|
 |
PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
It’s no secret that President Donald Trump doesn’t really believe in the justice system. For him, it serves only two purposes: protecting himself and hurting others. He doesn’t feel the least bit bound by orders or outcomes, but he isn’t just at war with judges.
He’s also at war with juries.
By now, everyone is familiar with Trump and the Department of Justice’s manipulation of grand juries to obtain felony indictments that fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. (Looking at you, US Attorney for the District of Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro.) Trump and the DOJ also have no problem misusing grand juries in an attempt to prosecute the innocent. (Looking at you, one-time Interim US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan.)
But when it comes to trial juries, Trump’s disdain manifests in exactly the opposite fashion. Convictions are tossed, regardless of what happened at trial, regardless of the careful work of juries. He’s making it extremely clear that views himself as judge, jury, and executioner.
 |
|
Now, the president isn’t foreclosed from pardoning someone just because a jury of their peers weighed in and found them guilty. But we’ve never had one who decided to traipse through past convictions, discarding things based on personal whims and opportunities for profit, with no real justification.
In Donald Trump’s America, if you’re rich enough or corrupt enough, jury decisions simply don’t matter. Pardons are for sale and used to send a message that juries shouldn’t convict people of crimes that the president himself has committed.
This has, predictably, led to results that are both terrible and stupid from the standpoint of the rule of law.
Take Trevor Milton.
Scams upon scams
Milton started an electric vehicle company, Nikola, that was basically a scam from the jump. He claimed he was making hydrogen-powered trucks and investors threw tons of money at him to do it. But he wasn’t making anything of the sort, particularly because he was selling a technology that doesn’t really exist.
To cover that up, Milton pulled stunts like rolling a nonfunctioning semi truck down a hill to make it appear like it was successfully trundling along a desert highway.
Milton was convicted by a jury in 2022 after a trial that lasted nearly a month and later sentenced to four years in prison. He was also ordered to pay restitution of around $680 million to investors he duped and an additional $15 million to one of his wire fraud victims.
But Milton managed to get quite a bargain by donating about $1.8 million to Trump’s campaign in October 2024. That didn’t just buy him a pardon and get him out from under a criminal conviction — it also wiped out that extremely expensive restitution. And Trump did Milton another solid by killing a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.
For Trump, saving Milton close to $700 million didn’t even merit a mention. Instead, he invented a world where what Milton was really prosecuted for was supporting one Donald J. Trump: “They say the thing that he did wrong was, he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. He supported Trump. He liked Trump. I didn’t know him, but he liked him. They persecuted him, they destroyed five years of his life.”
This fiction requires a lot of heavy lifting, even by Trump standards.