Welp... it’s official. President Donald J. Trump celebrated his second term doing exactly what he promised he would do. Among a series of executive orders signed by the president, Trump most notably either pardoned, commuted the prison sentences, or vowed to dismiss the cases of all roughly 1,500 people charged with crimes connected to the infamous Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, according to the White House.
Don Lemon, the television and social media journalist, outlined Trump’s orders on TikTok and noted the stark hypocrisy between Trump’s pardons and his treatment of the now Exonerated Five.
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Trump “did not have that same energy for the Central Park Five,” Lemon said. As we all remember, Trump took out ads demanding the death penalty for the five Black and Hispanic teens who were wrongfully convicted of a heinous crime. Trump has yet to apologize to those men.
Responses to Lemon’s video were mostly filled with users in complete awe of Trump’s wave of pardons. @ymalemon2, said “Wow this is crazy.” Another user, @angelaneugebauerp, recognized the irony of it all, saying “a felon issuing pardons...”
On X, many Black folks shared similar confusion like user @kylandyoung. “Friend: Well surely... He’s [Trump’s] not dumb/wild enough to blatantly excuse violent attackers of LEO’s that we all watched happen on video,” he posted. But to many people’s disgust, the president did just that.
But while some were stuck in confusion, other X users like @H0MOSEXCHA summed up Trump’s actions by spelling out “C O R R U P T I O N.”
User @CharlitKae said these pardons means there’s “Absolutely no accountability.” And she’s not the only one that thinks so. @yjeanwrites wrote how Trump’s orders makes it “legal to overrun the capitol now.”
Let’s not forget this is the first thing Trump did just hours after being sworn into office. The president is clearly wasting absolutely no time passing laws and signing orders to justify criminalization on his behalf, and X user @belihlex said because of that, we should all be scared.
“So much has happened in these past 48 hours, we’re so so cooked guys,” she wrote.
Rachel Scott, senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, said she spoke to the brother of Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died the day after the Jan 6. attack, on the matter. “‘We now have no rule of law,’” Sicknick’s brother told Scott. He even went as far as to call Trump “a poor excuse of a man.”
For many Americans, Trump’s actions are a clear representation of how the next four years will go. But user @Tamantha_5 said she found a way to get through it all. “U just really have to laugh,” she wrote.
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