When Donald Trump, seven months into his presidency, pardoned the corrupt Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio before he could even be sentenced—calling the 85-year-old a “great American patriot”—it caused a gigantic scandal.
Arpaio, who had been convicted of criminal contempt of court for refusing to stop the discriminatory detention of Latino people in Maricopa County, already had a decadeslong reputation for inhumane treatment of inmates in the county’s jails, as well as other forms of cruelty and bigotry. But he was also a staunch Trump ally, an original proponent of the birther movement against Barack Obama, and a partner in Trump’s nativist crusade against immigrants.
So Trump stood by his pardon of “Sheriff Joe” and said: “I think the people of Arizona who really know him best would agree with me.”
That first pardon broke with accepted norms, but by the end of his term, when Trump had granted pardons or commutations to 237 people, few were surprised by the kinds of recipients on the list. There were war criminals and police officers accused of brutality. There were scores of people who had been convicted of political corruption or fraud. The then president wasn’t exceptional in pardoning large numbers of people—Obama, for example, granted executive clemency to 1,927, many as part of mass commutations for nonviolent drug offenses—but Trump’s pardons were remarkably self-serving.
The full list includes an eclectic mix of criminals: drug dealers, wildlife smugglers, rappers who illegally possessed firearms, even sellers of bad beef. But there’s a category of recipient that stands out: his own people. Donald Trump had a remarkable number of people in his orbit who were convicted of crimes, including Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort.
Some of these figures have now been hired by the Trump campaign. Others have carved out careers as voices of the MAGA movement in exile, pushing the former president’s lies about the 2020 election and grievances about the Biden administration.
“Loyalty is paramount for Donald Trump and his network,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies political rhetoric. “The ones who stayed loyal have been rewarded with pardons that have enabled them to continue to be loyal to him, to go out and create an alternate media universe—one that’s largely unseen to the mainstream media consumer.”
If Trump wins in November, this is a cohort that stands ready to return to power, and once again fall in line with Trump’s orders.
Since the Trump years, some of those who were pardoned or had their sentences commuted thanks to Trump connections have gotten in trouble with the law again. Jamie Davidson, who had been convicted of murder in 1993 and saw his sentence commuted during Trump’s final days in office, was in 2023 convicted of assaulting his wife. Jonathan Braun, a drug dealer who had secured his commutation after working connections with Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner, and Trumpworld lawyer Alan Dershowitz, was this year also arrested for assaulting his wife and his 75-year-old father-in-law. And Ponzi schemer Eliyahu Weinstein, who had been serving a 24-year sentence for fraud when he received his commutation in January 2021, was charged in 2023 in a separate $35 million fraud scheme.
But a step-back look at the list of connected individuals who benefited from Trump’s pardons shows that the most significant outcome is not recidivism. It’s a blind embrace of conspiracy theories. The phalanx of loyal messengers who were pardoned have, since Trump was voted out of office, continued to amplify the election-conspiracy claims that flatter Trump’s ego and strengthen the idea that he was robbed of power. They were shown by Trump that extreme and total loyalty would be rewarded and have pushed his vision—betting on cashing in on that loyalty again.
Trump pardoned members of Congress who were loyal to him. He pardoned several members of his campaign and staff who were prosecuted in the Russia investigation. On the campaign trail this time around, he has floated the idea of pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, should he retake office. Many of these pardon recipients were either energized by Trump’s favor to step up their activism or freed, literally, to reengage with his politics.
Bernard Kerik, a former commissioner of the New York Police Department and a former senior staffer in the George W. Bush administration, served three years in prison for tax-fraud charges and was released just before Trump won the 2016 election. Four years and a pardon later, he would become one of the biggest drivers of the Trump’s effort to overturn the previous election, pushing false evidence of election fraud within Republican circles along with Rudy Giuliani, his personal friend. Biden’s inauguration didn’t end Kerik’s work in the election-denial movement: In July of this year, he flew to Nashville to support an event held by Kash Patel, a former Trump government official who has formed an entire postgovernment career around election denialism and fighting the deep state.
Phil Lyman, a member of the Utah House of Representatives, was convicted of charges relating to public land management after leading an illegal ATV protest on federal lands in 2014. He had long since served his 10-day jail sentence by the time he was pardoned by Trump. Lyman was energized by Trump’s fraud claims after the 2020 election, attending a 2021 “cybersymposium” event in South Dakota in which My Pillow founder Mike Lindell promised to reveal proof of Chinese hackers stealing the election from Trump. He would go on to be a speaker at another Lindell election-conspiracy event, in Colorado. Afterward, Lyman publicly claimed to have heard reports of rigged voting machines and urged Utahans to send evidence of election malfeasance to two conspiracy-theory promoters from the state who are popular on social media.
Lyman internalized these tactics, eventually deploying them to cause chaos in his own election campaigns. This year, running in the Republican primary for Utah governor, Lyman claimed that his opponent (another Republican and the sitting governor) was actively trying to “steal” the election. (Lyman lost.)
