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      Donald Trump didn’t win by a historic landslide. It’s time to nip that lie in the bud | Mehdi Hasan

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      Remember the “big lie”? In 2020, Donald Trump lost the presidential election so Republicans just brazenly lied and insisted he won.In 2024, we have a new post-election lie from the Republican party. Trump didn’t just win, they say, but he won big. He won a landslide. He won an historic mandate for his “Maga” agenda.And it was Trump himself, of course, on election night, who was the first to push this grandiose and self-serving falsehood, calling his win “a political victory that our country has never seen before” and claiming “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”.Republican politicians, masters of message discipline, quickly followed suit. The representative Elise Stefanik called his win a “historic landslide” while the senator John Barrasso called Trump’s a “huge landslide”. “On November 5 voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it,” wrote the “Doge” co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Wall Street Journal on 20 November.None of this is true. Yes, Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college. Yes, Republicans won the Senate and the House. But, contrary to both Republican talking points and breathless headlines and hot takes from leading media outlets (“resounding”, “rout”, “runaway win”), there was really nothing at all historic or huge about the margin of victory.Repeat after me: there was no “landslide”. There was no “blowout”. There was no “sweeping” mandate given to Trump by the electorate. The numbers don’t lie.First, consider the popular vote. Yes, Trump became the first Republican for two decades to win the popular vote. However, per results from CNN, the Cook Political Report, and the New York Times, he did not win a majority of the vote. Barack Obama did in both 2008 and 2012. Joe Biden did in 2020. But Donald Trump failed to do so in 2024.And the former president’s margin of victory over Harris is a miniscule 1.6 percentage points, “smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968”, as an analysis in the New York Times noted last month. In fact, in the 55 presidential elections in which the popular vote winner became president, 49 of them were won with a margin bigger than Trump’s in 2024.We actually know what a landslide in the popular vote looks like: the Democrat Lyndon Johnson defeated the Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 by an enormous margin of 22.6 percentage points!Second, consider the electoral college. Trump won 307 votes, which is 37 more than is needed to secure victory in the electoral college. But it’s still far fewer than Bill Clinton won in 1992 (370) and 1996 (379) and far fewer than Barack Obama won in 2008 (365) and 2012 (332). And it is pretty similar to what Trump himself won in 2016 (304) and what Biden won in 2020 (306). Trump’s margin of victory in the electoral college ranks 44 out of the 60 presidential elections in American history.We actually know what a landslide win in the electoral college looks like: the Republican Ronald Reagan won re-election with a whopping 525 electoral college votes in 1984!By the way, did you know that Trump won the crucial blue wall states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – by 231,000 votes? So if just 116,000 voters across those three swing states – or 0.7% of the total – had switched from Trump to Harris, it is the vice-president who would have won the electoral college … and the presidency!Third, consider the so-called “coattails” effect, where a presidential candidate’s massive margin of victory also boosts their party’s numbers in Congress. In 2024, Republicans flipped the Senate and held onto the House but Trump still ended up having “limited coattails”, to quote from the New York Times analysis. Of the five battleground states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) which held Senate races in November, the Republican candidate triumphed in only one of them (David McCormick in Pennsylvania, by a narrow 16,000 votes). Democrats held on to the other four.So where were the Trump coattails in the Senate?Meanwhile, over in the House of Representatives, Republicans held onto control of the chamber with the aid of an extremely partisan and anti-democratic gerrymander in North Carolina, signed off by a conservative-majority state supreme court. They are on course for what the CNN election analyst Harry Enten is calling a “record small majority”.So where were the Trump coattails in the House?And yet, the president-elect and his army of Republican sycophants cannot stop bragging about the landslide that wasn’t. You almost have to admire their chutzpah.But there is also method to their megalomania. As the political scientist Julia Azari has observed, when a president and a party claim a sweeping mandate it has “historically been connected to unprecedented expansions of presidential power” and can become a way “to give an unchecked executive the veneer of following the popular will”.Trump, the 49.9% president, doesn’t represent the popular will. Yes, he won the election fair and square, and won the popular vote for the first time, but if we are to prevent him from expanding his power in the Oval Office we must resist this new Republican election lie. We must not allow him to pretend that he has some sort of special “mandate” for controversial policies and personnel.Repeat after me: there was nothing unique or unprecedented about the election result last month. Republicans may feel they won a huge victory over the Democrats. And Trump may feel his election win was historic. But, to borrow a line from the right, the facts don’t care about their feelings.

      Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo More

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      What does it actually mean when we talk about the American ‘working class’? | Rebecca Solnit

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      In the aftermath of the election, the working class was constantly invoked and rarely defined – invoked as a badge of authenticity, as the people who really matter, as the salt of the earth, the ones politicians should woo or be chastised for failing to woo sufficiently. Who exactly is in this category? I asked around, and the definitions didn’t just vary – they wobbled, clashed and blurred.The more nebulous something is, the more it can mean anything useful to the speaker or writer. I thought of Alice Through the Looking Glass:
      ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
      ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
      When a word means whatever you choose it to mean, it becomes a cudgel for your cause, while it fails to do what I want words to do, which is to describe the world in ways that make things more clear and coherent.So what is the working class? Is it income levels or education, when some who work in the trades earn splendid annual incomes and some white-collar work mires people in poverty? Is it the kind of work or the status of being an employee, when the person who works for a construction company may go on to become a contractor herself?A Marxist told me it’s about whether or not you own the means of production, but this theoretical contractor, like many a construction worker, owns a F250 pickup truck and a lot of tools and maybe a garage workshop, just as many farmers own or inherit land.Someone else said it meant being paid by the hour, rather than salaried, but lawyers and legal experts bill (lavishly) by the hour. And more and more people work in the gig economy or are otherwise casual labor seen as self-employed or as subcontractors, not employees. Someone else insisted it’s about whether or not you have unearned income, but many a union person or employee of a big firm has a stake in a pension fund invested in the stock market.Another criterion was education levels, though quite a few people’s time in college netted them little but debt to be paid off via pink- or blue-collar work. In California, our public universities claim a lot of first-generation students, but the community college system defines that as people whose parents did not go to college at all, while the University of California system defines it as anyone whose parents didn’t graduate from college. The California State University system, meanwhile, has wobbly definitions: “In one scenario, 31% of CSU students are considered first generation; according to another definition, 52% are.”What’s clear about first-generation students is that some who grow up in blue-collar families become white-collar professionals and thereby have a foot in both worlds and sometimes an identity in tension with their current status. A lot of us worked entry-level jobs before entering a profession – before I was 21 I supported myself as a salesperson, a dishwasher, a data processor and a waitress. Upward economic mobility is central to the American dream and the draw for immigrants; downward mobility, debt peonage and destitution have been at the heart of the American nightmare set up by Reaganomics and the other forces creating a super-elite and a desperate underclass.One thing that’s been dismally obvious since 2016 is that by working class some speakers really mean white men, and imagine that group in nostalgic terms, as hardhat wearers and factory workers or as red-blooded rural Americans, even though much of the lower-income population is not white or male or rural. It’s janitors and nail salon workers and hotel maids, casual labor and delivery people and home healthcare aides.I’m not arguing that the working class doesn’t exist, and there are a lot of workers we would probably all agree belong to this class – but the borders and thereby the definitions are blurry, and the frame is too often invoked for other agendas.The idea that the working class is white men too readily becomes a justification for politics that pander to white male prejudices and entitlements, since white men are the single most right-leaning demographic. Framed that way, it often seems to mean: shut up about rights for women and non-white people. Meanwhile about 92% of Black women, a great many of whom meet most of these definitions of working class, voted for Kamala Harris, which is a reminder that talking about class without talking about gender and race flattens out a complex terrain (the same goes, of course, for talking about gender or race without the other two).Harris mostly spoke about the middle class, which many identify with whether or not they fit some of these criteria for the working class; I don’t think her rival used the term “working class” at all but pandered to white racism, misogyny and transphobia, each of which can fracture solidarity and even the perception of common ground, including economic common ground.In the end, all that’s clear is that we had an election in which the party that was supposed to be elitist was not the party whose candidate was a billionaire, the one put back in office in no small part through the machinations of the richest man in the world because they agreed on an economic agenda of cutting taxes for the rich and further impoverishing the poor.“Elite” is another nebulous word that pretends that somehow human rights are an upscale product like designer handbags or that the majority of us in this country – if you add up women, Bipoc, queer and trans people, immigrants, etc – are a special interest group. In this framework, the 26% or so that is white and male is imagined as the majority, perhaps because they once owned and ran nearly everything.White male grievance is a powerful force that cuts across class, as exemplified by the habitual whining of the billionaires. Those billionaires also own too many of the means of information production, from Twitter and Facebook to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Those and other means encouraged people to perceive themselves by many criteria that don’t include class or economics, but do include a lot of kinds of resentment.This was part of a package deal, of a whole lot of people getting a lot of misinformation about the sources of their problems and the potential solutions, which encouraged many of them to vote against their own and their economic peers’ self-interest. The lack of clarity about what the working class is is only one part of the ongoing problem of misinformation and missing information.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      ‘Harm to children was part of the point’: a harrowing film on US family separations

