This week, Donald Trump signed 16 pardons, including rapper NBA YoungBoy and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, and six commutations to reduce the sentences of convicted criminals like Larry Hoover.
While Trump’s decision has sparked outrage and discourse on social media, journalist and political analyst Joy Reid encourages constituents not to be fooled by the president’s recent actions.
“The Trump regime [or] current administration, whatever you want to call them, is trying to reset and reestablish what criminality means,” Reid said in a conversation with theGrio. “Recall that the current president of the United States was convicted and sentenced to no jail time, but he was adjudicated a felon, an 88-count felony, by a jury of his peers in the state of New York. He has a mug shot that he has turned into, for him, an iconic image of himself. At the same time, he has attempted to establish, through pardons, that the insurrection that he fomented to try to stay in power is not criminality, it’s patriotism. [So] all those people get pardons.”
In pardoning individuals convicted of fraud, Reid believes that Trump has established that corruption and grift are not criminal. In our discussion, the former MSNBC host analyzed the president’s decision to commute Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader who has been serving six life sentences since 1997.
“The Larry Hoover pardon to me, because Larry Hoover will not be leaving prison…was just a message pardon,” she explained. “[Trump] is going to try to send a message, I do believe, to our community, to say, ‘Look at this. I’m going to pardon someone who’s been referenced in hip hop. Now you need to love me.’”
“We shouldn’t be fooled by that,” she stressed. “Because [at the same time] his administration is indicting LaMonica McIver, a sitting member of Congress, a Black woman whose only apparent crime was attempting to physically protect Bonnie Watson Coleman, who is also a Black woman member of Congress from the state of New Jersey, who is in her 70s and was being pushed around by ICE agents that were there to arrest the African American mayor of Newark, New Jersey.”
Earlier this month, McIver was charged with assault after being involved in an interaction with federal agents who arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside a New Jersey immigration center. However, Baraka, McIver, and two other members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation were there inspecting the facility in their oversight capacity.
“The idea that you criminalize oversight, which Representative McIver is obliged to do, because that is what the people of New Jersey hired her to do…to say that her oversight over a private prison where migrants, unnamed are being held without trials, without hearings against the law and the Constitution… to say that her attempt to do oversight over that which is her job is a crime,” said Reid.
She continued: “Her attempt to physically protect an elder who’s also a member of Congress is a crime. They even implied that the New Jersey Mayor, attempting to enter that facility to do oversight over something he believes and is in Court arguing is criminal––holding those people without charges, without hearings, without even identifying who they are–– to say that he’s the criminal.”
“This attempt to shift the idea of criminality onto the people who are trying to enforce the law and enforce the Constitution, and then release people who are adjudicated criminals, and say that if they love Trump, if their families have given money to Trump, they’re not criminals anymore,” Reid concluded.
“That’s a dangerous message to send in a society that’s supposed to be bound by the rule of law.”
