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?