Thursday on CNN’s New Day, Rep. Raul Ruiz reacted to President Trump’s second round of pardons, calling it “corruption to the first degree.”
“It’s corruption to the first degree,” Ruiz blustered. “I mean, he’s really building a loyalist base. He’s sending his signal as an autocrat to people that if they follow him blindly that he will protect them as long as he’s in power.”
This is absurd. Every president exercises his right to pardon and commute sentences. Some, like Barack Obama, who pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly 50 times as many people as Trump has so far, pardon traitors and terrorists. Trump has merely pardoned a handful of people in his circle or administration who were unjustly swept up in the Democrat Party’s bogus investigation into Russian collusion. They never deserved to be imprisoned.
Ruiz, like his Democrat colleagues, have pushed for four years the demonstrably false narrative that Trump is a dangerous dictator-wannabe. The truth, borne out during the coronavirus pandemic, is that it is the Democrats who wield a totalitarian degree of power whenever they acquire it.