On Monday, the victory of America's Insurrectionist-in-Chief in the 2024 presidential election was certified during a joint session of Congress. Four years after a broad-daylight effort to halt the peaceful transfer of power culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Donald Trump will soon take power again—this time with both the popular vote and a comfortable Electoral College triumph in hand. He has long said that pardoning members of the mob he sent to sack the Capitol that day was going to be one of his first orders of business, and the fact that it is effectively a fait accompli at this point should not obscure how wrong it is and how it will further undermine what remains of the rule of law in the United States.

Trump's years-long Orwellian disinformation campaign justifying the riot as legitimate political expression and lionizing the perpetrators as heroes suffering from unjust persecution succeeded in muddying what should have been crystal-clear waters. After getting wound up with one of Trump's patented speeches featuring a firehose of lies, non-sequiturs and bombast, thousands of brainwashed MAGA die-hards descended, lemming-like, on the United States Capitol Building, scaling the walls, roaming the halls and creating violent mayhem. Some of them were armed with guns, carried zip ties and had........

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