Dec
10
2025

Something That Seems To Have Slipped Off My Impeachment Bingo Card

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Jeff Maurer suggests Democrats Should Make Trump Pay for Selling Pardons.

Why did Trump pardon Henry Cuellar, a Democratic congressman indicted for accepting $600,000 in bribes? A social media conspiracy theorist recently suggested that it was so that Cuellar would switch parties and give Republicans another seat. Here is the post from that social media conspiracy theorist:

It’s hard to deny the existence of a quid pro quo when Trump publicly complains that the other guy isn’t sticking to his end of the deal. There will never be an All The President’s Men-style political thriller about Trump because Trump often just blurts out his misdeeds publicly, often on video or in writing. The 2020s All the President’s Men reboot doesn’t have Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in a paper chase at the Library of Congress — it has Chris Pine and Rami Malek looking at their phones and going “Huh,” before writing an article called Five ‘White Lotus’ Moments That Only a 90s Kid Will Get, because nobody cares about the president being a crook.

Cuellar was far from Trump’s only strange pardon. He pardoned crypto magnate Changpeng Zhao after Zhao put $2 billion towards enriching the Trump family in a deal so fishy that a source familiar with the deal called it “nuts”. Trump has undercut his “murderous on drugs” stance by pardoning the former president of Honduras and drug kingpins in Chicago and Baltimore. He pardoned the January 6 rioters — including the ones who did a lot more than put their feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk — and pardoned Rudy Giuliani, giving Giuliani a new lease on probably 2-3 weeks of life. Trump caught everyone off-guard by commuting the sentence of George Santos, whom he called “something of a rogue”, which is an unbelievable description — calling Santos “something of a rogue” is like calling Vladimir Putin “a wee bit cantankerous,” or Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs “a strong advocate for skin hydration.”

A long excerpt, but the key phrase seems to be "nobody cares about the president being a crook."

If you care, though, Google is your friend; check out the back stories on Cuellar, Zhao, Santos, and the rest.

For fun, you might also want to check out the CNN segment that asks the musical question: What if the accused pipe bomber claims he’s already been pardoned?

Also of note:

  • Not just a crook, but a murderous one. Jacob Sullum claims Trump’s word games can’t disguise his murderous anti-drug strategy. (You would hope not, anyway.)

    I have a riddle for you. If we call a drug smuggler a combatant, how many combatants died when SEAL Team 6 killed 11 men on a cocaine boat near Venezuela on September 2?

    Zero, because calling a drug smuggler a combatant does not make him a combatant. That reality goes to the heart of the morally and legally bankrupt justification for President Donald Trump's bloodthirsty anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, which began on September 2 and so far has killed 87 people in 22 attacks.

    Jacob goes on to point out a simple truth: "Americans want cocaine." If they didn't, those drug boats would simply not exist.

  • And a good man is hard to find. Kevin D. Williamson muses on Good Things and Hard Things. It's long and somewhat (but wonderfully) rambling, but:

    The good news is that our main economic problems can be mitigated through fairly straightforward policy changes. The bad news is that nobody wants those policy changes to be made, because they would mean reduced government benefits, higher taxes on the middle class as well as on the affluent, less access to subsidized credit for higher education or buying houses, and a period of economic adjustment that probably would be at least as painful as the one Americans went through at the end of the Jimmy Carter years and the beginning of the first Ronald Reagan term, when a relatively responsible governing class acting under the leadership of Fed chairman Paul Volcker (who heroically blew smoke from his Antonio y Cleopatra Grenadiers and the occasional Partagas at the elected rabble throughout congressional testimony) screwed its collective political courage to the sticking place and did the needful thing.

    As a matter of pure political calculation, it is worth keeping in mind (should anyone in Washington feel the unaccustomed stirring of political courage) that while Americans in the 1980s sure as heck did not enjoy the process of fixing the inflation problem they really, really enjoyed having fixed it, and President Reagan went from being a basement-dwelling Gallup poll bum in 1982 to winning a 49-state landslide (recount Minnesota!) in 1984, largely on the strength of economic recovery: Real GDP growth topped 7 percent going into the 1984 election season. Average real GDP growth in the Reagan years was more than half-again as much as in the first Trump term or in Obama’s eight years, and more than under Joe Biden, when the economic figures were boosted by the post-COVID recovery.

    With respect to KDW's aside about Minnesota: It was the only state Mondale won in 1984, and that was by the thinnest of margins: 0.18 percentage points, or 3,761 votes out of over 2 million cast.