I recently had an online discussion with someone who believes that Trump is an utter failure and a cautionary tale because he "betrayed his supporters" by not pardoning the January 6 prisoners.
He had written the following:
Donald Trump squandered his shot. Now he’s paying for his failure. Many of the people who put their faith in him already are.
That last point is why Trump has proven unfit to lead and why no rational person should support him, even if he somehow makes it out of this mess he made. Trump has insufficient loyalty to his followers. That is not a momentary lapse of judgment. It is a persistent character flaw. When the chips are down, he will abandon his people again.
Barring some road to Damascus moment, that is. But even if Trump has a profound change of heart, he will need to prove it with concrete results before anyone should consider trusting him again.
Like all tragedies, Trump’s negative example can be an occasion for greater good. Otherwise smart, well-meaning people in positions of influence can take Trump’s removal from the board as a valuable lesson. There is no voting our way out of this – not with the electoral system totally compromised. Nor do we need a Boomer TV daddy to swoop in and save us.
In the discussion between him and me that followed, he wrote this as a response to one of my comments:
As for Trump’s loyalty, tell that to the hundreds of his supporters imprisoned in his name for January 6. He could have pardoned them before leaving office but left them to rot. Instead, he released thousands of black felons onto the streets.
I responded:
Pardoning them would have removed even the limited Republican Congressional and Senate support that he had during his impeachment trial, which was already barely enough to prevent him from being convicted. He would have been convicted in his impeachment and sent to jail for inciting an insurrection. The intelligence agencies would have tracked down thousands of other Trump supporters who were at the January 6 rally (using cell phone data) to arrest in retaliation for the ones that would have been pardoned. It would have been a suicide move; sometimes it’s necessary to live to fight another day.
Him:
That’s the problem with parroting talking points you hear online without stopping to think first. If you had, you’d have seen how the argument negates itself.
If a system is corrupt enough to tell the President “We’re illegally imprisoning and torturing these 300 people, and if you pardon them, we’ll imprison you and thousands more,” it is too corrupt to be bargained with. There are no checks to prevent it from prosecuting the President and his followers anyway.
Which is what we are seeing happen now. The FBI raided an ex-president’s home. Then they stopped a sitting congressman in transit and seized his phone. Leftist influencers are now calling for ordinary Trump voters to be arrested and crushed and their children orphaned. Who’s going to stop them? The same Republicans who threatened to convict Trump if he’d pardoned those same people?
The day the system proved itself illegitimate was the day Trump should have stood and fought (peacefully). Running to fight another day turned into just running. Now he’ll be jailed anyway. And so will many of his supporters.
Defending him now requires the same rationalization battered wives use to justify their abuse. It serves no one.
Another person in a follow-up discussion wrote this;
I can only speak for myself, but that is when he lost me. The Qult, as you call it, can torture language and logic all they want to rationalize this, but it’s betrayal, pure and simple. No good and decent man would have done this in the face of what Trump stood against.
If he was smart enough to be 10 steps ahead of the Deep State, or play the imaginary 4D chess at master level, as the Qultists frequently claim, he would have easily been able to predict the results of this betrayal.
What are your thoughts on this point of view?
How many were even arrested by Jan. 20 when Trump left office. FBeye waited for everyone to go home and they rounded them up later.
Yeah, was gonna say this. They didn’t start any legal process by the time Trump left to even allow him to pardon anyone... this argument that he didn’t pardon is retarded.
Doesn't there also need to be a conviction before there can be a pardon? The J6 prisoners have not even been given a trial, so technically how can they be pardoned?
No. Nixon was convicted of nothing and Ford granted a universal pardon to him even for any charges that might arise against him for any alleged past "crime" while in office.
Who actually thinks that Pelosi et.al., would actually honor a oardon for Jan 6..... You know.. The other person could be a shill. For DJT to grant a pardon, he would have to know who was there and that leads to fore-thought and planing leading to a way to prove he planned it....(in the mind of a leftist)..
Yep. Can't just issue some blanket proclamation. "Unknown people who committed yet to be known 'offenses' on jan 6 at the capitol are hereby pardoned!" Not only doesn't work, but would pardon the killer of Ashley Babbitt and other Capitol Police crimes. Plus any other crowd agitators and antifa etc.
We can talk hindsight, but I, for one, never considered the possibility that we would go full Stalin with the DC gulag. Nor that FBI would still be no knock raiding people on the other side of the country because they happened to be in the same city.
You could make the same argument re: FBI/Hillary Russia larps. "Why didn't he prosecute these people??"
There are a lot of things I might have done differently if it was me. But there's a helluva lot of shit I am not privy to that might have changed my thoughts if I was aware of all that.
The fact of the matter is that there is no glory in taking a righteous stand that results in being immediately routed. Ya, leaving them out to hang is not an optimal situation. But he didn't cause this, and he didn't send the FBI to bring them all to the gulag. This was plainly all of those goons.
The reason that they didn't ultimately convict Trump is that they were fully aware of the resulting backlash if they did so. Which might have been all for naught, given that you cannot impeach someone not a member of the government. They would have spent substantial political capital on negative results. Just look at what has happened to the people up for re-election that voted to impeach him...not looking so hot for them.
This guy basically thinks that Trump should have taken a righteous stand against insurmountable odds, and allowed them to completely remove him from the game board. This is the battle of hamburger hill, with a cost grossly disproportionate to the benefit, and that loses your war even if you win the fight. Pardoning them, if it were possible, results in a de facto admission of inciting muh erections.
I'm not trying to be insensitive here. It is egregious what they are doing to jan 6 people. It is egregious the horse shit undercover ops these people engineered to generate this result. But the fact of the matter is, people should have known that walking in there or hanging around during the mayhem was an extremely poor idea. Invited in by police or not. They don't deserve this, and they don't deserve any sort of punishment - save for the handful of dickheads that just went nuts doing bad shit. But they put themselves in that position by just going along with the crowd. Trump has no obligation to save them from themselves, no matter how they got in that position. He has an obligation to survive to continue the fight. Period.
Interesting. I didn't realize this. Do you know of any good documentation of this (that would seem credible to normies)?
is this "person" you are arguing with really a normie? or are they making themselves out to be a normie, but looking for any excuse to hate Trump? it is possible they carry on about this reason to find acceptance in both camps.
He's never been enthusiastic about Trump (and was always honest about that), but seems to have found him tolerable enough until after the 2020 election fraud and January 6, etc. He now sees him as a failure and disloyal.
I believe he's genuine in opposing the left and the corruption in our government; it's just that he thinks that Trump is like a used car salesman selling baby boomers false hope of turning back the clock to the 1980s.
he is making excuses to you to cover his leftist beliefs. imo. he never liked Trump and never will. he says he is conservative, but what policies does he want to see implemented? appeasement of the left? support for mccain/romney/mcconnell/cheney? he sounds like a lost cause to me, just dont let him drag you over to the left too.
Do we even know who all was arrested? Clearly some Patriots, but did they arrest some Deep State infiltrators as well "to legitimize". It is possible that there are some Deep State infiltrators rotting in jail as well that were fully expecting a Trump pardon that never came. They may have been told they would only be in jail for a couple weeks and then they couldn't be released for optics reasons when no Trump pardon came. And Deep State just sacrificing their pawns without a care.
This may be why the FBI went around to arrest more because they had expected them all to get released?
We may be able to file Federal third-party lawsuits against DOJ lawyers for "color of law" violations, but I can't figure out who we are truly dealing with for some of the Jan 6 prisoners.
So Trump would be pardoning FBI glowies after he left office?