President Donald Trump speaks to reporters, during the swearing-in ceremony for Sergio Gor as U.S. Ambassador to India at the White House in Washington, D.C., November 10, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
The Founding Fathers of the United States were warned about the potential for rampant, corrupt abuses of the pardon powers, and now, one veteran political reporter argued for The Guardian that President Donald Trump is the grim end result of them ignoring that warning.
Writing for the outlet on Sunday morning, James Rosen, an award-winning and long-tenured former political and Pentagon correspondent, predicted that historians will one day rank Trump's "utter abuse" of his pardon authorities at the top of the "shameful list" of his second-term corruption. So far, these abuses have ranged from his unprecedented mass pardon of January 6 participants on his first day back in the White House, to the "astonishing" recent reports about his "robust pardons market in which friends or relatives of criminals offer to pay millions for presidential clemency."
As Rosen explained further, these rampant abuses were foreseen 239 years ago by George Mason, a Founding Father often credited with his critical influence over the Bill of Rights. During the constitutional convention of 1787, Mason warned his fellow framers about the dangers he saw in the pardon powers they were planning to give the presidency.
"At the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Mason cautioned the new country’s most powerful men – among them George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton – against the dangers of giving future American presidents too much power," Rosen explained. "The risk was greatest, he told other delegates, in the absolute pardon power then being enshrined in our supreme law. Mason spoke out strongly against granting a president 'power of pardoning because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself.'"
He added further: "Washington, who would become the newborn nation’s first president in 19 months, presided as Mason addressed his peers. It was as if he had a crystal ball displaying Trump’s cynical visage... Mason spoke on 15 September 1787, two days before the convention concluded. Perhaps they were too hot and exhausted to focus, but the delegates voted against limiting presidents’ pardon power. Even when Mason begged them at least to put treason beyond the pardon realm, they deferred."
“It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy and destroy the republic," Mason warned.
Mason added later, during the Virginia Ratifying Convention: "The president of the United States has the unrestrained power of granting pardons for treason, which may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt."
Mason's efforts were doomed, Rosen explained, due to the insistence of future President James Madison that any president who issued pardons for treason could be met with impeachment and removal, a possibility that has seemed laughable during Trump's second term, given the overwhelmingly deferential GOP Congress that he has governed with.
