The single most important service the Select Committee has provided is to function as a time machine. The cunning and compelling use of video from January 6th forces everyone, MAGA or not, to confront the terror unleashed that day, both on the steps of the Capitol and within the group of advisors that had dutifully surrounded Trump. They had to do something! Anything! Trump’s entire legacy was being destroyed!
Hannity’s proffer as a means to smooth things over and start to rehab his guy is laughably MAGA, a movement in which everything is personal, principles have no place, and all that’s personal is open to the transactional. Hannity suggested Trump might buy himself some goodwill with that pardon pen. Trump had a chance to look “bigger” than this “little squable” on Capitol Hill. Trump could pardon Hunter Biden! From the Daily Beast:
As some of then-President Donald Trump’s closest allies hit the exits after the violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection, longtime informal adviser and Fox News host Sean Hannity took a different approach: He tried to convince Trump that he could use his office to help heal some of the wounds from the insurrection.
Hannity had proposed that Trump issue a last-minute pardon for Hunter Biden, whose business dealings had two years prior been at the center of the ex-president’s campaign to extort an investigation out of the Ukrainian government—efforts that led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.
Hannity pitched the idea in a Jan. 7 conversation, framing it as a gesture that might help “smooth things over” after the insurrection’s traumatic rift, this person confirmed.
Again, does anything scream “Trump-MAGA” more than an attempt to save one’s legacy by offering penance in the form of making a “scandal” dissolve before people’s very eyes? Is there anything more representative of the Trump presidency than the fascist character of the pardon pen?
Too perfect. And Trump didn’t do it, which is also very telling.
Jason Miciak believes a day without learning is a day not lived. He is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is a Canadian-born dual citizen who spent his teen and college years in the Pacific Northwest and has since lived in seven states. He now enjoys life as a single dad of a young girl, writing from the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He loves crafting his flower pots, cooking, while also studying scientific philosophy, religion, and non-math principles behind quantum mechanics and cosmology. Please feel free to contact for speaking engagements or any concerns.