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      He thought he was working in the past tense, making a film about what one Republican-appointed judge described as “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country”. Then Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now Errol Morris’s documentary about family separations at the US-Mexico border looks like a dreadful premonition.“It’s interesting how things have radically changed,” Morris says via Zoom from a book-lined office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The movie, which presumably is recounting past history, seems to be a crystal ball into what may happen next and that was not clearly imagined at the outset. But it is clearly suggested now.”Separated is based on the NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (“one of the best collaborations I’ve ever had”, says the Oscar-winning Morris) and premieres on the MSNBC network on 7 December. It is an excruciatingly timely reminder of how Trump ripped 5,500 children from their parents (up to 1,400 of whom are not yet confirmed as reunited).The 93-minute documentary forensically details how the first Trump administration’s policy of family separations was deliberate, systematic and intentionally inhumane, leaving children in wire-mesh cages with feelings of fear and abandonment. Trump said with casual cruelty: “When you have that policy, people don’t come. I know it sounds harsh but we have to save our country.”Wearing white shirt and spectacles, sipping from a white coffee mug and speaking slowly in honeyed tones, Morris reflects: “The separations was an abomination. It was racist, was cruel, was unnecessary. As one of the interviewees in my film says, there were other levers that we could pull. This seemed to be something we did not need to do.”Trump had come into office promising a crackdown on illegal immigration including the construction of a border wall. The pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) was ditched in favour of something more draconian.Family separations under his administration began as early as March 2017 under a pilot programme in El Paso, Texas. The fact it is was happening covertly undermines the notion that it could act as a deterrent.A “zero tolerance” policy, officially announced in spring 2018, marked a significant escalation. It mandated the prosecution of all adults crossing the border illegally. Anyone who did not arrive at a designated port of entry and claimed asylum would be arrested.While the policy never specifically called for children to be taken from parents, separation became inevitable because the adult was detained and charged. Since children were not allowed to be held in a federal jail, they were taken from their parents and placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).Jonathan White, a civil servant who worked at the ORR and fought against the policy, says in the film: “Harm to children was part of the point. They believed it would terrify families into not coming.”Images of children held in cages in a McAllen, Texas, facility triggered outrage in June 2018. But Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied that there was a policy of separating families at the border and sought to shift blame to Congress, even though the enforcement of laws happens at the president’s discretion. The Bush and Obama administrations had largely allowed families to stay together.Morris comments: “There was a totally fatuous claim that is made by Kirstjen Nielsen in the film: we’re just following the law – if you arrest a criminal and they have a child with him or her, you separate them.“There have been miserable policies towards immigrants from probably every administration, the first Bush on through to Donald Trump. But none of those administrations felt the need to do what he did. It was considered to be a step too far, a no-no, and yet they embraced it anyway.”He continues: “There are a lot of things that get to me but what really appalls me is that they would separate nursing infants from their mothers. This is clearly not right. What’s the word I’m searching for? This is wrong.”For Morris, the child separation saga pointed to a wider issue. “It’s an issue about racism and what I see as the racist rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and his acolytes. I find it repulsive. I often like to remind people that racism is disgusting and it’s also bad manners. Haven’t we been taught not to act like that? Isn’t that part of the repertoire of being a civilised, cultured human being?“I hate analogies, but like everyone else, I can’t avoid using them. I like to tell people, as an American Jew, I always wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, more specifically to be a Jew living in Germany in the 1930s. Now I know a lot more about what it must have been like.”Morris’s works include The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, American Dharma and My Psychedelic Love Story. Separated came with some distinct challenges. Much of the separation process happened away from TV cameras; the director compensations with dramatisations to portray a Guatemalan mother and son experiencing the border crossing, separation and reunification.View image in fullscreenIt was also hard to get interviews with those involved. Morris explains: “There are all kinds of impediments to getting people to talk; I’ve never seen anything this severe. If you’re working for the government, for example, like Jonathan White was working for the government, you’re constrained. You’re not allowed to talk without getting the permission of your superiors.