While some pardoned loyalists, such as Kerik, schemed with the Trump campaign directly, others developed more publicity-forward (and profit-focused) election-interference ambitions. Michael Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, is the poster child for this. For some years now, he has held a touring conspiracy-theory spectacle called “ReAwaken America,” in which he pushes QAnon-friendly ideas—often about “globalists” scheming to stop Trump’s work against the deep state—alongside other far-right celebrities and influencers. Flynn was pardoned for lying to the FBI about conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador while he was part of the Trump transition team in 2016; Trump’s prepardon pressure campaign to protect Flynn was at the center of FBI Director James Comey’s firing and Trump’s obstruction-of-justice efforts detailed in the Mueller investigation.
Flynn’s attempts to turn himself into a right-wing hero have paid off: According to the New York Times, Flynn and his family members have made at least $2.2 million off his various self-promotion ventures, including payments from a crowdsourced legal fund. He sells branded merchandise, including a series of “FlynnLock” rifles. He has also recently released a film about his own battle against the deep state.
Dinesh D’Souza is the intellectual persona to Flynn’s military man. A former college president who was pardoned in 2018 for an illegal-campaign-contribution felony, D’Souza made the 2022 film 2000 Mules, a deeply influential source of misinformation about the 2020 election. He hosts a right-wing podcast with his wife; joined Tucker Carlson on a lecture series in Australia; and in 2023 released another film, this time accusing federal law-enforcement agencies of persecuting Christians and Jan. 6 defendants. On Sept. 27, D’Souza released his latest documentary, Vindicating Trump, which presents fabricated scenes of journalists, Democratic strategists, and federal agents scheming to prevent Trump from winning the upcoming 2024 election through trumped-up criminal charges and other legal attacks, as well as an assassination attempt. And it once again presents false evidence of election interference.
The corrupt former Democratic governor of Illinois and now committed “Trumpocrat” Rod Blagojevich is another Trump pardon recipient pushing wildly dangerous misinformation. (He has said he’s currently writing a memoir with a chapter dedicated to “weaponized prosecutors and rigged politicized trials,” as he put it on X.) But although D’Souza, Blagojevich, and Lyman had reason to be grateful for Trump, they didn’t have the particular honor of going to jail for things they did while working for him. The true prestige among the pardons—at least in the eyes of supporters inclined to believe in a conspiracy of politically motivated judicial persecution—is carried by those who were caught up in the Russia investigation and refused to publicly turn on Trump. Along with Flynn, the most triumphant figure in this category is perhaps George Papadopoulos.
Papadopoulos was convicted of lying to the FBI about his interactions with a European professor and potential Russian agent who offered, during the 2016 campaign, to connect him with top Kremlin officials who had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos had worked his way onto the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team via Ben Carson’s campaign, though after he was ensnared in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Trump publicly called Papadopoulos a virtually unknown, “young, low-level volunteer” and “proven liar.” Still, the incident helped Papadopoulos rise from obscurity: He served just 12 days in prison in 2018 but was happy to publish a book with the grandiose title Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump.
In recent years, he and his wife, Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos, have spread election distrust abroad, doing conservative European media hits, often to discuss Trump’s 2024 campaign. (Mangiante Papadopoulos was also involved in the creation of a documentary called Hunter’s Laptop: Requiem for Ukraine, which premiered on Sept. 5 and featured Bannon as a talking head.) The couple are on the editorial board of and sometimes write for the far-right, pro-Russia website Intelligencer, which produces pro-Russian views about the war in Ukraine, alongside far-right disinformation about the U.S. election and vaccines.
The effect of all of these Trump loyalists effectively preaching propaganda on Trump’s behalf has been to strengthen the idea of a grand conspiracy against Trump that reaches untold numbers of vulnerable people through the internet, TV, and podcasts. The convoluted arguments they make to push the idea that Trump is a victim of the system—perhaps much like themselves—are no less dangerous for being comically absurd. As D’Souza tells Trump in the movie trailer to 2000 Mules: “You didn’t do an insurrection. Had you called for one, there would have been one. And there would be one if you called for it now.”
There is one name that stands out among the list of Trump’s pardon recipients for his long-term planning: Steve Bannon. Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and a senior strategist during his presidency, Bannon is perhaps singular among MAGA world pardon recipients in that he doesn’t cling to the former president for political relevance. Rather, Bannon, through his own media empire, pulls different strains of the far right together, teasing out and connecting their similar passions and paranoias. The War Room, Bannon’s TV and audio show, remains incredibly popular, even as its creator sits in prison for contempt-of-Congress charges related to his refusal to cooperate with the House Jan. 6 committee. (Trump’s pardon of Bannon was unrelated to Jan. 6; it concerned mail fraud and money laundering in connection with a fundraising campaign to pay for Trump’s border wall—he still faces state charges in New York for that crime.)
