Donald Trump on Saturday night positioned himself as a law-and-order hardliner who knew that the key to keeping the country safe was to direct the full might of the state at undocumented immigrants, potential criminals, and anyone else who did not storm the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Near the end of a meandering, 80-plus-minute address to a “Save America” rally crowd in Conroe, Texas, Trump dangled the possibility of pardons for the insurrectionists who participated in a deadly breach of the Capitol aimed at disrupting the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next.
“If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly,” Trump told a massive crowd, claiming that many people had asked about it.
Trump’s pledge of leniency came at the end of a speech in…
