There are few presidential powers as sweeping — or as revealing — as the power to pardon. It is a mirror of how a leader understands the limits of their office. For some presidents, it has been an instrument of mercy, a way to correct injustice or offer grace.
For Donald Trump, it has become something else entirely: a personal tool to reward allies, enrich loyalists and protect those whose fortunes are tied to his own.
His recent commutation of George Santos’ seven-year prison sentence makes the point. Santos, a disgraced former congressman who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft, had served just 84 days before Trump intervened. The Constitution gives the president enormous latitude in granting clemency — but how that power is exercised speaks volumes about a president’s respect for the guardrails that hold a democracy together. Clemency can be an act of mercy. It can also be a signal that some are exempt from the rules everyone else must follow.
Trump has chosen the latter, again and again. From Roger Stone to Michael Flynn, Santos is only the latest in a line of loyalists rewarded not for injustice suffered but for allegiance displayed. But last week’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, marks something even more extraordinary — and dangerous. Zhao pleaded guilty to money laundering violations after U.S. authorities found that his crypto empire allowed terrorists, drug cartels and sanctioned regimes to move funds with impunity. He served just four months. Now, with a stroke of Trump’s pen, his record is wiped clean.
This wasn’t a quiet act of clemency. It was a public declaration of loyalty and mutual interest. Zhao had hired Trump-connected lobbyists, while Binance entered into a lucrative partnership with the Trump family’s crypto startup, a deal expected to generate tens of millions of dollars annually for Trump’s inner circle. It is difficult to imagine a more naked fusion of presidential power and private enrichment.
And Trump’s view of power doesn’t stop at America’s borders. Just days earlier, he stood before Israel’s Knesset urging President Isaac Herzog to pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a stunning spectacle: an American president pressuring another democracy to set aside its own legal process. It was an unprecedented breach of diplomatic norms and an affront to the basic principle that each nation must be free to administer its own justice. For Trump, even another country’s courts are fair game for political meddling.
What corrodes faith in law and the orderly processes that sustain a democracy is not just the freeing of a fraudster or the wiping clean of a billionaire’s record. It’s the deeper message that justice is negotiable, accountability is conditional and loyalty is the only fixed point. In this worldview, the power to pardon isn’t a constitutional trust. It’s a loyalty program.
Each time Trump wields clemency to reward the powerful or politically useful, he weakens public confidence in the rule of law. Each time he mocks legal processes abroad, he erodes America’s moral authority to defend democratic principles. The pardon power was meant to temper justice with mercy. In Trump’s hands, it has become a political weapon and a business opportunity.
With Santos’ commutation, Zhao’s pardon and Netanyahu’s trial, the pattern is unmistakable. Trump isn’t just rejecting limits. He’s daring the nation to accept a presidency without them.
