The Power of Forgiveness: How Trump’s Latest Pardons Recast the Story of 2020
It arrived quietly, late on a Friday, a four-page proclamation that read more like a declaration of faith than a legal document. Donald Trump had issued “full, complete, and unconditional” pardons to more than seventy allies tied to his efforts to contest the 2020 election.
The list included the names that had defined the fevered aftermath of that race: Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mark Meadows. For nearly four years, they’d become symbols of loyalty to some and of dangerous delusion to others. Trump, in one sweep of clemency, restored them not merely to grace but to purpose.
On the surface, these pardons resolve little in legal terms; none of the recipients faced federal charges. However, they represent a bold reimagining of the post-2020 story in symbolic terms. If accountability had been the story’s closing note, Trump would have just ripped out the final page and rewritten it himself.
Pardons as Political Theater
“This is Trump’s ultimate narrative weapon,” says Dr. Lena Kravitz, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University. “By pardoning acts that were never federally charged, he’s declaring his version of truth and using the legal machinery of the presidency to do it.”
It’s not the first time Trump has treated pardons as political stagecraft. During his presidency, he tested the bounds of executive grace, granting high-profile clemency not necessarily for remorse, but for loyalty. “He uses the pardon like a signature,” notes campaign strategist Marcus Dean, who once advised Republican candidates critical of Trump. “It’s part of his brand, the benevolent strongman, the wronged leader who alone can forgive.”
In that light, the latest wave of pardons is less about law than about identity. Trump’s statement described the act as rectifying “a grave national injustice.” Those words are doing rhetorical work, transforming the cast of the 2020 saga from alleged conspirators into patriots unfairly punished by what he calls a biased system.
The American Art of Reinvention
In the end, these pardons aren’t just about Trump, his allies, or even 2020. The idea that any chapter, no matter how broken, can be rewritten if one has the will to narrate it loudly enough is what they are all about, and it is fundamentally American.
Across two and a half centuries, the presidency has oscillated between restraint and display, mercy and might. Trump’s latest act fuses them all into a single gesture: forgiveness as dominance, amnesty as authorship.
And somewhere in that fusion lies the enduring paradox of American power: a nation forever chasing closure, yet perpetually drawn to the figures who refuse to let the story end.
Sarge