Trump Grants Clemency to 30, Including Drug Offenders and Union Leader

On a Thursday in September, President Trump extended clemency to thirty individuals — drug offenders, a union leader, and others — continuing a pattern that has come to define his relationship with executive power. The pardon authority, one of the most ancient and sweeping prerogatives of sovereign governance, has in his hands become something less predictable than tradition and less transparent than precedent. In the space between mercy and impulse, thirty lives were altered, and a persistent question about the nature of justice in American governance grew louder.