Trump has 'skeleton key to a dictatorship' — and it's turned him into a 'tyrant': analysis

Washington Monthly writer David Atkins says the Republican Party has been President Donald Trump’s greatest enabler, but even they might be willing to curb a president’s wanton power for granting pardons after Trump’s second term.

“Often [Trump’s] pardons appear to have been a product of direct bribes to the president’s election campaigns himself,” said Atkins. “[I]n other cases, the recipients were donors or friends of donors; and, of course, many of them had committed crimes in direct support of Trump’s attempts to overthrow democracy itself.”

The scam goes much further than pardons, argued Atkins, pointing out that The Wall Street Journal reported that an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company in 2025. And soon after, the Emirati government nabbed an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips — despite President Biden rightfully withholding the technology for national security reasons.

But don’t ask too much of the Republican Party these days, said Atkins. At least the president’s abuse of the pardon power may be “one issue that is both so obviously in need of reform and potentially prone to abuse by all future presidents, that reform should be achievable across party lines.”

Atkins pointed out that gradual democratic backsliding under Trump goes much further than pardons, and it remains a product of the executive branch’s “direct flouting of the law." He asserted that Trump violates laws and direct judicial orders only to be rescued later by the Supreme Court, “without penalty or consequence.”

“This is because 1) the framers of the Constitution did not anticipate that a man of such ill character as Trump would gain office, … but also 2) they expected that a lawless Executive would be countered by a Legislative Branch that jealously guarded its power as a coequal branch,” said Atkins. “One consequence of the devolution of the conservative movement into a cult of personality around Donald Trump is that almost no Republicans remain who dare to challenge the president.”

The framers, he said, expected a president who so avariciously abused the pardon power to be impeached, “but Republicans in Congress refuse to fulfill their constitutional role.”

“Meanwhile, the pardon power in the hands of a ruthlessly criminal president is the skeleton key to a dictatorship,” said Atkins. “So long as his allies in Congress refuse to impeach, a criminal president could repeatedly, openly and intentionally violate the law and order his accomplices to do likewise, with promises of infinite pardons to follow.”

“Only the threat of state-level prosecutions might dissuade his minions, but many of the worst crimes Executive Branch officials can commit are covered more by federal law than state law,” Atkins added. “The pardon power, combined with the Supreme Court’s ruling that a president has immunity for all ‘official acts’ conducted while in office, functionally allows a president to rule as a tyrant. So the power itself must be curtailed.”

This would require a constitutional amendment. However, Atkins wrote that despite Republicans' enabling of their own corrupt president, their suspicion of future Democratic administrations could cause them to cross party lines and support such an amendment.

“Republicans would want to constrain the next Democratic president,” Atkins said.