Jeff is a lawyer and a contributing opinion writer for the NYT, after a long run at The New Yorker and CNN. He has written many bestselling books, including True Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Oath, The Nine, and Too Close to Call. He appeared on the Dishcast in 2024 to talk lawfare, and in this episode we discuss his latest book, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.
We recorded this episode a while back, and we’re posting it this week after Trump promised mass pardons for White House staffers before he leaves office. For two clips of our convo — on Biden’s corrupt pardons, and Trump’s obscene pardons — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: how pardons can be a beautiful act of mercy; the varying powers among the states; Lincoln’s amnesty for Confederate soldiers but not leaders; Andrew Johnson’s pardon for Jefferson Davis; Johnson’s impeachment; the thousand pardons of Rutherford B Hayes; Ford pardoning Nixon; Jimmy Carter pardoning resisters to the Vietnam War; the Willie Horton furlough and ad; HW’s pardons for Iran-Contra; Clinton pardoning his own brother and Marc Rich; Dubya’s refusal to pardon Scooter Libby against Cheney’s wishes; Dubya advising Obama to have a set protocol; Trump pardoning crooks like Charles Kushner and Paul Manafort who could have testified against him; the blanket pardon of January 6ers; Kim Kardashian’s role in Trump’s pardons; the ICE killings in Minneapolis; and the need for presidents with some basic virtue.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Greg Lukianoff on free-speech fights, Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” HW Brands on the life of George Washington, Ben Rhodes on foreign policy, and Tom Junod on his dad and masculinity. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
From a returning paid subscriber:
I subscribed last year but let it lapse recently — not as a protest on your war stance, but because I have so many other subscriptions. But listening to your Tom Holland episode reminded me of how much I value the conversations you share. So I’m back. Plus, I missed the value-add on the weekly column.
A dissenter writes, “Up front: I love your writing, and I’m an atheist”:
Tom Holland has a lovely turn of phrase and one of those deep knowledge banks that makes you proud to be a fan. I loved the conversation, but I found your takeaways infuriating. You both acknowledge the importance of empathy, but credit yourselves this quality, when, in fact, your elite fantasies shine through. Historically, the mass of people were ignorant, chronically fucked from subsistence endeavours, and, when occasionally forced to contemplate the divine, shit-scared.
I would argue that even in America, the bulk of Christians are just cultural and political. Given the choice between “finding a deeper meaning in life” or making a better living, most would choose the latter. Your plaintive musings on you missing out on peak, rapturous Christianity were, I’m afraid, quite pathetic. You can’t really mean that you would have preferred to have been born in the 13th century? Let me guess: in this alternative history, gay sex is just fine?
The intellectual aspects of Christian faith are fascinating and clearly fundamental to Western society, but I think that the difficulty of accessing the experiences of the “common people” obscures the negligible role it played in day-to-day life. In other words, it’s only people like you, Andrew, who get to think about religion in the way you do.
You should have met my grandmother. Another writes, “Thank you for this interview, and thank you for not talking about Trump (much)”:
I love Tom Holland’s description of “you’ll always have the poor.” Spot on, and it emphasizes my recent musings on God and Jesus. I started reading through the Bible in chronological order in a year during Covid. (I’m now doing my sixth year.) I was bowled over with the epiphany that the God of the Old Testament is not, as most peripheral Christians say, an angry God. The Old Testament God is an utter pushover. Time after time after time, he forgives, tries again, and falls back in love with his people, sometimes against his better judgment (or at least mine).
Then I get to the New Testament and that man, Jesus, is terrifying in his electrifying responses: he cuts people off, dismisses fools, demands impossible perfection, shows breathtaking kindness to a stranger and then ends it with, “go and sin no more” with a strident finality. His love is more like a bracing slap in the face or jump into an icy lake. He is reliable only in his ability to shock.
But every time I find him inscrutable, I recognize the problem is probably mine. Most of all, together, the OT God and NT God form the most perfect answer to my deepest longings.
By the way, if you interview Fleming Rutledge (whom Holland recommended), my head would explode — in a good way. Do it!
Def on the list. Another suggests a topic for the pod:
I’ve been a longtime reader of your columns since we met at Haverford College some years back when you were on a book tour for The Conservative Soul. I remember we discussed Plato, as I was then studying classics and went on to write a thesis on Political Eros in Athens in the 5th century.
Many have compared Trump to Nero, but there are apt comparisons to Alcibiades (and his own brand of populism) — though the logical extension of this comparison to include both Socrates and Roy Cohn makes me shudder at the thought. I wanted to thank you for bearing witness to the madness of this era and all the ways in which it has been derailed by Trumpian populism and left-wing excesses. Your interviews with the many guests of the Dishcast give me hope that there are still those who tend the sacred flame of Eleutheria and Aletheia.
That being said, I wanted to recommend a topic that has been hovering in the background for a while now, but few in the mainstream press dare cover it with any seriousness.
Let me start with a story: I was enjoying a glass of red wine with a friend in my parents’ backyard in New Jersey pre-pandemic. The sun was setting and we were looking at the sky and noticed three lights hanging in the dusk in a triangle formation that looked somewhat out of place. I got up to go into the house to grab binoculars, and as I was going into the house, the lights scattered in three separate directions like shooting stars. Now, I’ve seen shooting stars and satellites — and these three lights were neither. It seemed as if the lights knew we were trying to observe them more closely; the timing of their “departure” was uncanny.
I was only dimly aware of the subject of UFOs/UAPs, since my childhood fascination about the topic gave way to adult skepticism. This was after the NYT piece by Leslie Kean but before the wave of sightings surrounding the Chinese spy balloon shot down during the Biden years, as well as the New Jersey drones closer to the 2024 election. The story only got weirder when a former spy and two retired airmen went in front of Congress making all sorts of wild claims:
You may be thinking I’ve lost my mind (and I probably have; it’s hard not to these days), but without trying to sound like a snob, I work in investment banking in NYC and have an MBA from NYU and a wife and a cat and a baby on the way, so I’m far from being a tinfoil hat wearer. You could also ask Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds regarding the language in the 2023 NDAA. Reasonable people see things they cannot explain all the time, and I’d love it if you could mention this the next time you speak with Sam Harris, or if you were to invite a guest on the pod like Gary Nolan, David Grusch, or Chris Mellon.
As far as what “the phenomenon” is, my own private hunch is that we are being surveilled by an AI system of extra-planetary origin.
My brother keeps nagging me on this as well, and he is at least marginally sane. I’ve not known what to say, to be honest. But maybe I can find someone who does.
Here’s a dissent over the Dishheads pushing to get Sam Harris on the pod to debate Israel:
Sadly, you cannot count me among the Sullivan-Harris crossover fans eager for an attempted conversation on the Israel-Gaza-Iran conflict. I think one of the reasons this is such a thorny topic is that there are some legitimately good points to be made on each side. But sorry to say, I have my doubts that even two of my favorite public thinkers/writers can truly tackle them. If it comes to fruition, though, I hope it can remain focused on those best, difficult-to-address arguments rather than many of the tempting side topics that would arise.
Harris, like many others supporting both the actions in Gaza as well as Iran, rightly notes that Israel faces an enemy dissimilar to any other in modern history.
