DJT’s last, sour notes

With his refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the election he lost, former president Donald Trump already had ensured his presidency would end on a sour note. Yet he managed to add to the gracelessness on its final day.

Trump refused to attend President Joe Biden’s Wednesday inauguration, the first modern president to show such contempt for the American tradition of peaceful transfer of power. Instead, he vacated the White House early and held a small rally at Joint Base Andrews before flying off to Florida. At no point in his speech did he acknowledge that Biden won the presidency fairly. He could not bring himself even to say Biden’s name. Instead, he complained that COVID-19 derailed what he depicted as an otherwise exemplary presidency, and never mind the mismanagement that has made the pandemic so much deadlier than it had to be. Never mind, either, his general record of abuse of power, incompetence and lies, culminating in his incitement of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Trump’s final official acts added to the malodor, as he granted clemency to a raft of corrupt cronies, former officials and white-collar criminals. Stephen Bannon, the alt-right provocateur and one of the intellectual architects of Trump’s reactionary populism, got a pardon. He was charged last summer with defrauding donors to his We Build the Wall project, allegedly using $1 million for personal expenses after saying the money would go to construct sections of Trump’s promised border barrier.

Trump got Elliott Broidy, a 2016 Trump fundraiser, off the hook for his role in a foreign influence scheme. Convicted insider trader William Walters got a commuted sentence after he hired Trump’s former personal lawyer, the New York Times reports. Trump pardoned three former Republican members of the House convicted of crimes such as bribery and lying to the FBI, and he commuted the sentence of Kwame Kilpatrick, the corrupt former mayor of Detroit.

Among the white-collar criminals on the list was Sholam Weiss, who shamelessly stole millions from an insurance company in a spectacular financial fraud, leading to the company’s collapse. Of the inmates in federal prison, he is among the least deserving.

Throughout his tenure, Trump treated the powers of the presidency as tools to help his friends and punish his enemies. So it was on his way out.