An incomplete review of former Prez Trump's eccentric and eclectic use of his clemency power

Over at Slate, there are two new pieces about Donald Trump's clemency record when he was in the Oval Office.  Because "weird" has apparently taken on talismanic meaning this election cycle, the headline of one piece uses that adjective to describe Trump's pardons.  As the headline of this post highlights, I am thinking "eccentric and eclectic" are more fitting.  Readers are urged to make suggestions on the best adjectives to describe Trump's record after checking out these Slate pieces:

"Trump’s Pardons Were Way Weirder Than You Remember: A rattlesnake smuggler, a congressman who spent campaign money on his rabbit, a hip-hop superstar—and more!"

"I Revisited Everyone Donald Trump Pardoned. One Alarming Consequence Was in Plain Sight.: His disgraced political operatives have been busy."

Here is a segment from the start of this second piece:

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....

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.

Unsurprisingly, this kind of review glosses over clemency grants to a number of folks who were excessively sentenced and who failed to get relief from prior presidents (eg, Alice Marie Johnson and John Knock and a number of others).  In a funny way, I think one important lesson of Prez Trump's clemency record (and, to some extent, Prez Obama's record as well) is that granting a few (or many) controversial pardons to high-profile folks will lead to a whole lot of other clemency grants being largely ignored (for good or bad).