The Country's Largest Police Union, Which Repeatedly Endorsed Trump, Is Dismayed by His Capitol Riot Pardons

The Fraternal Order of Police mistakenly thought that the president "supports our law enforcement officers" and "has our backs."

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which supported President Donald Trump's election in 2016, 2020, and 2024, yesterday criticized his blanket pardon for people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The FOP, the country's largest police union, is troubled by the president's clemency for Trump supporters who assaulted police officers while expressing their outrage at a supposedly stolen election.

"Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety," the FOP said in a joint statement with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). "They are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law. Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families. When perpetrators of crimes, especially serious crimes, are not held fully accountable, it sends a dangerous message that the consequences for attacking law enforcement are not severe, potentially emboldening others to commit similar acts of violence."

Spreading the blame around, the FOP and the IACP roped former President Joe Biden into their critique of misguided clemency for people convicted of violence against police officers. The organizations cited "long standing and positive relationships with both President Trump and President Biden," thanking them for "their support of the policing profession." But they added that they are "deeply discouraged by the recent pardons and commutations granted by both the Biden and Trump Administrations to individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers."

The groups' beef with Biden presumably involves his last-minute commutation for Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Peltier, who is now 80 and ailing, served half a century for those crimes before Biden commuted his life sentence to home confinement on Monday.

Former FBI Director Christopher Wray described Peltier as "a remorseless killer" in a letter urging Biden to keep him in prison. But Biden noted that "Tribal Nations, Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials (including the former U.S. Attorney whose office oversaw Mr. Peltier's prosecution and appeal), dozens of lawmakers, and human rights organizations strongly support granting Mr. Peltier clemency, citing his advanced age, illnesses, his close ties to and leadership in the Native American community, and the substantial length of time he has already spent in prison."

Whatever you think of Peltier's commutation, it is different in kind and scale from Trump's pardons for Capitol rioters.

First, although Biden showed he is by no means averse to self-interested acts of clemency, he has no personal stake in this particular case. Trump, by contrast, has a strong interest in minimizing the crimes committed by his supporters, who were inspired by his baseless claim that massive election fraud had deprived him of his rightful victory. That interest explains why Trump, who in 2021 described the riot as "a heinous attack on the United States Capitol," now portrays it as "a day of love."

Second, allowing an elderly murderer to die at home after spending most of his life in prison is not quite the same as granting pardons to "heroes" and "patriots" who assaulted police during the Capitol riot. The former does not imply that Peltier is innocent or undeserving of punishment, while the latter suggests that the January 6 defendants were all victims of "a grave national injustice," as Trump put it.

Third, Biden's commutation involves one sick old man who poses no plausible threat to public safety, while Trump's pardons included about 600 people who were charged with "assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers" during the riot. As of last November, the Justice Department reported, that group included 169 defendants "charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer."

Trump's pardons, unlike Biden's commutation, implicitly excuse political violence, as long as it is committed by people who love the president and acted based on his phony grievance. Trump shows no such lenience when left-leaning protesters who hate him tangle with the police. Those "thugs" obviously belong in jail, he thinks.

More generally, Trump's authoritarian "law and order" instincts lead him to oppose accountability for police officers who violate people's constitutional rights. But when his supporters attack police officers who are simply doing their jobs, as happened during the Capitol riot, he sees no crime worthy of punishment.

The only plausible explanation for this blatant consistency is that Trump sees everything through a narcissistic lens, which is apparent even when he manages to do the right thing. When he pardoned Ross Ulbricht on Tuesday, Trump noted that the Silk Road founder "was given two life sentences, plus 40 years," for creating a website that connected drug buyers with drug sellers, which the president rightly described as "ridiculous." Trump sympathized with Ulbricht, he said, because "the scum that worked to convict him"—prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York—"were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me."

Trump perceived no contradiction between his sympathy for Ulbricht and his oft-repeated position that drug dealers should be executed. That hard-line attitude likewise did not stop him from condemning "very unfair" drug penalties, freeing drug offenders such as Alice Johnson in response to celebrity appeals, or supporting drug sentencing reform—a cause he embraced based on a political bet that he later complained did not pay off. "Did it for African Americans," he told a New York Times reporter in 2022. "Nobody else could have gotten it done. Got zero credit."

Trump's otherwise puzzling incoherence on criminal justice and drug policy is understandable only if you recognize that his self-interest overrides any principles he claims to support. That includes the principle that people who assault police officers deserve to be punished.

When the FOP endorsed Trump in September, its president, Patrick Yoes, said the Republican nominee "has shown time after time that he supports our law enforcement officers and understands the issues our members face every day." During his first term, Yoes said, Trump "made it crystal clear that he has our backs." If the FOP's leaders are now surprised that Trump abandoned that commitment when it conflicted with his personal interests, they have not been paying attention.