Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on March 6, 2014 (Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com)
After returning to the White House on January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump was quick to pardon the rioters who had violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building four years earlier. The pardons drew scathing condemnation from a combination of Democrats and Never Trump conservatives, but they didn't come as a surprise: Trump campaigned on pardoning the January 6 rioters in 2024. And his hardcore MAGA supporters applauded the pardons as "promises made, promises kept."
One of Trump's outspoken critics on the right is veteran Washington Post columnist George Will, who expressed his disdain for Trump and the MAGA movement by leaving the Republican Party and becoming an independent.
In his April 10 column, Will argues that Trump is abusing the presidential pardon power but is also critical of former President Joe Biden.
"Yet another reason that Donald Trump's and Joe Biden's presidencies cannot be examined without wincing concerns a constitutional provision that is obscure until it is abused, which it now often is," Will writes. "The presidential 'power to grant reprieves and pardons' has become yet another source of political brutishness fueling voters' cynicism…. In 2024, Trump pandered to his base by saying his first acts if reelected would include pardoning the January 6 defendants he called 'hostages.' This, like Biden's actions regarding marijuana and capital punishment, was discordant with the presidential duty to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'"
Will notes that University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, in his new book, "The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History," says the United States has entered an era of "pardon dystopia." And the Never Trump conservative argues that pardons have become increasingly "unseemly."
"Lobbying for pardons is now a more-than-cottage industry in Washington," Will laments. "One Trump pardon, Prakash says, might have saved the recipient, a fraudster, nearly half a billion dollars…. What can be done about grotesque use of the pardon power that, in Prakash's understatement, 'seems inconsistent with the general structure of checks and balances?' Not much. Submit potential pardon grants to the president's Cabinet? You probably have seen — speaking of grotesque things — the toadyism of the current one."
The conservative columnist adds, "Presidents hoard power, so any president probably would oppose constitutional reforms, such as establishing an independent Clemency Commission, or empowering the Senate or House to disapprove of presidential clemencies. So, the remedy for tawdry pardoning is not this or that institutional gambit. The only feasible solution is the election of presidents who are not louts. This, however, becomes less likely as voters are made ever more cynical by loutish pardons."