Chris Hayes ran down the string of astonishing pardons Donald Trump has doled out to supporters this week along with other examples of what the MSNBC host called “sheer corruption and moral obscenity.” And in the end, Hayes reached two unsettling conclusions.
The first is that, Hayes argues, Trump’s true goal here is to “effectively end white collar prosecution and white collar crime as a category.” And the second is that all of this poses the very serious risk of teeing the U.S. up for economic crisis at least as bad as the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that caused the Great Recession.
After first running down some of those pardons, Hayes said, “in many cases, Donald Trump uses the power of the presidency to grant a kind of criminal immunity to those he deems to be, for lack of a better phrase, his kind of people.”
“Last year, you may remember, Trump’s hand picked Supreme Court ruled that basically anything the President does, or at least i president does — We’ll see if this lasts,” Hayes added, apparently suggesting this kind of ruling would not be extended to cover a Democratic president. “Anything this president does that could possibly be construed as an official act of Office cannot be subsequently criminally prosecuted.”
“It was a wild ruling based on wholly invented doctrine, and it was effectively a pardon from the court to a man facing multiple criminal trials, including over his inciting a violent insurrection,” Hayes continued. “So now Trump wants to reorient the entire federal justice system to extend that same immunity to anyone he deems similarly above the law. Namely, anyone who commits the kind of crimes that Donald Trump might commit, anyone who is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, Trump or commits crimes in his name, and most importantly, perhaps, anyone who was a family member willing to show up $2 million fundraisers.”
Hayes ran through some examples of this — noting that it’s not clear for certain there was a direct 1:1 relationship between donations and pardons, but that the evidence certainly supports the conclusion.
“We are seeing this story play out over and over again, especially when it comes to what we used to call corruption and white collar crime. It’s the category of people who Donald Trump might have as say, Mar a Lago, members who, under his definition, and this is key to understand, cannot, by definition, be criminal,” Hayes argued.
He then ran down more examples of this, including his comments on Wednesday suggesting he’s willing to pardon the men convicted of plotting the kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Then Hayes, continued, “Clemency is a really important one. It’s essential in the Constitution. It can be a very good thing. And I want to be super clear here, okay, in most all presidencies of my lifetime, that power has been woefully underused by presidents. People genuinely do get railroaded. They really do end up with insane sentences that don’t match their crimes.”
“But Donald Trump is not attempting to redress systematic social injustice here, right? This is not a good faith effort. He has decided that the purpose of the pardon is to protect people who are loyal to him,” Hayes continued, before quoting Óscar Benavides, fascist dictator of Peru in the 1930s, “for my friends, everything, for my enemies of law.”
“People that commit the kind of crimes he thinks are like, not a big deal. Who cares? Tax evasion, fraud,. What he wants to do, I think it’s pretty clear, is effectively end white collar prosecution and white collar crime as a category, whether through pardons for a dismantle Department of Justice. And I gotta say, aside from the just sheer corruption and moral obscenity of it all, having lived through and covered the subprime mortgage mortgage crisis, I’m going to go on a limb and say the combination of totally defanging white collar prosecution while deregulating and embracing the dodgiest parts of finance, like crypto, where there’s billions of dollars sloshing around. is not gonna end well,” Hayes added.
Watch the commentary below:
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