It looks like the Orange Hydra is getting antsy. The Cult of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are failing. He’ll soon be out on his ass, and his judicial immunity stripped from him. Odds are he’ll be hunted till the rest of his days once he leaves the oval office. And in some sort of last ditch effort, the Trump seems to try and curry favour with the world around him with the age old US tradition of last minute presidential pardons (a fucking foreign concept to anyone living in a proper Rechtstaat).
According to a self-styled “scoop” from Axios, the news media outlet of Jonathan Swan fame, the president is considering a long list of names for his New Year’s pardons. Possibly in a desperate attempt to clean his name up a bit after his disastrous presidential stint. No president before him has used the office’s pardoning powers to the extent he has, and if the Axios report is to be believed, the Orange Hydra plans to go out with a bang.
Now, to be absolutely fair, most of the people Trump have already pardoned have been cronies of his. From corrupt money launderers and scam artist politicians, perjurers and racist sheriffs. With some good-will names thrown in for good measure in a meagre effort to balance the self-serving scales.
According to the scoop, plenty of names (to quote the beast; “anyone he’s ever met”) are circling in Trump’s tattered mind. And as soon as the report came out, speculation and requests have bloomed aplenty across the punditry and political lines. Names like Snowden and Assange, to name a few of the prolific ones.
And wouldn’t that be nice?
So why are we talking about this? Well, as the very real possibility of Trump blundering into a benign decision of pardoning unjustly convicted and hunted people like Assange or Snowden, it brings up a very important distinction that the modern day political discourse is very bad at discerning. Namely that just as good people can make bad decisions, so too can bad people make good decisions. And in a discourse climate where arguments ad hominem and other logical fallacies are ripe, it is important to talk about this potential event.
Trump has not been a good president. This may be controversial domestically, but I think it’s fair to say at this point. He’s corrupt, barely functional on a cognitive level, a bully, a bigot, and insecure of the highest level. Even though whatever criticism you can levy against him is also true of most other politicians (e.g. that he’s a liar, corrupt, self-serving, etc.), he has single-handedly tumbled the Overton window off its axis.
That being said; none of that means that every single little (or big) thing the Orange Disaster does has to be a bad thing. For example, if he were to pardon the US’s greatest citizen Edward Snowden, that would be a good thing. And it would not reflect poorly on Snowden just because Trump tried to use the pardon of the whistleblower as a publicity stunt. Even broken watches are right twice a day, and even blind chickens find a kernel every now and again. Just because you hate Trump does not mean that you automatically have to hate every single thing he does, or every little thing he associates himself with.
Yes, I know this may be difficult for an American audience to hear, but it’s none the less true. If Trump pardons Snowden and/or Assange, I think that would be a good thing. Not a single US soldier’s death, regardless of US politician war-hawk propaganda to the contrary, has been provenly attributed to Snowden’s leaks of mass surveillance. And as for the case against Assange, it doesn’t matter if you believe that he’s a rapist or not (as the shadow prosecution of him has tried to allude), what he’s hunted by the US for is that he dared to do a journalist’s job in disfavour of the US war machine. No matter what you think of the persons, the actions that they’re hunted for were not villainous acts. And so, them being pardoned by presidential decree, even though that might not completely solve their plights, would still be good things.
If you think that Snowden or Assange shouldn’t be hunted by the US, and the Trump pardons them, it doesn’t mean you’re somehow compulsed to stop hating Trump. If you dislike Snowden or Assange as people, that doesn’t mean that you have to decry their courageous acts as traitorous. Never forget that just as an essentially good person can sometimes be at fault, so too can a despicable person sometimes get it right, even if it’s by accident.
/Sebastian Lindberg 15/12-2020
WastedWords 