The presidential pardon is to Donald Trump what the car giveaway is to Oprah.
If only he had a studio audience to which he can hand them out to one and all.
“You get a pardon! You get a pardon! You get a pardon!”
The president has granted a number of high-profile pardons and commutations the past few weeks, and has even said he has the right to pardon himself for alleged possible transgressions that his lawyers say he didn’t commit.
On Friday, he seemed to be extending an olive branch to NFL players by asking them for recommendations on who should be pardoned. He also shared an idea of his own.
Trump wants to provide a posthumous pardon to boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
“He was not very popular then, his memory is very popular now,” Trump said at the White House before leaving for the G-7 summit in Canada. “I’m thinking about that very seriously.”
The response from Ali’s estate was a lukewarm thanks, but no thanks.
“We appreciate President Trump’s sentiment, but a pardon is unnecessary,” Ron Tweel, who has represented Ali and his family for decades, told NBC. “The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Muhammad Ali in a unanimous decision in 1971. There is no conviction from which a pardon is needed.”
In 1967, Ali was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison after he refused to report for induction in the Vietnam War. He was also stripped of his heavyweight title.
Ali, who had cited his Muslim faith and declared himself a conscientious objector, appealed the case.
“I’m not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over,” he said then. “This is the day when such evils must come to an end.”
In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned Ali’s conviction, finding that his conscientious objector status was valid.
Ali divided the nation. He was vilified by some who considered his actions un-American, and glorified by others for his stance on civil and human rights.
At the time of his death in June 2016, however, the 74-year-old Ali was widely hailed as a national hero.
“His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing. It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail,” President Barack Obama said then. “But Ali stood his ground. And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today.”
A year after Ali’s death, then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to kneel during the national anthem of NFL games. He said it was in protest of the oppression of people of color and with issues of police brutality against the African-American community.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL.com. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Kaepernick, like Ali before him, split the nation. Many other NFL players joined him in protest.
This offseason, the NFL approved a new policy requiring players to stand during the national anthem. The only form of protest the league will allow is the permission of players to remain in the locker room during the performance of the song.
Trump was among the harshest critics of the protesting players.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a (expletive) off the field right now’? Out. He’s fired. He’s fired,” he once said during a rally.
Earlier this week, Trump canceled the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles’ scheduled visit to the White House. Supposedly only about 10 players were willing to attend the ceremony.
On Friday, Trump seemed to want to make nice with the players with his new favorite thing — the pardon.
“I’m going to ask all of those people to recommend to me, because that’s what they’re protesting, people that they think were unfairly treated by the justice system, ” Trump said “And I understand that. I’m going to ask them to recommend to me people that were unfairly treated — friends of theirs, or people that they know about — I’m going to take a look at those applications, and if I find, and my committee finds, that they’re unfairly treated, we will pardon them, or at least let them out.”
