Trump Administration Plans Final Act of Mass Pardons
The Trump administration is drawing up the final act of Donald Trump's presidency, and the centrepiece, by the president's own account, will be pardons on a scale no modern president has attempted. In an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes, Trump said he intends to issue "tremendous numbers" of pardons before leaving office, extending protection to the aides, advisers and officials who served in his second term. The promise, repeated in a podcast interview days earlier, has become the clearest signal yet of how Trump intends to spend the final two years of his presidency: shielding his own people from the investigations a newly Democratic Congress is expected to launch, governing around a hostile legislature, and stamping his name on the capital.
The Pardon Promise
The promise surfaced twice in the space of a week, and each time Trump made it a little bigger. In the 60 Minutes interview, conducted by Ross Douthat, he was asked whether he planned to issue numerous pardons at the end of his presidency. "Yes, I do," he replied, adding that he expected to grant "tremendous numbers" of them. "I don't want people who served the country and did an excellent job to spend the rest of their lives the way I did," he said. "I spent four years defending myself against radical people and stupid people." He said he did not expect to pardon himself, though he maintained he had the authority.
Days earlier, in a podcast interview with the New York Post's Miranda Devine, Trump had gone further, offering preemptive pardons to current and former employees if Democrats won the midterms. Asked whether he would pardon everyone who had worked for him, he answered: "I would if I needed to. Sure." Devine raised the example of Elon Musk, who had led the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump said he wanted to protect allies such as Musk. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Trump had repeatedly promised senior officials pardons before leaving office, telling his staff: "I'll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval." The room laughed, and the radius has grown each time he has repeated it. In the 60 Minutes interview he joked about protecting even those who came within a thousand miles of the Oval Office.
A Clemency Record Without Precedent
The promise is credible because the record behind it is already without precedent. Trump has granted clemency to more than 1,700 people in his second term, as of June 2026, against fewer than 250 in his first term. On his first day back in office in January 2025 he issued a blanket pardon to some 1,500 people convicted over the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Most grants since then have gone to people charged with fraud against the government or investors, and in many cases Trump also removed the requirement that they pay restitution and fines, costing victims an estimated 1.3 billion dollars. He has even pardoned corporations, erasing 200 million dollars in penalties.
The process has been as unusual as the numbers. Trump has largely bypassed the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney, which traditionally vets clemency requests. In March 2025 he fired its career leader, Liz Oyer, and installed the loyalist Ed Martin, who left the department in August 2026; by September most successful cases were coming through personal appeals to the White House. In February 2025 Trump named Alice Marie Johnson to a new role recommending candidates. A Reuters review in June 2026 found that 96 percent of the grants failed to meet the DOJ's longstanding guidelines, that many went to people who used Trump allies to lobby, and that donations or payments to allies had helped achieve clemency.
The Limits of the Pardon Power
For all its scale, the pardon power has hard limits, and Trump's own advisers have warned him about them. A presidential pardon reaches federal crimes and nothing else. It can be issued before any charge is brought, as Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was, and it can be as broad as the president's nerve; the Supreme Court upheld that broad preemptive authority in Ex parte Garland in 1866. But a pardon cannot touch a state statute, a state grand jury, a state attorney general or a county district attorney. Trump's own legal advisers have told him the pardons "won't be enough," for the plain reason that state and local prosecutors still exist, and that he should "get creative" about the gap.
The gap matters most for Trump himself. His exposure is in New York, where he was convicted on 34 felony counts in May 2024, received a sentence of unconditional discharge, and has an appeal still moving through the courts. No federal pardon can reach that case. For the rank and file, the position is different: a state cannot prosecute a federal officer for acts within the scope of federal duty, under the Supremacy Clause as the Supreme Court read it in 1890. So the shape of the next two years is this: the government will be pardoned, down to the last agent, while the business in New York will not be, because it cannot be.
