From betraying Ukraine and dispatching masked agents who killed Americans to deporting US citizens and pulling out of accords controlling climate change and Iranian nuclear weapons, the list of Donald Trump’s abuses is long and growing still longer, seemingly by the day.

Looking back decades from now, historians will see that at the top of this shameful list is Trump’s utter abuse of his pardon power. It started on the first day of his second term, when he pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists who, on 6 January 2021, had stormed the US Capitol.

More recently, as documented in astonishing accounts by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, Trump has overseen a robust pardons market in which friends or relatives of criminals offer to pay millions for presidential clemency.

Centuries before this unprecedented malfeasance, George Mason tried to warn us.

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Mason cautioned the new country’s most powerful men – among them George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton – against the dangers of giving future American presidents too much power.

The risk was greatest, he told other delegates, in the absolute pardon power then being enshrined in our supreme law. Mason spoke out strongly against granting a president “power of pardoning because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised........

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