President Donald Trump won’t handle the basic duties of presidenting, like not tweeting from the White House executive bathroom in the early morning, but now he’s becoming the Oprah of pardons.
For some reason unbeknownst to anyone, Trump offered to speak with NFL players who have kneeled during the national anthem in protest of the over-policing of black communities, to find out whom they believe he should pardon.
Clearly, Trump doesn’t understand how any of this works. Speaking with reporters in front of the White House, Trump began waxing on the recent release from jail of Alice Marie Johnson, the unfairly imprisoned grandmother whose prison sentence he recently commuted, then went on to explain his next moves.
“What I’m thinking to do, you have a lot of people in the NFL in particular ... they’re not proud enough to stand for our national anthem ... ,” Trump said, TMZ Sports reports. “I’m gonna ask all of those people to recommend to me ... people that they think were unfairly treated by the justice system [...] friends of theirs or people that they know about, and I’m gonna take a look at those applications. And if I find and my committee finds that they were unfairly treated, then we will pardon them or at least let them out.”
While I’ve not spoken with any of the kneeling players, I’d assume that they are cool on the pardoning and would probably just like the president to stop bashing them for protesting the killings of unarmed African-American men, women and children by police. Oh, and they’d probably ask him to get Attorney General Jeff “King Keebler” Sessions to stop emboldening police forces that have violated the constitutional rights of people of color across the country.
Clearly the president has the brain capacity of a 3-year-old who views pardoning as a new, shiny toy that he can’t stop playing with, but it would be nice if someone on his senior staff explained to him that the answer to every injustice isn’t pardoning someone.