Trump has turned his presidential pardon power into a sleazy, cash‑drenched patronage machine. This shows cynical indifference to law and harm done to ordinary people. His pardon of nursing‑home magnate Joseph Schwartz, who defrauded the government of nearly $39 million in payroll taxes and helped collapse a multistate nursing‑home chain, wiped out prison time, fines, and $5 million in restitution after Schwartz had served only a few months. This contempt for victims and for the sentencing judge, who had rejected leniency because of the scale of the fraud, signals a president who treats justice as an opportunity to harvest cash by selling access to his presidential pardon power. Link 1, link 2
Trump has built a lucrative “pardon industry” that now sells access and influence to rich felons. To buy a pardon, each criminal launders about $1 million to Trump through operatives and lobbyists with personal connections to the president and his inner circle. The official clemency list is a roll call of tax cheats, securities fraudsters, murderers, corrupt politicians, foreign influence peddlers, and January 6 and 2020‑election traitors. Trump rewards loyalty, ideological alignment, or personal usefulness in his calculation of who gets pardoned. He operates a pay‑to‑play get out of fines and jail (not for free) for criminals. Trump's moral rot openly mocks the rule‑of‑law ideal that justice cannot be bought. Link 3, link 4
Estimates are that Trump’s pardons and clemency grants have eliminated almost $2 billion in court‑ordered financial penalties, including restitution, fines, and forfeitures. Of that, more than $1.3 billion was owed directly to crime victims in restitution. In other words, Trump shafted the victims of pardoned criminals' crimes in return for payment from the criminals themselves. So far, his pardons have taken about $1.3 billion from innocent crime victims. Link 5, link 6
Criminals buying pardons for cash is MAGA law and order in action, right? /s
Q: Is Trump's pardons for cash evidence that he really is on the little guy's side, as he always claims, or is it evidence he is on the big guy's side and, more or less, could not care less about shafting little regular people who have been harmed by criminals?
Link to the DoJ's list of Trump pardons since Jan. 2025: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-donald-j-trump-2025-present
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