Felon Pardons People Who Rioted for Him

Sign on a highway saying "Wrong Way."

By Michael Woyton

Anybody else’s head still spinning from yesterday? I know mine is.

We knew that Inauguration Day would eventually get here, but it was still sobering to think that adjudicated convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump actually swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. 

That counts as his first official lie for his second term in the White House. (Maybe he had his fingers crossed behind his back, and that’s why he did have his hand on the Bible the Hamburglar Melania was holding.)

I avoided all real-time news coverage during the day, keeping the television machine tuned to anything but and staying off all social media except for a limited amount of BlueSky.

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Then during the evening Monday the felonious firehose began spraying information about all the executive orders he was signing.

We already knew the felon from Florida was gunning for a number of hot-button issues — to him — including making sure transgender Americans are cut down a notch by the government only recognizing two sexes, ordering federal workers back to their offices, creating an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs, withdrawing from climate change agreements, opening Alaskan wilderness to oil and gas drilling and a myriad others.

Some of the EOs are downright stupid, if not unconstitutional — by any otherwise normal SCOTUS. 

The rapist-in-chief said he was ending birthright citizenship, which is written in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, for the children of immigrants who are undocumented. 

I realize it seems like a slam dunk that the entire U.S. Supreme Court would say, “Hold on there. That’s unconstitutional,” but frankly I can imagine at least five of the justices deciding that, heck, our president knows best.

Releasing all those executive orders mere hours after being sworn in is meant to throw us off balance and make us feel completely overwhelmed.

Some have pointed out that, historically, not all of the EOs will actually take effect. Some will be litigated which will delay implementation and some will in fact be enforced.

However, the executive order pardoning those convicted in participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Building insurrection and riot was a hard one to hear. 

There was some obfuscation about whether President Felon would only pardon those convicted of non-violent crimes. JD Vance as vice-president-elect actually made that statement recently.

And we know from Vance’s messaging about Springfield, Ohio, that he doesn’t exactly shy away from telling lies.

The hard and true fact is that a president who is himself a convicted felon issued “a sweeping grant of clemency on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol,” the New York Times reported, “issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.”

Among those who were pardoned were rioters convicted of assaulting police officers.

Think about that. 

A Republican president pardoned people who had viciously assaulted police officers. In his name.

This is what the 47th president of the U.S. will be most remembered for — not giving a flying f*** about uniformed law enforcement.

Further, anyone in the future who says that the GOP respects the police — or “backs the blue” — is as much of a liar as we know the president to be.

Can we assume that Pres. Felon pardoned those people so he will have a militia-in-waiting?

Lead art: Screen grab from Google Maps.

Published by Michael Woyton

Michael Woyton is an award-winning journalist who covered municipalities and school districts for the Poughkeepsie (NY) Journal and local and regional news in the Hudson Valley for Patch Media.

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