“Most people who are still working in some capacity for the government simply would not talk and it didn’t matter how much begging and how much cajoling I might do. Jonathan would and that represents an extraordinary act of courage on his part.“He felt that the issues were so important that he had to talk. Call him a whistleblower. Call him whatever you want to call him. He did something that was incorrect and greatly appreciated by me. He took risks in order to tell a story which I believe needed to be told. A hero.”In his interview White describes Scott Lloyd, the head of the ORR, as “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history”, given White’s disturbing lack of awareness of the trauma inflicted on children under his care.Morris reflects: “Why is he doing the job? He’s a political appointee. He was known for his anti-abortion activism and that was his chief concern: preventing any of the women in ORR custody from ever getting abortions, even though at that time Roe was the law of the land.“Was Scott Lloyd interested very much in the care of people in his charge? I don’t know. It seems to me – I hate to make these inferences but I don’t hate them so much that I’m unwilling to make them – that he was currying favour with the administration. He was interested in self-advancement. He was ambitious and perfectly willing to do the bidding of the hardliners in the Trump administration.”Separated is also a study in the bureaucratic machinations behind how the sausage is made. “There is a very strong theme running through this about bureaucrats and bureaucracy, good bureaucrats and bad bureaucrats. Most interesting to me in the story is how pliable our morality is.“If we need to find a way to justify the most appalling behaviour, we somehow find a way to do it. You can listen to Kirstjen Nielsen braying like a donkey that she is just following the law – you wouldn’t want me to break the law, would you?“Well, I don’t look at it that way and, when it’s suggested that she might be separating families as a deterrent to immigration, she gets outraged. I can’t even believe you would suggest such a thing. This is all Looney Tunes. It’s people living in some strange nimbus of self-deception.”The film highlights the role of civil servants who challenged the policy and fought to reunite families – courageous individuals such as White and Jallyn Sualog who worked within the system to mitigate its harmful effects. And it offers a reminder of the mass street protests – plus worldwide condemnation from the pope and others – that ultimately compelled Trump to back down: the one significant policy reversal of his first term.Yet a scandal that has been called “torture”, and by Morris himself as leading to “state-created orphans”, gained relatively little attention during this year’s presidential election campaign. Democrats were on the defensive on the border issue and tried to avoid the subject.Morris says: “People were scared to talk about immigration. The Democrats were and the Republicans weren’t scared to talk about it as long as they could frame it in the most draconian, repulsive terms: we’ll deport everybody.”View image in fullscreenHe was denied a chance to help put the issue on the agenda when Separated was not scheduled for TV broadcast until after election day. Morris complained on the X social media platform: “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election? It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”Trump claimed that undocumented migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and asserted, without evidence, that Haitians were eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He pledged the biggest mass deportation in US history and has already announced a team including the immigration hardliners Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, both of whom were instrumental in family separations during the first term.Will there be another public revolt this time or, given Trump’s victory in the national popular vote, are people demoralised and desensitised? Morris asks: “Did people in Germany all know that there was antisemitism? Well, yes. Did they know that they were involved in genocide? Probably not everybody.“On the part of the public, there’s a concept I’m very fond of: anti-curiosity. I sometimes say to myself, how much will it cost me to know less? There’s denial, there’s self-deception, there’s willful disbelief and on and on and on and on and on. I often say Homo sapiens: very bad and most certainly a compromised species.”But a mass deportation operation will be costly, logistically difficult and likely to produce harrowing images on TV that could reignite the anti-Trump resistance. At a recent screening of Separated in Washington, an audience member interrupted Soboroff and others on a panel discussion by shouting: “We’re not going to let him make our federal government the Third Reich of the US! We’re not going to let him make our National Guard people the Gestapo of the United States! We are not going to let that happen!”The sequel is always worse. Mass deportations would mean a return to child separations by another name. Some 4.4 million US citizen children lived with at least one undocumented parent as of 2018. The return of Trump has left Morris thinking about questions of justice.“What happens when you have crime without punishment?” he asks. “We all have this kind of quasi-religious model that moral transgressions have to be punished. There has to be some kind of societal reply. But what if there isn’t? What if crime goes unpunished?“I was just in Ukraine and I kept wondering – they’ve recorded over 100,000 war crimes by Russian soldiers – will these go unpunished? Will there ever be any kind of accountability? My answer to that is: ask America about crime without punishment and what ultimately that does to a society.”

