One of Donald Trump’s last significant actions as president was to issue a series of pardons and commutations. With less than 12 hours remaining at the White House, he granted executive clemency to more than 140 people, including his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who was accused in 2020 of defrauding donors as part of a private fundraising effort to build the Trump Wall building on the Mexican border. Trump also forgave artists like rapper Lil Wayne and several former congressmen.
[Related: Trump’s Pardons Have Been Sparse and Self-Serving — And That’s Without Even Pardoning His Kids]
So now that Trump’s presidency is officially over, how does he compare to other presidents when it comes to using the power of forgiveness?
How Trump’s pardons compare to those of other presidents | FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast
Trump will not go down in history as the most petty president in that regard. But, as the table below shows, he issued far fewer pardons (143) and commutations (94) than his predecessor, Barack Obama, according to Justice Department data. In the end, Trump was generally aligned with other Republican presidents.
Trump’s pardon history resembles that of other Republican presidents’
Total pardons, commutations and other forms of leniency granted by each president during his term
| President | Pardons | Commutations | From others | Clemency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carter | 534 | 29 | 3 | 566 |
| Reagan | 393 | 13 | 0 | 406 |
| HW Bush | 74 | 3 | 0 | 77 |
| Clinton | 396 | 61 | two | 459 |
| W. Bush | 189 | 11 | 0 | 200 |
| Obama | 212 | 1,715 | 0 | 1927 |
| Trump | 143 | 94 | 0 | 237 |
It was unusual, however, on how Trump’s wave of clemency was at the last minute. Most presidents use their pardoning power more liberally when the end of their term is near, but almost all Trump’s commutations and pardons were issued in the last months of his term. At the end of September 2020, Trump had issued 27 pardons and commuted 11 sentences. But in the next four months, he issued 116 pardons and commuted 83 sentences.
Most of Trump’s pardons came too late
Part of the total pardons, commutations and other leniency grants issued by each president in the last fiscal year of his presidency
| FY | President | part of the total leniency concessions issued | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1981 | Carter | 14% |
– |
| 1989 | Reagan | 8 |
– |
| 1993 | HW Bush | 49 |
– |
| 2001 | Clinton | 56 |
– |
| 2009 | W Bush | 19 |
– |
| 2017 | Obama | 61 |
– |
| 2021 | Trump | 84 |
– |
Overall, however, Trump has not really broken his pattern of issuing pardons and commutations to wealthy, well-connected and controversial people. In the final months of the presidency, he essentially undid the work of special lawyer Robert Mueller in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections, forgiving five of the eight people who pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes as a result of Mueller’s work, including his ex – Campaign President Paul Manafort, his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his former political adviser Roger Stone. And he granted clemency to several other rich and highly controversial figures, including Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared, and four Blackwater guards who were convicted of the death of 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007.
[Trump Is Leaving Office With a Bunch of Legal Problems — And We’re Not Just Talking About Impeachment]
And in many cases, according to research by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, Trump bypassed the official process to veto clemency requests and had a personal or political connection with the people he forgave. That, to say the least, is not how executive clemency should work, according to experts I spoke with in December. They told me that Trump’s use of forgiveness was not only extraordinarily selfish, but it could also set some dangerous precedents.
In the end, Trump didn’t push the envelope as much as he could – in the end, he didn’t forgive himself or his children, for example. But the assessment that Trump was parsimonious and selfish in his pardons is unlikely to be significantly altered by Trump’s final round of pardons, although it does include some more traditional candidates for executive clemency, such as those serving life sentences on drug or fraud charges and whose cases were defended by criminal justice reform advocates. As several experts told me last month, Trump’s approach was mainly to grant leniency to people with the right connections – not to ordinary people for whom power was designed to help.