Donald Trump just handed us a huge gift

Even for a normal legitimate President, it’s always tricky to strike a balance between keeping your base happy and being broadly popular. If you can’t do both, to at least some extent, then you run out of political muscle and you’re finished.
This applies in ever more stark fashion to Donald Trump, because his base consists of psychotic extremist traitors. How exactly do you keep lunatics like that happy without alienating everyone else? It turns out you don’t.
Trump campaigned on the promise that he would pardon the January 6th terrorists. So when he took office, he immediately pardoned fifteen hundred of them. The list apparently included domestic terrorist ringleaders like Enrique Tarrio, and the embarrassing lunatic in the bear suit. Trump actually handed pardons to these types.
In doing so, Trump handed us a huge gift. These pardons are immediately going to play poorly for him. He’s already entering office with a historically low approval rating not much above forty percent, and now he’s setting terrorists and lunatics free on day one.
Further, we’ll be able to use these pardons against every Republican candidate in next year’s midterms. Every House or Senate Republican in a competitive race will have to answer questions about Trump’s pardons of domestic terrorists. Trump is already giving us these kinds of gifts to use against him, and it’s only day one.