In ongoing stunt, Trump names Alice Johnson his ‘pardon czar’

Out of all of Donald Trump’s propaganda efforts, his continued use of Alice Johnson — the former prisoner he pardoned at the behest of online activists like Kim Kardashian — has always struck me as one of the most dubious.

He initially commuted Johnson’s life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense in 2018. And ever since then, Trump and his supporters have leaned on her in a seeming effort to play up his purported generosity. The president fully pardoned Johnson a day after she spoke on his behalf at the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Indeed, it’s great that Johnson was released from prison. But MAGA world has done a whole lot of gaslighting in using her as a supposed example of Trump’s compassion. After all, he has said drug dealers deserve the death penalty, promoted stop-and-frisk policies that have led to racial profiling and supported sending American prisoners to be jailed in El Salvador, which has been widely criticized for its human rights abuses toward incarcerated people.

Nonetheless, this gaslighting effort continued Thursday as the White House hosted what it called a Black History Month event. Yes, despite the administration’s full-on assault on diversity, Trump held an event purporting to celebrate Black history. And that’s where he named Johnson as his “pardon czar.”

“Alice was in prison for doing something that today probably wouldn’t even be prosecuted,” said Trump, who added that Johnson will be tasked with finding people who deserve a pardon.

It’s not clear that this position will have real power. Ultimately, the president determines who receives pardons, so it’s possible this role will have as much actual authority as Trump’s Diet Coke retriever.

But it seems pretty obvious what he’s after with this stunt. Trump has perverted the pardon process, most glaringly with his pardons of violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. And now he has made a sympathetic figure the face of that process.

If you want evidence that Trump’s new role for Johnson doesn’t represent some kind of newfound compassion, here he is a day later, yet again calling for drug dealers to face the death penalty.