to grant clemency to an unsavory figure. What is offensive here is not the pardon power, but the use of it. Trump rewarded a man who consciously and brazenly violated the rules of the political system.

Trump suggested he wants to pardon former Illinois Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, who has served six years of a 14-year sentence for corruption, and was once overheard on a court-authorized FBI wiretap boasting of his plans to sell a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder. Before going to jail, however, the flamboyant politician made an appearance on Trump’s television show Celebrity Apprentice.

Trump is also talking about a pardon for television celebrity Martha Stewart, who spent five months in prison for lying to investigators in a stock case and briefly headed a spinoff of Trump’s program. The logic behind such actions is authoritarian; pardons as the product of presidential whims and personal favors.

What is at stake here is not legality, but democratic values. Trump conducts himself as chieftain of his own clan, not the protector of the rule of law for the nation as a whole.