“I JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER… I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!” Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon shaman as a reflection of his horned-animal headdress and body paint at the January 6, 2021, riot inside the U.S. Capitol, posted on X shortly after President Donald Trump commuted the sentences of or pardoned all those convicted of crimes related to the events of that day.
“NOW I AM GONNA BY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!” he continued. “J6ers are getting released & JUSTICE HAS COME… EVERYTHING done in the dark WILL come to light!”
A Scripps News/Ipsos poll conducted in late November, after Trump had won the 2024 presidential election, found that only 30% of Americans supported pardoning the January 6th protesters. In early January, many Republican lawmakers suggested they would not support pardons for those who committed violence against police officers, and on January 12, 2025, then vice president–elect J.D. Vance told Fox News Sunday that “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
This puts Republican leaders, who claim to defend law and order, on the back foot. When CNN’s chief congressional correspondent, Manu Raju, asked Republican senators what they thought of the blanket pardons, even MAGA senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said it was unacceptable to pardon people who assaulted police officers but claimed he “didn’t see it,” although the footage of the violence is widely available. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) both criticized the pardons.
Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) tried to blame Trump’s pardons on former president Joe Biden, saying he had opened the door to broad pardons, although Biden preemptively pardoned people who had not been convicted of crimes but were in Trump’s crosshairs: people like former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed but later accused of “treason” for being unwilling to execute an illegal order. In one of his first moves as president yesterday, Trump had the official portrait of Milley removed from the hall in the Pentagon where portraits of all previous chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are displayed—all, now, except Milley.
The D.C. Police Union expressed its “dismay over the recent pardons,” reiterating its stance that “anyone who assaults a law enforcement officer should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, without exception.”
Trump’s blanket pardons signal to his MAGA base that the judicial system that tried to hold him—and them—accountable is corrupt and that he will protect those who fight for him in the streets. But those pardons do not appear to have popular support.
At the same time, Trump is demonstrating that he intends to create a country dominated by the right-wing, white men who supported him. It is not clear that that intent is any more popular than his pardons for the January 6 rioters.
In that Scripps poll, only 23% of Americans supported restricting women from military combat. But today, Trump fired the first uniformed woman to lead a branch of the armed forces, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan. A senior official for the newly-staffed Department of Homeland Security said she was fired for an “excessive” focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Demonstrating his determination to advance a particular kind of Americanism, Trump announced he would rename the Gulf of Mexico, calling it the Gulf of America, and that he would change the name of Denali in Alaska, the tallest peak in North America, back to the name it held between 1917 and 2015: Mt. McKinley, in honor of the nation’s twenty-fifth president, who was famous primarily because he was assassinated in 1901.
Trump has made McKinley a touchstone of his second administration, saying yesterday that he would “restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”
Senator Murkowski strongly objected to the change. “Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial,” she said.
But it is in his executive order concerning birthright citizenship that Trump most clearly demonstrated his determination for white men to dominate the United States, and for Trump to dominate those men. In an executive order issued last night titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” Trump sought to overturn the U.S. Constitution and its consistent interpretation. He wants the power to decide who can be considered a citizen, and he apparently wants to force the U.S. Supreme Court to give him that power.
In 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, as southern states were passing laws that relegated Black Americans to subservience, Americans added the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to enable the federal government to override those discriminatory state laws. The Fourteenth Amendment provided that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and then it charged the federal government with guaranteeing that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Fourteenth Amendment made it clear that being born in the United States made someone a United States citizen.
That clarity meant that the Supreme Court reinforced the amendment’s intent, even in the late nineteenth century during a period of anti-immigrant sentiment that was most virulent against the Chinese who made their way to American shores.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of workers from China. Thirteen years later, in 1895, Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, was denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. He sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, and he won. In the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the Supreme Court determined that the children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and that no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.
Trump would like the Supreme Court to award him the power to override the Constitution that a previous Supreme Court denied to Congress, but his attempt to overturn our foundational law has already launched lawsuits. Twenty-two Democratic-led states have sued the Trump administration for violating the U.S. Constitution. Washington, D.C., and San Francisco—fittingly, the city where Wong Kim Ark was born—have joined the lawsuits. So have the American Civil Liberties Union and an expectant mother.
Trump’s administration is facing lawsuits not only on his attacks on birthright citizenship, but also on the executive order that would enable Trump to fire nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with loyalists. And, within minutes of Trump taking office, at least three lawsuits were filed in Washington, D.C., against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk—Vivek Ramaswamy has been pushed out—charging that it was breaking transparency laws.
The new administration has other problems as well. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, Trump’s first day on the job was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline.” Bunch recorded Trump’s slurred speech, rambling, and nonsensical off-the-cuff speeches and said that his “biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”
Even before he took office, Trump began to walk back his campaign promises—on lowering food prices, for example—and the administration is continuing to move the goalposts now that he’s in office. Last night the Senate confirmed former senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) 99–0 for secretary of state. Today, when CBS asked Rubio about Trump’s repeated promise to end the war in Ukraine on Day 1, Rubio said that what Trump really meant was that the war in Ukraine needs to come to an end.
But Trump is not helping those trying to defend his presidency. Tonight he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who founded and from January 2011 to October 2013 ran an online criminal marketplace called Silk Road, where more than $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services, such as computer hacking, were bought and sold with cryptocurrency. Most of the sales were of drugs, with the Silk Road home page listing nearly 13,000 options, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD. The wares were linked to at least six deaths from overdose around the world. In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison and was ordered to forfeit more than $180 million.
In May 2024, during his presidential campaign, Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht in order to court the votes of libertarians, who support drug legalization on the grounds that people should be able to make their own choices. They saw Ulbricht’s sentence as government overreach.
Tonight, Trump posted that he had pardoned Ulbricht (although Trump spelled his name wrong), saying: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
