The real victims of the January 6 pardons are the Republican senators who politely asked us to move on

I was at an intimate dinner party in Kalorama last Thursday, seated somewhere between a prominent venture capitalist and a defense contractor who makes a very sensible line of autonomous drones, when the mood was entirely ruined by the arrival of the evening’s news. The host, a lovely woman who usually has the good sense to confiscate smartphones at the door, accidentally let slip that Donald Trump had spent his very first moments back in power granting pardons to everybody involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The reaction around the table was one of immediate, palpable exhaustion. Not because of the pardons themselves, of course. We are all adults here. We understand how power works. The exhaustion stemmed from the collective realization that, once again, the American media and the voting public were going to demand that our friends in the Senate actually talk about it.

I looked across the table at Susan Collins. The Maine senator was nursing a perfectly crisp Sancerre, her brow furrowed in that signature posture of profound, agonizing, entirely consequence-free concern. It broke my heart to see her so distressed. She set her glass down, sighed heavily into her sea bass, and muttered that it was a terrible day for our Justice Department.

And that should have been the end of it. She said the words. She performed the requisite ritual of moderate disappointment. But I knew, and she knew, that the coastal elites would not let it go. They would demand follow-up questions. They would ask if this terrible day for the Justice Department might influence her vote on the next slate of unqualified judicial nominees. It is an utterly unreasonable burden to place on a woman who simply wants to confirm corporate tax lawyers to the federal bench in peace.

This is the fundamental cruelty of the modern political discourse. We ask our elected officials to endure the grueling psychological toll of standing by a man who unleashes violent mobs, and then we have the audacity to ask them how they feel about the violent mobs.

I was discussing this exact phenomenon with Senator Tommy Tuberville on a private flight back from a donor retreat in Sun Valley just a few days prior. Tommy is a man of deep, almost staggering emotional complexity, and he has been treated appallingly by the press. When asked about the pardons for the people who viciously beat the Capitol Police, Tommy looked at me with genuine pain in his eyes.

He admitted that it was a hard one, because they work with the Capitol Police up there on Capitol Hill.

I want you to really sit with that statement and appreciate the empathy it requires. Imagine, for a moment, that you are Tommy Tuberville. You put on your suit, you go to the Capitol, and you have to walk past the very police officers whose skulls were fractured by the supporters of the man you unconditionally back. Do you have any idea how awkward that elevator ride is for Tommy? Do you know how hard it is to make small talk about the weather with an officer who was bear-maced by your political base?

The emotional labor we are forcing upon Tommy Tuberville is staggering. The media focuses entirely on the physical trauma of the police officers, completely ignoring the severe social discomfort experienced by the senators who have to casually avoid eye contact with them in the cafeteria. It is a one-sided narrative, and it is frankly exhausting.

As Tommy so rightly concluded, at the end of the day, we have got to get Jan. 6 behind us. And he is right. We must put it behind us, precisely because looking at it makes Tommy Tuberville feel weird.

This brings me to the brilliant, stoic philosophy of Senate Majority Leader John Thune. When pressed on the pardons, Thune elegantly dismissed the premise of the question entirely, stating that Republicans were not looking backwards, they were looking forward.

This is not merely a political talking point; it is a profound cosmological framework. Why do we look backward? The past is a miserable place. The past is where the insurrections live. The past is where the violent attempts to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power occurred. If we simply stop looking at the past, those things cease to matter. By choosing to look forward, John Thune has essentially cured the Republican party of historical continuity.

I mentioned this to a tech CEO over lunch at the Cosmos Club earlier this week, and he agreed completely. In Silicon Valley, they call this the pivot. If a product launch fails, or if an app accidentally radicalizes a few million people, you do not dwell on the negative externalities. You pivot to the next quarter. The Republican Senate is simply pivoting away from the violent mob. It is agile governance at its finest.

Which brings us to the other supposedly scandalous news of the week: the revelation of the president's $1.8 billion slush fund. Critics in the legacy media are screaming that this is worse than stealing. They claim that granting the executive branch nearly two billion dollars in entirely unaccountable, untraceable cash is a threat to the very fabric of the republic.

To this, I must ask: have you people never heard of a discretionary budget?

I find the phrase slush fund to be incredibly classist. When a hedge fund manager has two billion dollars in liquid capital to deploy at a moment's notice to hostile-takeover a regional grocery chain and fire all its pension-holding employees, we call it dynamic capital allocation. We put him on the cover of Forbes. But when the president wants a measly $1.8 billion to quietly handle his personal priorities, suddenly it is a crime against democracy.

Is it worse than stealing? Perhaps in a strictly legal, semantic, or moral sense. But in a practical sense, it is simply the cost of doing business. If we want the executive branch to function with the ruthless efficiency of a modern corporation, we have to allow the chief executive to maintain a massive, shadowy pool of capital to pay off whoever needs to be paid off.

We need to grow up as a nation. We need to stop clinging to archaic notions of accountability, rule of law, and linear time. The insistence on holding the president responsible for his actions is what is truly dividing this country.

If we are ever going to heal, we must center the comfort of our elected officials. We must allow Susan Collins to drink her Sancerre without having to furrow her brow quite so deeply. We must allow John Thune to gaze blankly into the future without being tethered to the reality of the past. And most importantly, we must allow Tommy Tuberville to walk the halls of the Capitol without having to think about the people who bled to defend it.

It is the absolute least we can do for them.