What did Donald Trump do today?

He issued some pardons, in accordance with his usual standards.

Trump issued 11 pardons today. With few if any exceptions over the course of his time in office, Trump has issued acts of clemency for a short list of specific reasons: either he has been paid, or because the recipient was accused of a crime he himself is known to have committed, or because he is trying to send a message about what kinds of laws he wants to encourage people to disobey.

The first category includes, for example, a Chinese billionaire who laundered money for Hamas. Changpeng Zhao's company paid Trump millions of dollars in cryptocurrency processing fees, and Zhao received a pardon from Trump—or someone using Trump's authority without his knowledge, as sometimes happens. (A few weeks later, Trump was unable to say who Zhao was or why he was granted a pardon.)

The second group includes people convicted of fraud, running a fake charity, violating campaign finance laws, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, offering or accepting bribes, stealing classified government documents, and influence peddling. (Those examples are all just from one day last May.)

The most obvious example of the third is Trump's blanket pardon of everyone who committed sedition or other violent acts in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden's win in the 2020 presidential election. Trump has never really even pretended to believe that laws mean anything if they get in his way.

But it applies to his finer-grained policy choices, too, like his disdain for environmental protection laws. For the second time in less than a month, he tried to paint people convicted of serious charges related to the Clean Air Act of having been guilty of nothing more than "fixing their cars." 

As with the previous pardon, these people were not convicted of "fixing their cars." They were white-collar criminals who owned repair shops and were convicted of disabling required pollution control devices for owners of heavy trucks. In other words, they were selling a way for truck operators to illegally gain an advantage over those who followed the law. Trump has suspended enforcement of that law. 

Trump, a convicted felon himself, also issued at least one pardon today that fell into both the first and second group. Adam Kinan, a major Trump donor, received a pardon for wire fraud.

Why does this matter?

• "It's not illegal if it helps the Leader" is how dictatorships work.  

• If Trump had pardoned someone people would actually have sympathized with, he wouldn't have needed to lie about what the criminals had done.