One of the reasons it’s so difficult to feel sympathy for Donald Trump’s current legal woes (selective and politically motivated though they are) is Trump’s own abandonment of his most loyal supporters to malicious prosecution, people who unlike Trump don’t have a fortune to spend on legal defenses and are only in trouble because they answered his call to attend a protest that not only never had any chance of overturning the 2020 election, but his own campaign staff never even expected to overturn the election.  

Other than the government officials who are actively perpetuating selective, disproportionate punishment of non-violent January 6 defendants without regard for their due process rights, nobody bears more responsibility for their predicament than Trump. And putting aside the question of how much more he could be doing for them beyond collaborating on a song or addressing the occasional fundraiser while dealing with his own legal problems, it is an inescapable fact that before leaving office, he could have prevented nearly all of the suffering they have endured over the past two and a half years, by issuing a blanket pardon to everyone present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (exempting those determined to have been credibly accused of violence against other people by January 20).

Alas, Poor Donald can never be at fault for anything in MAGA’s eyes, which means this must be either ignored or denied. One of the worst offenders on that score is “journalist” Julie Kelly, who carved out a niche in conservative media as a supposed warrior for J6 detainees, yet who is suspiciously blasé about replacing the current president with someone who could actually end their persecution.

Since Ron DeSantis announced his candidacy, Kelly has taken to frequently sniping at him with pedantic and disingenuous claims that he is somehow questionable on the issue of dismantling weaponized government.

Admittedly, I believe DeSantis’s comments here have suffered from his instincts as a lawyer getting in the way of the need for direct answers that frontload a simple “yes” to the pardon questions. But on the merits, the idea that the guy who has been more aggressive and proactive in fighting the Left than any other officeholder in America, who said on day two of his campaign that he would be “aggressive at issuing pardons” on “day one” of his presidency, who has been developing a comprehensive plan to rein in a rogue Justice Department, and who has ousted George Soros-backed prosecutors is not clearly preferable to the guy who abandoned his pledge to prosecute Hillary Clinton the moment it was no longer politically useful and spent his presidency doing nothing to clean up the rot in the executive branch, to the point that he appointed one of the US attorneys who went on to screw him solely because a couple of Democrat senators asked him to…well, it doesn’t pass the laugh test.

In response to this, several tweeters (who have yet to be blocked by her, unlike yours truly) have pointed out how Trump left the J6ers out to dry by not pardoning them…to which Kelly has incredibly suggested that he couldn’t have pardoned them.

“Blanket pardon is absurd—who knew DOJ would round up and charge 2k people, did you?” Kelly tweeted on May 24. On July 28, she again dismissed the possibility as “absurd,” and upon receiving pushback retorted, “what would the crime be? Explain how this pardon would’ve worked.”

Multiple respondents did just that. Kelly, naturally, did not respond to any of them.

The point is worth taking a few moments to set the record straight on: Trump absolutely could have issued a blanket pardon preventing the persecutions, with historical precedent readily demonstrating how.

On September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon “for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.”

On January 21, 1977, Jimmy Carter pardoned “all persons who may have committed any offense between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973 in violation of the Military Selective Service Act or any rule or regulation promulgated thereunder,” with language excluding any offense “involving force or violence” or representatives of the “Military Selective Service system.”

The subjects did not need to be identified. Their alleged crimes did not need to be specified. Their cases did not need to have been adjudicated.

It should not have been remotely difficult for White House lawyers to draft a pardon, for instance, covering “all persons who may have committed any offense within the United States Capitol or on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021,” with language clarifying that it “does not apply to individuals who may have committed any offense involving force or violence against another human being.”

As for the idea that the Justice Department’s persecution of J6 protesters was some unforeseeable surprise…really? After years of Democrat efforts to demonize conservatives as “domestic extremists” and everything they tried to criminalize Trump himself throughout his presidency? As far back as I can remember, the Left has itched to brand peaceful conservative protests as breeding grounds for violence. Now that they finally had one that did turn violent, of course they were going to make the most of it.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that people who lead their followers into catastrophe then leave them there should not be entrusted with the task of getting them out of it. Nor should self-styled experts on their plight who actively mislead their readers about the most basic solutions that were available.