Bob Schwartz

Last November I wrote:

A best guess is that Trump would love to pardon everybody, or almost everybody, who might be caught in the net of the special investigation….There is a thought that his pardon of those who might provide evidence in the ongoing investigation could be considered obstruction of justice. Of course, that charge will have to wait until he is out of office, since a sitting president cannot be indicted. Plus, he can pardon himself for any federal crimes, including that. So that would not stop Trump.

And here we are. While his pardon of others is still a work in progress, Trump now loudly claims the absolute power to pardon himself.

As with all things Trump, he has managed to distract us. Like he does with his lies. As reasonable citizens, we want to focus on important lies the president tells. But we can’t focus because he tells so absurdly many of them (3,000 and counting, according to the Washington Post).

The little issue at the moment is whether the president has the power, conditional or absolute, to pardon himself. The issue has never been litigated, and despite the overwhelming view that it is wrong, legally and morally, there is a small colorable claim for this position. Not a claim I would make as a conscientious patriotic American lawyer if Trump was my client, but a constitutional claim that could be made.

The much, much bigger issue we are distracted from is that a President of the United States is for the first time ever claiming the absolute power to pardon himself in the face of criminal activity he is charged with or has committed. Our most corrupt presidents of the past—and we’ve had a handful—have convinced themselves that they could get away with plenty. But even as crooked as they were, they believed that claiming such a self-pardoning power not only relegated them to political hell, but to actual hell itself. It seems we finally have a president who isn’t afraid of going to hell—because he is already there, and is taking us with him.

If you listen carefully, you will hear respected journalists and observers now saying some things about Trump that you rarely heard from them before—not during his campaign, and not until recently during his presidency:

He is a liar.
He is a narcissist, possibly mentally disordered.
He is corrupt.
He is leading America towards authoritarian rule.

Why have they been so reluctant to speak more plainly about the obvious? First, because these are extreme characterizations, not to be offered lightly. Second, the appearance of objectivity is important for these journalists and observers, and such extreme characterizations can be seen as biased—even if true. Third, many people who reached these conclusions could hardly believe it themselves. Finally, in a fit of magical thinking, they thought that it would pass, and that we would revert, much sooner than later, to a more traditional, conventional, decent, reasonable, principled, truthful, democratic approach to American government.

This led me to wonder about others who have observed and covered historic authoritarians as they rose to power. I came across the book Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (2012). Those Americans who had a front-row seat to the first act of one of history’s darkest and most tragic eras—what did they think they were watching?

Andrew Nagorski writes:

Today, it’s conventional wisdom that Hitler’s intentions were perfectly clear from the outset and that his policies could only result in World War II and the Holocaust. Most people find it hard to imagine that in the 1920s and right through the 1930s, American reporters, diplomats, entertainers, sociologists, students and others living in or passing through Germany wouldn’t have all instantly seen and understood what was happening before their eyes. After all, they had ringside seats, providing them with an unparalleled view of the most dramatic story of the twentieth century. Several of them not only observed Hitler from afar, but met and spoke to him, both when he was still a local agitator in Munich and then the all-powerful dictator in Berlin. To them, he wasn’t some abstract embodiment of evil but a real-life politician. Some Americans tried to take his measure very early, while others did so once he was in power. And even those who didn’t have those opportunities witnessed the consequences of his actions.

Yet their readings of what was happening in Germany, and what Hitler represented, varied greatly. There were those who met Hitler and recognized he represented almost a primeval force and possessed an uncanny ability to tap into the emotions and anger of the German people, and those who dismissed him as a clownish figure who would vanish from the political scene as quickly as he had appeared. There were those who, at least initially, viewed him and his movement sympathetically or even embraced it, and those whose instinctive misgivings quickly gave way to full-scale alarm, recognizing that he was a threat not only to Germany but also to the world.