NOW who is emptying prisons and putting dangerous people on America’s streets?
Trump's private army
(This post was updated on 1-25-25 to reflect Friday night’s vote confirming Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary.)
Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed - hundreds of times - that foreign countries are emptying prisons and insane asylums and dumping dangerous people on the streets of the United States. Those claims have repeatedly been debunked.
It turns out that the person responsible for freeing dangerous prisoners to roam the streets of America is Donald Trump himself!
On his first hours in office, he pardoned roughly 1500 people and commuted the sentences of 14 of his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol four years ago. The list includes rioters convicted of violently attacking police officers that day. It includes Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
These are attacks that we all watched happen. You saw it with your own eyes. It was not a day of love. It was not a peaceful protest. People died. Hundreds of officers were injured. Rioters attacked officers with table legs, flagpoles, baseball bats, bear spray, stun guns. Officers were dragged into the crowd, tackled to the ground, and stomped on. And it was all caught on video. The evidence is indisputable.
And now they are free to commit more violence, and so long as it’s in the name of Trump, they can feel quite safe from criminal charges. A friend of mine said, “Now Trump has his private army.” It’s all eerily reminiscent of Germany in the 1930’s.
Iowa Republicans duck the question
And speaking of law enforcement, the next time I hear a Republican talk about “backing the blue”, I plan to let out the loudest horse laugh I can muster.
Kudos to the Des Moines Register for trying to get a sensible response from Iowa’s congressional delegation to Trump pardoning violent offenders. Iowa’s delegation - entirely Republican - apparently thinks Iowans are gullible.
As the Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel reports, Senator Chuck Grassley, sang from the GOP hymnal and said he would not criticize Trump because he disagrees with Biden’s pardons of his family.
Pul-leeze. There’s no comparison between preemptively pardoning Dr. Anthony Fauci from the possibility of politically motivated investigations, and a guy who beat a police officer with a baseball bat. They are not remotely equivalent. Dr. Fauci tried his level best to save lives, not bash in the brains of a cop.
Congresswoman Ashley Hinson had her GOP hymnal open to the same page as Grassley, blaming the media for “glossing over Joe Biden’s preemptive pardons to his family…”
We have heard nothing from “back the blue” stalwarts like Governor Kim Reynolds and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird. It was Bird who surrounded herself with law enforcement officers in her 2022 campaign.
In a speech to the Republican National Convention last year, Bird said she won her 2022 race because she backed the blue. “We won because Iowans were ready for an attorney general who would protect them, not the criminals,” she said. And, “Republicans get justice for victims and we put criminals where they belong: in jail.”
So now her mentor Donald Trump lets those criminals OUT of jail, and the police victims are anything BUT protected, but Bird has nothing to say? I hear a horse laughing loudly.
Ernst takes a cowardly vote
According to the Register, Senator Joni Ernst also had nothing to say about Trump opening the jail cell for people who beat up cops. Her spokesperson said, “If the media was so concerned about covering pardons, why aren’t the pardons Joe Biden granted his family and COVID czar Anthony Fauci…front page news?”
This is textbook GOP response when they look bad. Blame the media. Play what-about-ism. You’d like to think Iowans are smarter than that, but apparently not enough are.
Ernst might have been too busy to admonish Trump’s pardons due to her own cowardly vote for Pete Hegseth as defense secretary. I don’t use the word “coward” blithely because Ernst has much to be proud of with her military service and being the first woman Iowa sent to Washington. But her vote for Hegseth throws that record out the window. She ignored everything she has stood for in Washington – working to protect women from sexual assault, especially in the military. She was too much of a coward to stand up to a possible primary challenge next year when she’s up for re-election.
Republicans Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell (of all people) were brave enough to vote no on Hegseth. Joining with every Democrat, the vote was 50-50, requiring VP Vance to cast the deciding vote in favor of Hegseth. That means Ernst went to bed Friday night knowing SHE was the deciding vote putting Hegseth in office. She must be very proud. Ernst ignored allegations of Hegseth drinking to excess. She ignored Hegseth’s on-the-record admission that he paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of rape. She ignored an affadavit from a Hegseth family member that his second wife would hide in a closet to avoid his angry outbursts.
If only Ernst had been courageous enough to protect the military and the country instead of her own political future. She is either a terrible judge of character, or a coward. Maybe both.
We are four days into this administration with four more years to go. I don’t know what can be done about all the chaos except to call it out and make sure enough Iowans can recognize hypocrisy and cowardice when they see it.
I’m proud to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, along with some fine writers like Ed Tibbetts, who writes from Davenport. Ed is a clear thinker and a clear writer. I recommend his column this week abut several topics, mostly concerning Iowa’s mixed up priorities.
See the full roster of writers here.
Appreciate someone finally calling the cowardice by its name. Keep up the great work! It is appreciated.
Thanks for calling out this profound hypocrisy.