Pardoning racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio is Donald Trump’s dumbest move yet
Last night Donald Trump hinted at it during his rally in Phoenix, and this afternoon it’s being widely reported that the White House has drawn up the paperwork awaiting his signature. Trump is about to pardon former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose systematic abuse of Hispanic Americans crossed so many legal lines that Arpaio is now a criminal himself. Trump is about to find out the hard way that while the powers of the presidency are vast, they’re not without consequence, and that every move like this comes at a cost.
Trump wants to pardon Joe Arpaio for personal reasons because he was a loyal campaign surrogate. He’s also gambling that the move will score him easy points with his racist base, many of whom worship Arpaio for his criminal pursuit of white supremacist policies. But that’s a bet that Trump has been losing since he took office. His approval rating was at forty-five percent in January; it’s at thirty-five percent now. He’s been steadily losing supporters by pandering to his base, because not all of his supporters are in his base.
Trump has never understood that his core base is around fifteen percent of the country, and that the remainder of his approval rating has come from people who only supported him skeptically. He’s been losing support from outside his base all year. And now he’s about to give them yet another reason to give up on him.
Not only did Joe Arpaio commit his crimes in wide open view, he continued his crime spree even after the courts ordered him to stop. Trump is pardoning the worst kind of unrepentant criminal, and he’ll have no way of explaining it; so much for being the law and order president. Moreover, this will prompt the media to revisit Arpaio’s viciously racist crime streak at a time when Trump is already on the ropes for siding with racists. So if Trump wants to pardon this racist thug, he’ll find out rather quickly that his dwindling supporters outside his base aren’t buying it.
