Trump just made an 'unforced error' that will backfire against GOP: strategist
President Donald Trump has been pardoning supporters since Day One of his second term, but a Democratic strategist pointed to a recent round of them as an "unforced error."
The president signed pardons this week for a corrupt Virginia sheriff, a convicted tax cheat and a reality TV couple found guilty of fraud, and panelists on "CNN This Morning" discussed how in their view these stand out as clearly corrupt.
"What stands out about these is that there seem to be two routes to a Trump pardon," said Jonathan Allen, senior national politics reporter for NBC News. "One is you can make a colorable argument that [Joe] Biden went after you politically, or two, you put a lot of money into electing Donald Trump, and maybe those things combine in some cases to make it even stronger argument. But it seems like there's a pretty clear pattern here."
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Host Audie Cornish asked if these pardons would break through politically in a way that even Trump's pardon of all 1,500 of his supporters convicted of rioting on Jan. 6, 2021, has not seemed to resonate, and Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson said voters tend to view the pardon process as sketchy.
"The average voter looks at the pardon process and thinks this is all kind of gross and broken," she said. "I mean, remember on Donald Trump's first day in office, the thing that he did that was perhaps the most outrageous and certainly tested the worst in the polling I was doing was pardoning the Jan. 6 folks. But that very same day, on his way out of office, Joe Biden had pardoned his whole family. There have been shameful pardons."
Democratic strategist Hyma Moore said the clear theme in Trump's pardons would eventually reinforce a narrative with voters that would hurt the president and the Republican Party.
"Sometimes these pardons have been used to sort of reinforce a narrative that you want to sort of be an umbrella of your administration, and I don't know what Donald Trump is doing right now with these with these pardons and what's happened over the last couple of months," Moore said. "It's like you pardon people who are who have been who've been prosecuted for fraud seems like a bad narrative, particularly when you are taking a plane from a foreign country, when you have questions about your own ethics and the ethics of your family, the Bitcoin stuff, and so it just feels like an unforced error for Donald Trump to go this far on these pardons, and I think people are going to care about it at some point, but maybe not right now."
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