Lawless to the Max(well)
As Trump contemplates a pardon for a convicted sex trafficker implicated in the abuse of hundreds of girls and women, his corruption and immorality are pushing American society to the brink
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
A confession: for the first week or two of turmoil in Trumpworld, as the president reneged on promises to release the Epstein files, I was more or less in “pass the popcorn” mode, enjoying the right-wing circular firing squad while it lasted. It seemed more than likely that Trump would sooner or later arrive at a face-saving formulation that MAGA thought leaders could get behind, one that would allow him to keep well hidden whatever the government possesses about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.
What I was not doing in particular was considering the very real and very dark crimes committed by Epstein and his accomplices, the sex trafficking and rapes. The danger to Trump, and the upside to his opponents, was the main thing, particularly the way that Trump-sympathetic conspiracy theories built around Epstein might come crashing down and, in the process, do measurable damage to the president’s political support.
Ironically, it was none other than Donald Trump himself who woke me from my cynical slumber and reminded me of the deeper stakes of the Epstein imbroglio. As the president began talking about a possible pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner who was convicted of sex trafficking and has been credibly accused of participating in Epstein’s sexual abuse of girls and young women, my attitude quickly began to change. I felt a visceral sense of revulsion and even rage at the idea — after all, this is someone who was justly convicted of heinous crimes.
Moreover, Trump’s clear intent to leverage personally beneficial testimony from Maxwell in exchange for a pardon didn’t just feel like an attack on our justice system: it hit like an attack on the idea of morality itself, on the basic concepts of right and wrong. Trump’s wrecking ball wasn’t just aimed at our political system; it was aimed at the nature of our society itself. The corruption felt tangible, morally resonant.
Obviously there have been legal travesties before. But a pardon of Maxwell would be far more intense than more quotidian miscarriages of justice. Carried out by the president in open contempt for the facts and the rule or law, reaching for a state of absolute, self-serving corruption that no one one in their right mind could call otherwise, it would be particularly corrosive to baseline societal standards of decency. The horror of Maxwell’s pardon — the pardon of a woman who enabled large-scale rape and other abuses — would be bound up with the confirmation it would give that, at a minimum, Donald Trump fears being implicated in any release of information regarding Epstein’s crimes. An FBI team reportedly flagged multiple references to Trump in Epstein-related files; such a pardon would validate reasonable suspicions that Trump has something awful to hide.
The formulation that comes to mind isn’t overly complicated: “The United States can’t have a president who pardons those convicted of horrific sex crimes in order to protect the public from discovering the extent of his own possible sex crimes.” It does not matter at all whether Trump actually has something to hide himself, or if he sees this as a way to put the Epstein mess and its lingering questions about his own complicity behind him. Again, this is more than an attack on the rule of law — giving Maxwell a get-out-of-jail-free card is an attack on basic morality. It’s the sort of act that, if unchallenged and unrepudiated, helps kicks the bottom out of a society.
Some situations in politics are complicated, requiring a careful balancing of competing interests and trade-offs. This is not one of those situations. Opponents of Trump, particularly including elected Democratic leaders, need to make clear that Trump cannot remain president if he grants such a pardon. Indeed, at his Off Message blog, Brian Beutler describes a handful of specific scenarios involving what we know, what might still become known, and whether the president pardons Maxwell; the bottom line is that there is a range of ways in which the president can be credibly implicated in Epstein’s activities (including knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking and rapes) that disqualify him from continuing in office. Should those circumstances occur, Beutler urges Democrats to press for impeachment, and to challenge their GOP colleagues to do the same. Personally, I’d prefer that Democrats demand his resignation alongside assertions of his unfitness to serve the public interest — but whatever the mechanisms, the call must be unambiguous that the president must go.
This is because the stakes here are so high, going not just to the integrity of our justice system (which, let’s be clear, has already been severely compromised by Trump) but to our society’s ability to maintain even the most minimal standards of right and wrong. If Trump is pardoning a person for horrific crimes, crimes viscerally understood as evil by most ordinary Americans, and is deploying the power of the presidency to protect such crimes and his own possible involvement, then Democrats need to act as if these are indeed horrific crimes deserving of accountability. Crucially, they cannot hold back because they have savvily gamed out in advance that Trump will not resign or be impeached, so why even bother?
Here, Trump’s capacity to defile our government and our society can either be mitigated or amplified by the Democrats’ political stance towards his authoritarian depravity. As I’ve repeatedly argued, Democrats can’t limit their ambitions to lessening the damage of a four-year Trump presidency around the margins. President Trump poses such a grave danger to our country that every Democratic elected official should wake up every morning brainstorming ideas for driving Trump from office long before he has served his full term.
We are well past the point where undue deference to his electoral and popular victory merits more than a moment’s consideration. Starting on Inauguration Day, Trump began to betray his oath of office by failing to faithfully execute the laws, instead embarking on a reign of lawlessness and hate that has seen much of the federal government illegally gutted, millions of Americans and immigrants labeled as enemies, opposition politicians targeted as if we were some podunk banana republic, and our national security weakened by the appointment of incompetents at the Pentagon and over the public health apparatus. As his collapsing poll numbers demonstrate, millions of Americans are seeing through the lies that led them to cast a vote for him.
The possible pardon of Maxwell should remind us that Trump and the MAGA forces behind him aren’t merely a political threat, corroding our democracy and imposing right-wing policies on everything from health care to education. Despite the avowals of righteousness from the Christian right, what MAGA and Trump also portend is an overturning of our free, relatively open society in favor of one that is far more hierarchical, ideological — and fundamentally immoral.
The only thing that’s mildly surprising is that we’ve so quickly arrived at this point where Trump would openly contemplate pardoning a sex trafficker and abuser. This is not a sign of his strength — it’s far more indicative of how he doesn’t see any better options for getting himself out of whatever mess he perceives himself to be in. But it is a reminder of the moral vacancy at the heart of MAGA. Democrats would do well to condemn Trump on these moral and cultural grounds — as a figure so morally disgraceful that his presence in the seat of power threatens to defile us all. Trump may be hitting rock bottom, but that doesn’t mean the rest of America has to go along for the ride.