In blue states and red, kids are taught in grade school that the men who founded America were geniuses, as if touched by the divine with the wisdom to build the world’s first lasting democracy.
It’s time to revisit that. They made their share of mistakes. And I’m not talking about blessing the institution of slavery to curse the land for another century, or giving tiny states a ridiculous share of power. Those concessions made union possible.
I’m talking about the imperial power they gave presidents to pardon criminals, for any reason, with no checks and balances. They didn’t envision a president like Donald Trump. And that mistake could bring the whole experiment crashing down.
Think about next year’s midterms, and brace yourself. It’s not paranoid to think that Trump will try to cheat. And that pardon power means he can unleash an army of loyalists to break every rule, to ignore every law, knowing that Trump will likely pardon them.
Look at the shameless pardons he’s already issued. It’s a rogue’s gallery of 1,700 thieves and cheats who have one thing in common: They serve Trump.
Sometimes, it’s just for money. He’s pardoned a long list of fraudsters and tax cheats who have donated money to him, or his political efforts. That also relieved them from having to pay a total of $1.3 billion in compensation to their victims, according to a tally from House Democrats.
But he’s pardoned a long list of political actors as well, starting with the January 6 rioters who were convicted of crimes, even assault on police officers. Earlier this month, he pardoned 77 more people who backed his effort to overturn the 2020 election, including Rudy Giuliani.
MIDTERM MADNESS
So, what can we expect in the midterms? What’s to prevent Trump from sending in masked ICE agents or the National Guard to drum up chaos at the polls, or demand citizenship checks, or even arrest principled political leaders who won’t dance for him? Unleashed MAGA players could go rogue without paying a price.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Steve Bannon, the Trump strategist who warned of the January 6 riots on his podcast a day before it happened, saying “All hell is going to break loose.” Perhaps this time we should listen to him.
Here’s what he says about the midterms: “They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places. You’re damn right.”
After Trump lost the 2020 election, he tried to pressure Republicans to give him the win anyway. Vice President Mike Pence famously refused to block the certification of the election on Jan. 6, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood his ground when Trump demanded that he “find” the 11,780 votes to tip the results.
But will Republicans in 2026 stand up like that? Can Trump find more compliant Republicans this time around who are willing to cheat, knowing they will likely be pardoned for their crimes?
If one thing has become depressingly clear this year, it is that Trump can find enough scoundrels to do any foul duty that he requests, especially with a pardon in mind. File bogus charges against political opponents? Sure. Fire FBI agents who investigated him, as ordered? Check. Kill drug suspects without trial? Done.
So, is it a big stretch is to imagine he’ll ask his people to explicitly break the law to steal the midterms?
WHAT GEORGE MASON FORESAW
Some of the Founders saw the danger, but they lost the argument. George Mason of Virginia was one of them. He refused to sign the finished Constitution. Among his arguments was that it granted the president too much power, offering this prescient warning about the pardon power:
“The President of the United States . . . might frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It might be a great inducement to betray the interests of his country, and thereby establish a monarchy, and destroy the Republic.”
Trump is not the first president to abuse the pardon power. President Biden gave his son, Hunter, a pardon for any unnamed crimes he might have committed. President Clinton famously pardoned the commodities trader Marc Rich after his ex-wife donated money to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Library. Trump is an exception only by degree, and because he’s bypassed the normal Justice Department procedures for reviewing pardons.
But we’ve never had a president who tried to overturn a free election, who showed such disdain for the rule of law, and such scorn for the fundamentals of democracy, like free speech and the right to dissent. In Trump’s hands, the unchecked power to pardon is far more dangerous.
A HARD SOLUTION
This could be fixed, of course, with a Constitutional amendment that, say, could require pardons to receive two-thirds approval in the Senate. But that brings us to another mistake of the Founders: They made it more difficult to amend than any Constitution on Earth, according to Harvard Professor Sanford Levinson, author of Our Undemocratic Constitution. It requires a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress, plus ratifications of three-fourths of state legislatures (38 of 50). That’s hopeless.
“We are trapped inside a constitutional ‘iron cage’ whose bars seem impervious to relaxation even when a majority of the country might agree that change is needed,” Levinson wrote. “As a practical matter, the hurdles set up by Article V . . make it nearly impossible to imagine that anything truly controversial could surmount them.”
So, yes, be afraid. Democrats will need to win by a whopping margin to overcome the cheating we can expect. On that thin thread, the fate of our democracy may hang.