      Separated will air on MSNBC in the US on 7 December More

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      Why Joe Biden pardoned his son – podcast

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      Joe Biden’s love for his family has long softened his public persona. From his grief at losing his first wife and daughter in a car crash, to the death of his son Beau, the tragedy he endured has been clear. And so has his obvious devotion to his second wife, Jill, and his remaining son, Hunter.It was in this light – as a doting father keen to protect his son – that the president hopes people will see his sudden decision to grant a pardon to Hunter for gun and federal tax offences. He was due to be sentenced this month. Hunter had become the first child of a sitting president to face a criminal trial and could have spent years in prison.Yet to many critics, Biden’s pardon is shocking. The president had repeatedly said he would not pardon his son, that he had faith in the institutions of justice, and he had positioned himself in his shortened election bid as someone who would uphold the rule of law. The Guardian’s US live editor, Chris Michael, explains why Biden may have changed his stance. And he tells Helen Pidd how the move could set a dangerous precedent on the cusp of Trump taking power. More

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      Trump picks Republican mega-donor Warren Stephens as ambassador to UK

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      Donald Trump announced on Monday he has picked investment banker and Republican mega-donor Warren Stephens to serve as ambassador to the UK.“Warren has always dreamed of serving the United States full time,” wrote Trump in a social media post. “I am thrilled that he will now have that opportunity as the top Diplomat, representing the U.S.A. to one of America’s most cherished and beloved Allies.”Stephens is chairman, president and CEO of Stephens Inc, a privately owned financial services firm headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to the firm’s website.The businessman has donated regularly to conservative causes, although not always in support of Trump. Stephens initially poured money into efforts to oppose Trump’s 2016 run, but he later supported Trump’s 2020 presidential run. In 2023, Stephens donated in support of Asa Hutchinson’s presidential run. In 2024, according to Federal Election Commission filings, he donated at least $2m to Make America Great Again Inc, a pro-Trump Super Pac.In his announcement, Trump called Stephens’s company a “wonderful financial services firm” and praised Stephens for “selflessly giving back to his community as a philanthropist”.A 2017 report by the Guardian revealed that Stephens held a 40% stake in a payday loan company, Integrity Advance, that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) took action against in 2015 for allegedly employing predatory lending practices. The revelation was produced through the Paradise Papers reporting project, which investigated multinational companies’ use of tax havens to shelter their money.According to the 2015 CFPB report, Integrity Advance allegedly misled loan recipients by obscuring the total cost of the loans and requiring borrowers to pay back loans through pre-authorized electronic transfers.

      Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Raskin seeks to lead Democrats on House judiciary in ‘fight of our lives’ against Trump

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      Jamie Raskin, the Maryland congressman who spearheaded the second impeachment of Donald Trump, has announced a bid to unseat a veteran Democratic colleague from a key role in a Capitol Hill committee as part of a party drive to sharpen its opposition in preparation for Trump’s return to the White House.After days of speculation, Raskin said he would challenge Jerrold Nadler of New York for the post of ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee.The move signals Democratic conviction that the committee could become one of the most important Capitol Hill forums in which to combat Trump’s stated goal of installing loyalists at the justice department and FBI with the brief of purging supposedly disloyal officials and pursuing retribution against political enemies.The Republicans will control the House with a wafer thin majority – expected to be 220-215, with one race from last month’s election still to be officially called – when Congress returns in the new year, further raising the stakes of effective committee opposition.Raskin, currently the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, announced he was challenging 77-year-old Nadler, who he acknowledged as a friend, in an open letter.“We are in the fight of our lives. The stakes have gone way up since the election,” Raskin wrote. “House Democrats must stand in the breach to defend the principles and institutions of constitutional democracy. We dare not fail.”Explaining the key role of the judiciary committee, he added: “This is where we will wage our front-line defense of the freedoms and rights of the people, the integrity of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the security of our most precious birthright possessions: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and democracy itself.”Raskin, who played a leading role in the House investigation into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, had been urged by colleagues to run amid doubts over Nadler’s ability to combat Trump’s agenda, as advanced by the committee’s pugnacious Republican chair, Jim Jordan.A former constitutional law professor, Raskin, 61, played the role of leading impeachment manager against Trump following the riot. The House impeached the then sitting president for his role in the episode. A Senate trial the following month failed to garner the two-thirds majority vote to convict that would have barred him from seeking office again.Nadler has been criticised by colleagues for a pedestrian speaking style that sticks to talking points, whereas Raskin is widely seen as more spontaneous and combative.The New York Times reported that Nadler had expressed anger to Raskin – who he previously supported to be the party’s leading figure on the oversight committee – at the prospect of a challenge.Among those having reportedly urged Raskin to mount a challenge has been Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, who continues to wield influence in the party’s congressional caucus.Nadler’s challenge is part of a broader attempt by Democrats to replace some of their most senior ranking figures with younger faces on key committees.Raúl Grijalva, 76, the ranking Democrat on the House natural resources committee, announced on Monday that he was withdrawing after being challenged for the position by Jared Huffman, 60, who has promoted himself as being able to “limit the damage from Trump’s Project 2025 agenda”. More

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      What is a presidential pardon and how has it been used in the US?

