Why Trump Is Now Making Promises to Voters About “the Dread Pirate Roberts” (2024)

The president’s ability to grant pardons and commute sentences is a dramatic but generally quiet power. Presidential grants of clemency generally go through a complex bureaucratic process. They are not usually announced in advance, let alone deployed as part of a campaign to win votes.

But, as with many other things, Donald Trump is changing all that. He has made promising pardons an important part of his 2024 campaign.

This is a bad development in our scheme of constitutional government, a tactic that taints one of the most awesome of presidential prerogatives. Trump is turning clemency from a solemn responsibility to just another tool in his transactional political repertoire.

On Saturday, in an appearance at the Libertarian Party Convention, Trump gave us another example of the lengths to which he will go just to win a few votes. There he offered a clemency quid pro quo.

“If you vote for me,” he promised, “on Day 1, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served.He’s already served 11 years. We’re going to get him home.”

Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he made that promise, since many in his audience were waving “Free Ross” signs. And, as Politico reports, “Ulbricht’s case was one of the top issues that libertarians asked Trump to address before the convention—and it won Trump his biggest applause of the night.”

Ross W. Ulbricht was thefounder of an online marketplace called Silk Road, where illegal drugs were bought and sold.Ulbricht operated the website between 2011 and 2013, when he was arrested.He has been a longtime follower of the libertarian hero Ludwig von Mises, who believed that “every action we take outside of government control strengthens the market and weakens the state.”

Ulbricht wassentenced in 2015to life in prison by federal Judge Katherine B. Forrest for his role as what prosecutors described as “the kingpin of a worldwide digital drug-trafficking enterprise.” Forrest cited six deaths that resulted from drugs bought on his website and five people he tried to have killed as the reasons for her sentence.

As the New York Times explains, “Mr. Ulbricht’s novel high-tech drug bazaar operated in a hidden part of the Internet sometimes known as the dark web, which allowed deals to be made anonymously and out of the reach of law enforcement. In Silk Road’s nearly three years of operation, over 1.5 million transactions were carried out involving several thousand seller accounts and more than 100,000 buyer accounts.”

Transactions were made, the Times notes, “using the virtual currency Bitcoin, and Mr. Ulbricht, operating under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, took in millions of dollars in commissions, prosecutors have said. They said Mr. Ulbricht had ‘developed a blueprint for a new way to use the Internet to undermine the law and facilitate criminal transactions,’ and that his conviction was ‘the first of its kind, and his sentencing is being closely watched.’ ”

Never one to be bothered by his own inconsistencies, Trump made his promise to the libertarians even though he has said on many occasions that if he is elected he will make sure that people who sell drugs will be quickly convicted and executed. He has praised countries like China and Singapore for enforcing the lethal penalty against drug offenders. Trump has also said that capital punishment “is the only way you’re going to stop” addiction.

No matter. Trump wanted to associate himself with the Ulbricht case since Ulbricht has framed his case in terms that would appeal to people with libertarian sensibilities. “I remember clearly why I created the Silk Road,” Ulbricht said. “I wanted to empower people to be able to make choices in their lives, for themselves and to have privacy and anonymity.”

The Libertarian Party first took up his cause in 2018 when it called on Trump to pardon him. At the time, Libertarian National Committee chair Nicholas Sarwark said, “In any moral sense of the word, Ulbricht is not guilty of any crime.”

“Hosting a website,” Sarwark continued, “where adults can buy and sell drugs should not be a crime. No one is involuntarily harmed or defrauded. Making trade in drugs illegal is the real crime against human nature. It’s a crime of politicians against the people.”

In its 2018 campaign to free Ulbricht, the Libertarian Party alleged that “the government prosecution violated Ulbricht’s First Amendment rights to run a website and his Fourth Amendment rights to remain secure from unwarranted searches, which were probably conducted by the National Security Agency. The prosecutors probably tainted the judge and the jury pools by publicizing allegations that Ulbricht had solicited contract killers—flimsy charges at best, for which Ulbricht was never even indicted.”

Six years later, in the midst of a close presidential race, Trump has gotten the message. But his promise of a pardon in return for libertarian votes is not the first time Trump has promised to use his clemency power as part of his 2024 campaign.

In fact, a January 2024 National Public Radio review of social media posts, speeches, and interviews found “that Trump has made calls to ‘free’ Jan. 6 defendants or promised to issue them presidential pardons more than a dozen times.” He has repeated those calls countless times in the ensuing months.

As NPR noted in January, “Trump has said he would issue those pardons on ‘Day 1’ of his presidency, as part of a broader agenda to use presidential power to exact ‘retribution’ against his opponents and deliver ‘justice’ for his supporters. ‘We’ll be looking very, very seriously at full pardons,’ Trump told an interviewerin 2022. ‘I mean full pardons with an apology to many.’”

And, when he was president, Trump associates allegedly said that he would grant pardons in return for cash payments. They supposedly told people seeking such favors not to go “through ‘the normal channels’ of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Trump also used his clemency power to reward his cronies and loyalists. He pardoned or commuted the sentences of people like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. As Politico put it in a January 2021 overview of Trump’s grants of clemency, “The degree of Trump’s politicization of the process was staggering.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that he would continue down that path in 2024. Still, as the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky puts it,“A president selling pardons”—or using them to get votes—“is morally and ethically right up there with the Catholic Church selling indulgences, a practice that has gone down rather poorly in history.”

Now, one can only hope that Trump’s promises of pardons in order to win votes will go down poorly in the 2024 presidential campaign.