What Trump pardons show about his idea of presidency

Offering pardons is perhaps the closest thing the president has to absolute power, and in using this power Tuesday, President Trump gave glimpses of how he sees himself.

In 2010, Donald Trump fired Rod Blagojevich from “Celebrity Apprentice” because the former Illinois governor didn’t learn enough Harry Potter trivia for a marketing assignment. In 2020, President Trump commuted Mr. Blagojevich’s prison sentence for public corruption with perhaps the closest thing he has to a Potter-esque magic wand: his Constitution-based power to “grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States.”

In providing legal relief to Mr. Blagojevich and 10 other persons convicted of federal crimes, President Trump on Tuesday lit off a national conversation on the nature of his use of the powerful pardon tool – and what it might reveal about his conception of the presidency itself.

President Trump defended his actions as a dispensation of justice for those who had been unfairly convicted or already served adequate time for their sins. He presented himself as legally positioned to shape the U.S. legal system as he sees fit.

“I’m allowed to be totally involved,” he told reporters. “I’m actually, I guess, the chief law enforcement officer of the country.”

Those more critical of the pardons framed his decisions as impulsive, isolated from the long-standing Justice Department procedure for considering pardons, and aimed largely at white-collar criminals whose relatives or representatives were able to lobby for relief on Fox News.

Anyone looking for a pattern or a plan in the pardons is looking in the wrong place, argues political scientist Jonathan Bernstein in a Bloomberg News column.

“He wants what he wants, and he treats the presidency as something he won that allows him to do stuff he wants,” Mr. Bernstein writes. “Pardons are great for that, because they’re the closest thing to an absolute power the president has.”