Trump has an answer ready for the criticism: a precedent set by his predecessor. In the final hours of his term, Joe Biden signed preemptive pardons for members of his family, his brothers James and Francis and his sister Valerie, after pardoning his son Hunter weeks earlier, as well as for Dr. Anthony Fauci and General Mark Milley. "That's what Biden did," Trump said. With a Democratic House weeks away from choosing its committee chairs, the pardon question is no longer theoretical. It is the opening move of the next two years.
How the Trump Administration Governs by Executive Order
The pardons are only one instrument in a final act taking shape since January 2025. Trump has signed 292 executive orders since returning to office, governing largely by unilateral action even while his party held majorities in both chambers. That habit will become a necessity with Democrats about to control Congress, and the veto will become his main line of defence. A veto can only be overridden with a two-thirds majority in both chambers, a threshold the new Democratic majority does not hold. The confrontation will centre on spending, foreign policy and healthcare, and on House committees expected to target his inner circle, including Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump has shown no appetite for self-criticism since the defeat. On the evening of November 3, he watched the results come in at a White House reception. The pardons fit the pattern of his career: they protect the people who carried out his agenda and deny his opponents the satisfaction of prosecuting them.
Legacy Projects and the Imperial Frame
The final act is also being built in stone and steel. Trump has spent his second term remaking the capital in his image, and the two most visible projects are the ballroom rising where the East Wing once stood and the 250-foot triumphal arch planned across from Arlington National Cemetery. The ballroom's stated price has climbed from 200 million dollars to 400 million since July, and Trump replaced the original architect midway. The arch's final plans, released in October, dropped the military complex Trump had used to justify it, the drones, snipers and ammunition cache, and now describe it as a "ceremonial gateway."
The scale of these projects is why the phrase "imperial presidency" keeps returning to this administration. Axios used it in 2024 to describe a president planning to test the boundaries of presidential power, knowing the restraints of Congress and the courts were dramatically looser than during his first term. The Supreme Court's immunity ruling in July 2024, which held that presidents enjoy substantial legal immunity for actions taken in office, opened the door wider still. Underpinning it all is the unitary executive theory, the idea that the commander-in-chief should be master of executive government. Trump held court at the ballroom construction site the day after the defeat, a sign he has no intention of shifting his focus away from these projects.
The Wars and the World
Abroad, the final act will be judged by five challenges that will define Trump's strategic legacy. The first is ending the war against Iran without wrecking America's position in the Middle East. The United States and Israel launched strikes across Iran on February 28, and Tehran responded by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil once transited, triggering a spike in oil prices and a global energy crisis. The second is the unfinished business of peacemaking in Ukraine. The third is consolidating the "Donroe Doctrine," his effort to ensure American primacy in the Western Hemisphere. The fourth is steering relations with China, including preparing for a potential Taiwan crisis in his final months. The fifth is winning the race for artificial intelligence, even as safety risks and political resistance mount.
Vice President J.D. Vance has already named the price of the Iran war. "The reason we lost is the war," he wrote on X after the midterms, adding that the president himself had said so. The war pushed consumer prices and interest rates higher while driving Trump's ratings downward, and in February the Supreme Court struck down his Liberation Day tariffs. Trump will be in legacy mode, and he may be attracted to strategic gambles that promise grand returns. But the Democrats will make things harder for him in three ways: investigate, impeach and impede.
What Happens Next
The next two years will open with a Democratic Congress choosing its committee chairs and a White House bracing for subpoenas. Congress also faces decisions on defence spending and government funding after December 11. Trump has already reshaped his team, firing chief of staff Susie Wiles and replacing her with Stephen Miller, the hardline architect of his immigration crackdown, who must rebuild the fractured MAGA coalition, double down on mass deportations and fight the investigations from congressional Democrats.
The pardons will be the shield behind which that fight is waged, and for the rank and file of the last two years, the promise is real and it will be kept. In the podcast interview, Trump said he would love to run for a third term but acknowledged that "the language is very exacting," and he noted that "we have more than two years left." The final act, as he has described it, is a presidency that pardons its own, vetoes what it cannot control, builds monuments to itself and gambles abroad. How he handles the five challenges before him will decide how messy a world, and how strong an American position, his successor inherits.
Source: Axios