Donald Trump digs himself an even deeper hole with crazy new rant about pardons

| 1:34 pm EDT July 22, 2017
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Donald Trump found a new way to disgrace his already historically disgraceful occupation of the office of President of the United States this week when he began privately asking around if he could pardon himself and his kids. In so doing, he admitted his guilt for all to see, and he sunk to a depth that not even Richard Nixon was willing to breach. The backlash came swiftly. So how did Trump address his mistake once he saw that it had backfired? As usual, he made it even worse.

This morning Trump decided to take his leaked private conversation about pardoning himself and formally make it a public spectacle. He tweeted “While all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.FAKE NEWS” (link). In so doing, Trump tacitly acknowledged the accuracy of the media reports about his pardon inquiries. It’s ironic that he yelled “fake news” in the middle of confirming the news story in question. But that was just the beginning of his pardon problems.

Yesterday three of the foremost legal scholars in the nation – Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter, and Norm Eisen – teamed up to publish an op-ed in the Washington Post in which they laid out precisely why the Constitution does not give the president the power to pardon himself (link). There are other legal scholars out there who disagree. But Trump’s notion that “all agree” he can pardon himself is laugh out loud absurd. And it’s not even merely about that.

Donald Trump’s increasingly self defeating idiocy was most thoroughly on display by the fact that he decided to begin tweeting about pardons at all. There is nothing more humiliating a president could ever do than to pardon himself. Just by talking about it, he’s further destroyed himself. And if Trump does try it, he’ll ensure that history remembers him as even more of a bad joke than had already been cemented by his crimes to begin with. Worse than merely being a villain, Trump will go down as a punchline.