Source: The Weekly Dish
by Andrew Sullivan
“No president ever pardoned a soldier for war crimes before Donald Trump. Yes, there were broad Confederate amnesties that effectively forgave Civil War atrocities, but no pardons. Even Nixon merely lessened and commuted the sentence of the My Lai commander found guilty of civilian mass murder. But in his first term, Trump pardoned three men very credibly accused by their own troops of wantonly killing unarmed civilians — and one convicted of posing with a man he’d just murdered. Their chief lobbyist? [Pete] Hegseth. … Yes, murdering a few bad guys on a boat in cold blood may sound like a trivial thing. But the principles it violates are about as profound as you can get. This kind of murder is not a defense of the West. It’s an attack on it.” (12/05/25)
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-military-as-a-murder-weapon-cbd