On the show, which airs every day, a collection of guest hosts regale listeners with shadowy tales of the evils of the left, of the global power structures plotting against American patriots, and of the immigrants who threaten the very stability of the country. When he returns from prison, at the end of this month, Bannon will continue his work of ceaselessly generating talking points for conservative pundits and politicians, including Trump, and pushing the MAGA movement toward a cohesive vision of right-wing nationalist populism.
“He’s figured out a way to try to assemble a MAGA movement that is Trump-supportive but not necessarily Trump-centered—something that can sustain itself into the future,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the left-leaning organization Media Matters for America. But although Bannon has a less desperate relationship with Trump—he has called Trump a “moderate” and can fill airtime with rants fully unconnected to whatever is happening in Trump’s world—he still seems to need the former president for his ambitions. This is something Bannon shares with other media-adroit pardon recipients, including Flynn and Roger Stone.
“Trump is their meal ticket, to a certain extent,” Gertz said. “They grift off their relationship to him.” (A prime example: Stone auctioning off a Trump-autograph NFT.)
Trump’s own obsessive relationship with media has affected his pardon habits in profound ways. Trump’s second pardon, after Joe Arpaio, was of the former Navy sailor Kristian Saucier, who was convicted for the unauthorized retention of national defense information. The pardon came just days after Saucier appeared on Fox & Friends in 2018; his case had been held up as a contrast to the lack of repercussions for Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material. Afterward, criminally convicted political figures would often go on Fox in hopes of getting their case before Trump.
Gertz doesn’t think that many of these individuals (save for Bannon) are powerful enough to lead their own movements. But he does think they contribute to something more powerful.
“The election-fraud narratives we saw in 2020, and now in 2024, benefit from the willingness of Trump supporters to say shameless things that were obviously false about the election. To that extent, anyone willing to do that benefits the movement as a whole,” Gertz said. “You need the Fox News hosts who can talk to an audience of zillions, but you also need the lower-level figures. You need everyone pulling on the oar.”
And in an effort to sustain their separate low-level projects, the Trump pardoned seem to boost one another for mutual benefit.
Roger Stone, who worked as a consultant for the Trump campaign and who was convicted of seven felonies for obstructing justice during the Russia investigation, hosts a radio show on WABC-AM, one of the biggest radio stations in New York. Donald Trump was the first guest on his show when it debuted in June 2023, but his guests have also included his fellow pardon recipients Flynn (on multiple times), Blagojevich (also a repeat guest), Papadopoulos (another repeat guest), Conrad Black, Paul Manafort, and D’Souza.
Similarly, D’Souza has hosted Blagojevich (discussing Democrats) and Flynn (discussing “corruption and political targeting at the highest levels of the intelligence agencies”) on his podcast, and after Papadopoulos’ wife released her film about Hunter Biden’s laptop, D’Souza was happy to have her on. When D’Souza screened his latest conspiracy-theory film at Mar-a-Lago, Bannon, Stone, Papadopoulos, and Flynn were all there.
Some of these figures seem to feel a sort of kinship toward one another. Kerik is apparently a close enough friend of Bannon that he, along with Blackwater founder Erik Prince, dropped Bannon off at prison on July 1. But Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies political communication and the media, speculated that the Trump pardon recipients likely promote one another in a noticeable way simply because it’s the best way to publicize their proximity to power.
“The set of people who hung around the Trump Hotel trying to be seen—it’s not a big group,” he said. “They probably all know each other, and they’re probably frenemies in a way people like that often are.”
But, Nyhan said, “they all have a joint stake in the continued flow of content.”
If Donald Trump loses the election in November, it will almost certainly depress the careers of the pardoned loyalists. “They can’t trade on their proximity to the most powerful person in the Republican Party forever,” Nyhan said. “He’s too old for that to last.”
But another way to look at it is: If Trump loses, they will have nothing stopping them from going all in on their already developed conspiracy theories of election fraud. Another “Stop the Steal” movement could be personally risky for these individuals, but arrests would mean more publicity, and another chance for the Trump-pardoned loyalists to convince their audiences that they went to prison for the movement—that they were good soldiers who made sacrifices and should be rewarded.
Gertz noted that some of these figures urge their audiences even today to be willing to go to jail or pay some other legal penalty to serve Trump’s noble cause. Several of these figures, including Bannon, Stone, and Flynn, have also touted their criminal charges as proof of what the movement calls for.
“The competition to play the victim card among his supporters is intense,” Nyhan said. “Bannon trumpeting his willingness to serve time—there’s a kind of competition for people to show just how committed they are to the cause.”
Trump himself became the first president in history to be indicted on federal charges, having been criminally charged in four separate cases. In MAGA world, these charges aren’t seen as liabilities. They are further proof of the politicization of the justice system and Trump’s own martyrdom.
“They see their convictions as proof of the conspiracy against them,” Mercieca said. In other words: “ ‘We must be right, because they’re always attacking us.’ ”
