Quite a lot of hay has been made over Trump’s Saturday night Texas rally pledge to pardon the MAGA terrorists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “We will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly,” said Trump, using his tried-and-true “say outrageous shit to own the libs and get media attention” move, much to the delight of his scumbag fans at the rally.

The thing is, as we’ve pointed out before, 58 of the suspects had been arrested and charged between January 6th and January 19th, 2021, while dozens, maybe even hundreds, more had been identified during that period, all of whom could have been granted presidential pardons, but were not. While it is generally thought that presidential pardons could only apply to persons already convicted of crimes and known to the Department of Justice, this has not actually been tested in court yet and there are plenty of examples of pardons being effected before conviction.

Trump himself pardoned Steve Bannon for the “We Build the Wall” scam before Bannon went to trial. Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor Richard Nixon before he could be charged with crimes related to the Watergate scandal, neither were ever challenged in court. However, the closest analogue to what Trump could have done for the Capitol insurrectionists was Jimmy Carter’s January 21st, 1977, blanket pardon for all Vietnam War-era draft dodgers. A total of 209,517 had been accused of violating draft laws while another 360,000 or so had yet to be formally charged, yet the pardon still applied to them. None of that was ever challenged in court. It happened at the very beginning of Carter’s term, it’s unlikely there was much appetite among the Reagan Administration to fight it as unconstitutional four years later.

So there certainly was precedent for pardons of unprocessed charges and convictions, maybe even formal identification of a person suspected of a crime if there were more than those half-million or so draft dodgers in federal prosecutors’ files. All of this is to say Trump had the ability to pardon maybe about a hundred Capitol rioters known to law enforcement and very likely could have preemptively pardoned all of them before they were identified. Would a total blanket pardon have survived a challenge from the Biden Administration? Probably not, but it would have been an unparalleled years-long clusterfuck to try to reverse it, putting courts into completely uncharted territory and likely ultimately constraining presidential pardon powers if it were successful.

However the true bottom line is that Trump didn’t even try to issue a preemptive blanket pardon to all those who were eventually charged with committing crimes at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, much less the 58 who had been charged or the few dozen to a hundred or so that had been identified and were sought by the FBI, a smaller group whose reprieve would have been on much more solid ground. The Orange Satan can make all the pledges he wants when he’s screaming at bunch of rednecks and not follow through, however this is one where his track record very unambiguously says he’s full of shit. He had the chance to walk the walk and he didn’t even try, even with at least two of them actually directly asking for his help.

Or, as Proud Boy captain Ethan Nordean put it in a message to his fellow fascist gangbangers on Inauguration Day in 2021, per court documents in his federal conspiracy case: “FUCK TRUMP! Fuck him more than Biden. I’ve followed this guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all. Yes he woke us up, but he led us to believe some great justice was upon us… and it never happened, now I’ve got some of my good friends and myself facing jail time cuz we followed this guys lead and never questioned it. We are now and always have been on our own. so glad he was able to pardon a bunch of degenerates as his last move and shit on us on the way out”