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      Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter on Sunday for any federal crimes “he committed or may have committed” between 1 January 2014 and 1 December 2024 has brought renewed focus on the expansive power the US constitution gives the president to grant official clemency.It’s a power that presidents have deployed since George Washington, who pardoned those involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, to Donald Trump, who pardoned his political allies.What is the pardon power?The presidential pardon power is explicitly outlined in the US constitution.Section 2 of article II says that the president has the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment”. The president’s power only applies to federal crimes, not state ones. It also does not apply to cases of impeachment.The founders took the pardon power from England, where there was a longstanding tradition of the king’s ability to issue mercy pardons. There was some debate about whether Congress should be required to give approval of pardons and whether there should be an exception for treason, but Alexander Hamilton pushed the constitutional convention to include a broad pardon power solely vested in the president. “As men generally derive confidence from their numbers, they might often encourage each other in an act of obduracy, and might be less sensible to the apprehension of suspicion or censure for an injudicious or affected clemency. On these accounts, one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of government, than a body of men,” he wrote in Federalist no 74, one of a series of essays to promote the ratification of the constitution.When it came to treason, he argued that the president could deploy the pardon power as a tool to negotiate and unify the country. “In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall,” he wrote.Bernadette Meyler, a law professor at Stanford University who studies British and US law, described it as “the one emergency power written into the constitution, other than the suspension of habeas corpus.“It’s one thing that is a concession to the idea that there might be certain unforeseen circumstances that the president would have to intervene in,” she said. “It goes along with the president’s control also over the army and navy and military power because, in the context that it was being contemplated, it was really being thought about as another tool within the ability to control domestic unrest.” How has the pardon power been used?George Washington issued the first pardons in 1795 to two men who were involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, a violent uprising in Pennsylvania to protest a tax on whiskey and other alcohol products by the nascent federal government.A key moment in the pardon power came after the civil war, when president Andrew Johnson issued “a full pardon and amnesty” to any person “who, directly or indirectly, participated in the late insurrection or rebellion” during the civil war. This and similar pardons around the same time led the US supreme court to interpret the pardon power to allow the president to grant broad amnesty to a group of people and not just for specific crimes already committed, Meyler said.After Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in the 1970s after Watergate, Gerald Ford issued a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes.In 1977, Jimmy Carter issued a mass pardon for those who had dodged the draft for the Vietnam war. At the end of his term in 1992, George HW Bush pardoned six people involved in the Iran-Contra affair, including the former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger.In his last day in office in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and gave an extremely controversial pardon to Marc Rich, a fugitive convicted of financial crimes whose ex-wife had been a major donor to Democrats and the Clinton campaign. Barack Obama granted clemency to more than 1,700 people while in office, including hundreds who had been convicted of non-violent drug offenses.Who did Donald Trump pardon?Trump did not hesitate to use the pardon power during his presidency to help political allies. He pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared. The elder Kushner had pleaded guilty years earlier to tax evasion and witness tampering (Trump has now tapped him to be ambassador to France).He pardoned his political adviser Steve Bannon, who faced charges of defrauding donors on a charity related to building a wall at the southern border. He also pardoned Paul Manafort, who served as a top official on his 2016 campaign, and Trump ally Roger Stone.Trump pardoned the former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, the conservative personality Dinesh D’Souza, and Elliott Broidy, a major Republican donor. He also pardoned the rapper Lil Wayne and Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who had spent decades in prison for drug offenses but earned considerable attention after Kim Kardashian took on her cause.Trump has said he will issue a mass pardon for those involved in the January 6 attacks, a move that would end years of work by the justice department to investigate and criminally prosecute those involved in the attacks.Do other countries have a pardon power?The power to pardon is one that widely exists around the world, said Andrew Novak, a professor at George Mason University who is the author of Comparative Executive Clemency: The Constitutional Pardon Power and the Prerogative of Mercy in Global Perspective.But the United States is somewhat unique in allowing its chief executive the ability to pardon without having to get input or sign-off from others.“Biden can grant a pardon without input from anybody, which is much more of like a medieval English king conception of the pardon power, which is kind of ironic,” he added. “We have kind of an old-fashioned conception of the pardon power, at least generally.”“Having this unlimited pardon power that’s more similar to like 1700s England than it is to the current state of affairs in the western world,” he added. “In most countries in Europe, and the comparators in the developed world, they require input from someone else.” That requirement for input, Novak said, can somewhat limit a pardon being used to serve political or personal interests, the way it can be used in the US.Many countries also don’t allow for a pardon before conviction, Novak said, and there has been a movement over the last few decades in other countries for more transparency to ensure that proper processes are followed.About half of constitutions around the world limit the pardon power to something that can only occur after conviction, are only for specified offenses, or require an executive to consult others, Novak said. It’s uncommon for countries to have a ban on self-pardoning or pardoning a family member, he added.“Maybe it’s not common because the circumstance doesn’t arise very often,” he said. “The pardon power has always been a corruption risk going back to medieval times and can be used for many forms of self-dealing, like shielding one’s close associates or supporters.”The US founders understood impeachment to be an important check on the pardon power, Meyler said. “As we’ve seen it’s extremely hard to actually convict on an impeachment so that has proved to be really a fictional limitation on the president’s power.” More

