Donald Trump has promised to pardon his January 6 rioters, telling Kristen Welker of Meet the Press last month, “Yeah, most likely, I’ll do it very quickly.” He reiterated as much in a news conference on Tuesday, saying, “I’ll be making major pardons, yes.” The scope of the pardons remains unknown—with more than a thousand people who have been convicted of federal crimes connected to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and hundreds more who have open cases—but one question overshadows the rest: Will Trump even pardon the hundreds of rioters who, as the Department of Justice emphasized this week, were charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder”? When Welker asked him as much—whether he “was going to consider pardoning even those who pleaded guilty to crimes, including assaulting police officers”—Trump twice dodged the question.

Joining Trump in such dodges are major police unions, including those representing officers who were assaulted on January 6. The Fraternal Order of Police, a national police union that endorsed Trump for president, has been quiet on the question of whether Trump should pardon rioters who attacked police, and the head of the FOP’s Capitol Police chapter on Monday declined to comment to The Washington Post (even while Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger came out against such pardons). The New Republic asked six additional police unions, which represent some of the officers charged in January 6–related offenses, if they supported the pardons. None of them responded.

Police unions are political organizations more than they are labor organizations. They’re not press-shy in general, and especially not when they’re asked to defend police officers. And yet, police unions, whose own members were attacked on January 6, have gone silent about whether their attackers might get pardoned. It would seem they’re reluctant to take a stand that could be at odds with Trump—more willing to appear hypocritical than to run afoul of MAGA. But there’s another way of looking this. There’s nothing contradictory about these unions’ implicit—and some of their members’ explicit—support for January 6 rioters. It’s merely another instance of the cops doing what they always do: allying with power.

Trump’s plan to pardon rioters is one strand of his broader

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