More or less normal
Every president’s pardon list contains some self-serving or controversial picks—think of Clinton’s pardon for Marc Rich, or Barack Obama’s commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence to time served.
But every other president in American history has chosen some worthy recipients of executive clemency as well, some reformed souls whose cases sang out for pardons. That’s because every other American president has been a more or less normal human being. And normal human beings have some concept of justice.
I don’t think that’s true about the more or less normal human being, actually. Nixon wasn’t normal. Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t all that normal. Lincoln wasn’t. Coolidge wasn’t. Andrew Johnson wasn’t. Kennedy wasn’t. Most are, probably, but there are definitely some outliers.
But Trump, of course, is in a class by himself. There’s not all that normal and then there’s stark staring psychopathic.
Trump is incapable of comprehending abstract virtues like justice. A glance at the list of his pardons so far just screams ME, ME, ME. There’s Arpaio, whose rabid followers Trump aimed to please, and billionaire Conrad Black, convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice, who is a voluble Trump supporter. Dinesh D’Souza and Bernard Kerik also pass the shameless toady test.
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What about Alice Marie Johnson, who received a life sentence for a first-time drug offense (and a handful of others whose cases she highlighted)? Yes, that was straight up justice. And it would deserve approbation except for one thing that slides it into the tabloid category: Trump issued the pardons after high-profile lobbying by Kim Kardashian West.
And we can be quite sure he would not have done so at the behest of some do-gooding bleeding-heart prison reform advocate. It’s a Kardashian or nothing, with him.
The only time Trump expands his self-regard to others is, revealingly, when it comes to police and war criminals—a pattern he continued this week. He sees them not as distortions of honor but as “strong” and virtuous. Inevitably, he complains that they are “very badly treated.” He misses the irony.
His only disinterested altruism is directed at mass murderers.
Please define ‘normal’.
It’s like that similar term, ‘honour’, which the Bard had Falstaff sum up in these terms:
‘Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.’
This can be rendered as follows:
‘Well, ’tis no matter; normal pricks me on. Yea, but how if normal prick me off when I come on? How then? Can normal set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Normal hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is normal? A word. What is in that word “normal”? What is that “normal”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Normal is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.’
I would posit that anyone who aspires to the presidency is abnormal. Some are good abnormal, some are bad. That being said, I understand your point, and don’t mean to pick nits. Trump is absolutely an astonishingly horrible, abnormal person, and I welcome the day when he exits this earth and we no longer have to be exposed to his self-serving orange blabbering.
True, and I was thinking of normal/abnormal apart from the whole running for president thing. Normal-for-an-ambitious-person kind of abnormal. Some are outliers and others not so much.
Kennedy kind of performed normal, but he wasn’t really. Nixon couldn’t even put on the act.
It’s interesting that even as awful as he was, Nixon at least paid tribute to the idea that he was less important than the country. I could never imagine Trump saying these words.
” I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.
To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home.
Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.”