What a pardon of 2 D.C. cops says about Trump and the U.S. violence to come

As 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown lay dying on the pavement of a Washington, D.C. street in October 2020, the two white District police officers who’d chased a young Black man to his last breath knew that things had gone terribly wrong, according to prosecutors who later alleged they schemed “to bury all of this under a rock.”

The cops, whose rulebook-violating chase of the young moped driver for not wearing a helmet had led to Hylton-Brown’s fatal crash with another car, had — according to prosecutors — falsely radioed their commander that this was a minor accident, allowed the motorist who struck the young man to leave, and failed to secure the crime scene for evidence. Instead, Officer Terence Sutton drove over the debris with his cruiser while Lt. Andrew Zabavsky falsely told supervisors that Hylton-Brown was drunk.

The death of Hylton-Brown — an unarmed man with no adult criminal record who’d committed a minor traffic offense — triggered days of heated community protests outside a D.C. police precinct and then something that too rarely happens in a nation where more than 1,000 citizens are killed by police actions every year.

Justice.

In 2022, federal prosecutors in the District of Columbia tried the two officers and — as so rarely happens with allegations of lethal police misconduct — convinced a jury to find Sutton guilty of second-degree murder as both cops were convicted of conspiracy and obstructing justice. The verdict brought a modicum of relief to the victim’s grieving mother, Karen Hylton, who’d led the protests with a bullhorn and told reporters: “My child was human, he didn’t deserve that.”

In 2025, all of this has been undone, under a brand new American system of injustice where one man with the anointed powers of a king has become judge, jury, and prosecutor, meting out warped mercy to his most violent allies and threatening his enemies under frontier law.

And when the 47th president and first unrestrained monarch of the United States announced full pardons for the two D.C. officers, Sutton and Zabavsky, on Wednesday night, he did so with a Trumpian flourish of lies, telling reporters that the 20-year-old who died in a pool of his own blood was an “illegal” — even though Hylton-Brown was a U.S.-born citizen — and “a rough criminal,” also not true.

The police pardons came amid a “shock and awe” flurry of actions in the first three days of Trump’s nonconsecutive second term to unravel an American era not only of justice but diversity, environmentalism, science, and more. And so this story was understandably buried, even in the hometown Washington Post.

But Trump’s decision to throw out, on seemingly regal whim, a verdict that a jury of 12 everyday Americans had deliberated and agonized over for five days, is worth highlighting as a powerful example of how our national bus is plunging over a cliff that’s been stripped of guardrails, in a United States which, impossibly, seems about to get much more violent.

Like everything Trump does, the two cop pardons can be viewed through multiple lenses, and like a lot of things Trump does, it can also look like a glaring contradiction. After all, the president wiped out the first-ever murder conviction against a D.C. officer amid a tsunami of outrage over Monday’s pardons and dropped charges for more than 1,000 pro-Trump Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionists, including those who attacked and injured scores of police officers that day.

And so some pundits will surely see the pardons for Sutton and Zabavsky as an effort to mollify the police unions, including the nationwide Fraternal Order of Police, which so fervently supported Trump in the 2024 election but released statements this week highly critical of the Jan. 6 pardons and clemency for higher-level coup plotters.

That’s somewhat true, but Trump’s Week One rejection of accountability for police violence looms larger in two other contexts. On the same day as the pardons, the new interim chiefs at the Trump administration’s Department of Justice froze all cases in its Civil Rights Division which, among other things, investigates police misconduct.

In a related move, a department memo also issued Wednesday cast doubt on the status of major police-reform agreements reached with cities like Louisville and Minneapolis that were at the center of 2020’s massive Black Lives Matter protests. In Minneapolis, where a police officer murdered George Floyd and sparked the nationwide protests, investigators for the Biden Justice Department found a pattern of police brutality, racial profiling of Black and brown citizens, and unnecessarily violent cop responses to mental health calls.

Now the new regime is telling police across America, never mind.

Killings by police, which millions marched against nearly five years ago, have already been increasing. But the Trump administration is now signaling there’ll be no restraints on law enforcement, which is a dire warning to anyone thinking about taking to the streets to protest mass deportation, detention camps, climate change, or anything else.

Even more broadly, there is a common thread to Trump’s stunning abuse of the presidential pardon powers, which have arguably been the most egregious abuses from the 2024 election winner, who has already more than surpassed his election vow to be a dictator on Day One.

America’s Founders saw pardon powers for the chief executive as an extension of Great Britain’s royal prerogative of mercy, but Trump is instead wielding this as a powerful tool to both reward unrepentant allies — and their violent ways — as part of a broader climate of fear. This week’s other pardon by POTUS 47 — the Silk Road Bitcoin mogul Ross Ulbricht, who created an online drug-dealing empire and solicited, unsuccessfully, the murders of his rivals — was a blatant reward to libertarians and the cryptocurrency dudes who helped get him elected.

» READ MORE: King Trump threatens to tear America apart

But these pardons also set the stage for the frightening new America we now live in, in which anyone willing to show their support for Trump through violent force — whether that’s paramilitary rioters like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other thugs of the insurrection, or police unions seeking no restraints on state violence — have been given carte blanche. The bigger goal is to send a chilling message of fear to anyone inclined to speak out against a monarchical White House.

The strongman intimidation is already working. You saw it Monday from the sanctimonious TV pundits who — on orders from their cowed bosses, we now know — pretended the ascension of 2021’s coup plotter was a traditional, peaceful transition of power, and from the Democrats on Capitol Hill so afraid to act like an opposition party, and from the Republicans who waved their “Back the Blue” flags until Dear Leader told them not to.

It’s been especially stunning to watch the reaction to Washington Episcopal Bishop Mariann E. Budde and her sermon in front of Donald and Melania Trump at a national prayer service on Tuesday, in which she made a public appeal for mercy — remember, the thing that presidential pardons were supposed to be for — for migrants and the LGBTQ community now in the crosshairs of the new boss.

Her appeal to decency would have been unremarkable two weeks ago. Now, amid a fire-and-brimstone condemnation of Budde as a heretic from right-wing pundits, and glowing praise from the last throes of the left, I feel reminded of watching the USSR when I was growing up, and the gasps when any Russian dissident dared to speak out against the Kremlin. A singed and sweaty Joseph Stalin is looking up and laughing at us now.

Trump’s royal mercy in his pardon blitz feels more like a sequel to The Purge movies, except that the orgy of retribution and violence will last a lot longer than 24 hours. I can only imagine what this week’s news is like for the spouses, children and ex-friends who testified against the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, or for the Capitol Police and other cops who feel like they’re under assault a second time. A president who rewards thuggery and attacks the merciful is an American nightmare for all of us.

There’s been a lot of pushback about Joe Biden’s final flurry of pardons, for his son Hunter, for other family members, and for Trump critics such as former Rep. Liz Cheney and retired Gen. Mark Milley. I didn’t like them at all, but in the current crisis they were understandable. The outgoing president knew that Trump would keep his promise to annihilate two-and-a-half centuries of American justice, and in this new lawless Wild West he defended his family like a gunslinger in a Clint Eastwood movie.

Today, the sun is very bright (even at 15 degrees), the Oscar nominations are out, and the Birds are preparing for the NFC championship game. There is a veneer of normalcy, but none of this is normal. We now have a government that wants you to feel not hope but fear, not peace but paranoia, in a nation where the scales of justice have been replaced with the blunt end of a nightstick. I fervently believe that we shall overcome, but we’re going to have to absorb some hard blows along the way.

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