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      Joe Biden criticized by some supporters for pardoning son Hunter: ‘Selfish move’

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      Joe Biden has been criticised by some of his own supporters for issuing a pardon to his son Hunter that he had previously sworn not to give.The president’s volte face drew predictable fire from Republicans, led by the president-elect, Donald Trump, who used it to raise the case of the jailed ringleaders of the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol, who he has suggested he will pardon when he returns to the White House.“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.Yet it was condemnation from fellow Democrats – some of whom said he had handed Trump justification for his own use of the presidential pardon power – that seemed likely to carry greater sting.Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, said Biden had risked his own reputation and legacy.“While as a father I certainly understand President @JoeBiden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Polis posted on X.“This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.“When you become President, your role is Pater familias of the nation. Hunter brought the legal trouble he faced on himself, and one can sympathize with his struggles while also acknowledging that no one is above the law, not a President and not a President’s son.”Hunter Biden was convicted by a court in Delaware last June of lying on a gun licence application at a time when he was addicted to cocaine. He was later convicted of separate tax evasion charges in a court in California.He was scheduled to be sentenced for both convictions in hearings this month.Biden justified his pardon by insisting that Hunter’s prosecutions had been driven by “raw politics” and would not have been pressed had his father not been president.That interpretation was rejected by Greg Stanton, a Democratic House member for Arizona.“I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he posted on social media.“This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”There was further condemnation from Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator for Colorado, who was prominent among those calling for Biden to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee last summer following a bad debate performance.“President Biden’s decision put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all,” he wrote on X.Peter Welch, a Democratic senator for Vermont, said the pardon was “as the action of a loving father, understandable – but as the action of our nation’s Chief Executive, unwise”.In similar vein, Greg Landsman, a Democratic congressman for Ohio, posted: “As a father, I get it. But as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback.”Joe Walsh, an anti-Trump former Republican congressman who endorsed Biden for president, called the pardon deflating because it enabled Trump to validate his own much-criticised pardons of friends and supporters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This just furthers the cynicism that people have about politics,” he told MSNBC. “That cynicism strengthens Trump because Trump can just say: ‘I’m not a unique threat. Everybody does this. If I do something for my kid, my son-in-law, look, Joe Biden does the same thing.’ I get it, but this was a selfish move by Biden which politically only strengthens Trump.”In the Atlantic magazine, Jonathan Chait argued that the president had undermined the democratic values that he had previously championed.“Principles become much harder to defend when their most famous defenders have compromised them flagrantly,” he wrote.“With the pardon decision, like his stubborn insistence on running for a second term he couldn’t win, Biden chose to prioritize his own feelings over the defense of his country.”Some Democrats leaped to Biden’s defence.“Hunter. Here’s the reality. No US [attorney] would have charged this case given the underlying facts,” Eric Holder, an attorney general under Barack Obama, wrote on X.“Had his name been Joe Smith the resolution would have been – fundamentally and more fairly – a declination. Pardon warranted.”Jasmine Crockett, a Texas member of the House of Representatives, went further, saying: “Let me be the first to congratulate the president.”“At the end of the day, we know that we have a 34-count convicted felon that is about to walk into the White House,” she told MSNBC, referring to Trump’s conviction by a New York court on document falsification charges relating to hush money paid to a porn actor.Alluding to allegations against several of Trump’s cabinet nominees, she added: “For anyone that wants to clutch their pearls now because [Biden] decided that he was going to pardon his son, I would say take a look in the mirror because we also know that … this cabinet has more people accused of sexual assault than any incoming cabinet probably in the history of America.”Sarah Longwell, another anti-Trump Republican strategist who endorsed Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, wrote: “‘Trump is worse’ is never a good argument to justify bad behavior.“Biden knows it’s wrong. That’s why he committed over and over to not doing it. It doesn’t make him the same as Trump. It doesn’t erase how singularly corrupt Trump’s current appointments are. It’s simply wrong and we should say so, lest we forget that right and wrong still exist and awareness of it matters in our President.” More