Pardon me while I burst into flames

During the general election, in one of the many instances where Hillary Clinton proved she was the vastly superior candidate and human being over Donald Trump, they each spoke at the Al Smith dinner. She came across as warm, self deprecating and funny, as the occasion called for. He unwittingly proved that he didn’t know what those words meant. One of Trump’s most awkward moments was when he suggested Hillary would end up begging him for a pardon. And now we’ve come full circle.

During the course of the election, Donald Trump – along with every other Republican candidate – consistently and falsely claimed Hillary Clinton was in some kind of legal jeopardy over her emails. That was never the case, and those facts were always readily available. But that never mattered, as the media eagerly played along with the phony story that Hillary might have to drop out of the race or go to prison. Nevermind that she’d been fully and publicly exonerated by the FBI months earlier; Trump was still trying to push the idea that Hillary somehow had imaginary legal problems. Now he’s the one in severe legal trouble, and as of this weekend, he’s the one issuing pardons to his criminal cronies.

Of course back during the election, Trump was just as obviously a criminal as he is now. The evidence was there, though shockingly underreported, that his campaign was knee deep with Russia. And anyone who’s paid close attention over the years has known that Trump’s business career has consisted entirely of one long-con. But none of that seemed to matter during the election, because the media had already concluded that it could get the top ratings from A) letting Trump write his own controversial narratives, and B) flat out lying about Hillary being in some kind of legal trouble.

So now that Donald Trump has grossly abused the pardon process to let his own campaign surrogate Joe Arpaio off the hook, his upcoming pardons are likely to be even more egregious. He’ll try to pardon his criminal associates, his criminal children, and just before he’s ousted from office he’ll try to pardon himself. Trump was always the criminal, and Hillary was always the squeaky clean one; the media simply decided to report the opposite for ratings. And now Trump is indeed issuing pardons, but not to Hillary, as he had long ago suggested. Instead he’s on track to end up pardoning himself.