"Worst of the worst" or "Very fine person"?
Trump's choices of whom to pardon or persecute reveal a host of doublespeak and double standards
“The worst of the worst” has become the President’s go-to depiction of the people under siege in the U.S. these days: The ones being snatched without warning off city streets, put in chokeholds and getting their car windows smashed. The ones being nabbed by federal ICE agents inside their apartments, or at federal buildings where they’d reported for check-ins. ICE insists its officers can force their way into homes without judicial warrants.
This is all happening even though there is no evidence that migrants commit crimes at a higher rate than Americans.
The Cato Institute - no liberal organization - says the Department of Human Services’ data for “worst of the worst” show only 4 percent of those arrested by ICE in the past year would qialify; 73% of ICE detainees had no criminal convictions, and only 5% had violent convictions. Among those convicted, most were for vice, traffic or immigration offenses.
ProPublica found that as of October, 170 U.S. Citizens had been among those rounded up by Immigration Agents. And that doesn’t include the number of foreign-born imigrants who are here legally, working and paying taxes.
But labelling them as he does enables Trump to rationalize the inhumanity to which the mostly nonwhite, sometimes accented people are being subjected: Confined without even warnings or court hearings; shipped off to a harsher prison in a country to which they have no ties and the U.S. has no oversight.
The “worst of the worst” might even be a 5-year-old.
In an era of declining news consumption, Trump uses words to forge narratives. He uses the moniker “Very fine people,” to describe convicted criminals he pardoned, and the white supremacists carrying swastikas who marched in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017 — an event that turned deadly.
In his second term, Trump has pardoned 1,600 people ranging from drug dealers to corrupt nursing-home owners to reality TV stars. One of the 1,500 granted pardons on his first day back in office was self-described “American terrorist” Andrew Paul Johnson, who broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to avenge the presidential election results. Then, two months ago, he was arrested for molesting his girlfriend’s 11-year-old son multiple times in 2024. He allegedly promised the child money from a “Jan. 6 payout” (there was no such thing) to keep him quiet.
Other Jan. 6 offenders Trump pardoned had violently assaulted police officers or been convicted of conspiracies. One was a Proud Boy whom a video captured smashing a Capitol window with a riot shield. Another Proud Boy had been sentenced to 18 years for seditious conspiracy.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was not one of Trump’s “very fine” people, but former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández apparently was. Having built up a narrative about Venezuelan drugs invading the U.S., Trump sent troops to pluck Maduro from office and imprison him here. But Hernandez was convicted in the U.S. last year of conspiracy to import cocaine here, and he got a Trump pardon.
Why the difference? Because Trump had another goal to get Venezuela’s oil? Because he owed Hernandez for something? Or because he unilaterally uses crime and punishment, appointments, firings, pardons, domestic and foreign invasions - to avenge actions by his personal enemies and reward his friends.
You might question how someone convicted of trying to sell former President Obama’s former Senate seat, and swindling money from a children’s hospital could be a “very fine person.” But that’s what Trump called Democratic former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in pardoning him after he’d been sentenced for political corruption.
Many of Trump’s pardons have been for people convicted of corruption and financial fraud. Those include :
—Billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the Crypto currency exchange, Binance, which allowed “terrorists and other criminals,” to move money around. Zhao confessed to money-laundering in what The New York Times called one of the U.S. government’s most significant crackdowns on crypto crime. Trump pardoned him after only four months in prison.
—Culpeper County, Virginia’s sheriff, Scott Jenkins, who was convicted of taking $75,000 in bribes, pardoned one day before his sentence was to start. And New Yorker Ross Ulbricht, who’d drawn a life sentence for seven convictions related to selling drugs and laundering money.
—Former U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm of New York who was convicted of tax fraud and had threatened to throw a reporter who asked him an unfavorable question off a Capitol balcony. Trump pardoned him last year.
Under previous administrations, Justice Department employees would recommend candidates for presidential pardons if they had served their time and appeared repentant, according to The Washington Post. Such cases can take years and millions of public dollars to investigate, prosecute and convict.
The double standards are stunning. Trump claims Minneapolis’ ICE infiltration is about stopping fraud by Somali immigrants, even as he pardons Americans convicted of major fraud. Of the 3,000 detained in Minnesota, the Department of Homeland Security shared the names of 240 immigrants arrested as of Jan. 19. Those who had commited crimes had been adjudicated and served their time. They might have been candidates for Trump pardons if they were rich and white.
Every year the nonprofit PolitiFact picks out a No. 1 “Lie of the Year,” made by a politician. This year, unable to stop at one, its editors did some word play of their own and declared 2025 the “Year of the Lies.” As they put it, “the volume and severity of the inaccurate claims was just overwhelming.”
Those lies they cited were mostly from Trump, and immigration-related, including his claim that those targeted for deportation are the “worst of the worst.”
And now the Trump administration has been given the blessing of the U.S Supreme Court to have ICE agents profile those they stop based on race, ethnicity, language or job. That’s certain to result in more biased actions
So what do we do? Use our own narratives. Attend candidate forums as the midterm elections approach, and raise these issues with office-seekers. Register new voters. Remind people about the Jeffrey Epstein files, which have been pushed out of the headlines by Trump’s many efforts to change the subject.
What we can’t afford to do is be complacent and lose hope.
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Well, not really "like," as I indicated but certainly agree. Our country is led by the dipknobs we left behind in sixth grade.
The playbook never changes, only the names of the characters and their depths of depravity. Every day brings new accusations, new needs, more lies and more criminality. History and reality is fake news, a hoax to be ignored. Friends are enemies. Citizens are insurgents or terrorists if not compliant supplicants. Resistance is treason. Don’t believe what you see, read or hear. Obey or be imprisoned, deported or killed. This is what happens when you don’t care about people, only your own ideology.