You heard it here first: President Trump will bow to pressure from MAGA media influencers and pardon Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis policeman convicted of killing a Black man by kneeling on his neck for nearly 10 minutes.
Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to use presidential pardons to score political points. He pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who sought to overturn the results of a legitimate election — some of whom menaced and even injured police officers. In a shameful perversion of justice, he granted clemency to 1,500 people involved in the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Around the same time, and to less fanfare, he also pardoned two D.C. police officers convicted in connection with the killing of a young Black man in October 2020.
Is the white policeman who cruelly killed a Black man in Minneapolis next?
Last week, influential right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro launched a petition urging Trump to pardon Chauvin on his federal convictions. Chauvin pleaded guilty to federal crimes after being convicted by a Minnesota jury and sentenced to more than two decades for murdering George Floyd, a Black man suspected of passing a counterfeit bill, by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Shapiro’s petition quickly gained traction on conservative social media, particularly on X (formerly Twitter), owned by Trump’s biggest financial supporter, Elon Musk.
When Trump was asked about “allies [who] are calling on you to pardon” Chauvin, he said: “I haven’t even heard about it.” But the prospect of a Chauvin pardon is setting off alarms.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) pushed back on Shapiro’s calls for a pardon. He said it would amount to “blatant disrespect” for the rule of law.
Pew polling in April 2023, nearly three years after Floyd’s death, showed most Americans, 51 percent — including 42 percent of white Americans — still supported Black Lives Matter and the goal of racial justice.
As I write in my new book, “New Eyes for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement” — BLM began in 2013 after a volunteer security guard was acquitted in the killing of an unarmed 17-year-old, Trayvon Martin.
But BLM’s defining moment came after Floyd’s death, a video of which ignited protests under the BLM banner.
“I can’t breathe,” Floyd’s plea as Chauvin kept pressing on his neck and upper back, became a rallying cry. BLM protests in 2020 took on a distinctly anti-Trump tone in the months before Trump lost a reelection bid.
To pardon Chauvin now would neatly fit with a pattern of Trump seeking revenge against the BLM movement.
Since he returned to the White House this year, Trump has worked to systematically dismantle Former President Biden’s BLM-inspired policies to advance racial justice. Now, as the stock market takes a hit from his use of tariffs and failed promise to end wars quickly in the Middle East and Ukraine, Trump is moving on a racially loaded agenda to distract and change the nation’s political conversation.
Government documents and websites, it was reported last week, are being pushed under Trump to erase language, even words dealing with “diversity,” “disability,” “injustice,” “black,” Hispanic minority,” and “women,” according to the New York Times.
In another move with major racial implications, Trump has called for the “shutdown [of] the Department of Education,” according to Linda McMahon, the education secretary. The education department is a primary source of aid for public schools in poor, minority-heavy areas, and it monitors of performance of non-white children.
He is also gutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice offices, which have been especially important in serving less affluent and less white communities.
That fits with the successful pressure campaign mounted by Trump and his congressional allies to get D.C. city officials to erase the large, boldly painted words “Black Lives Matter,” from the streets near Lafayette Park and the White House.
Lafayette Park in June 2020 was the ugly scene of National Guard troops tear-gassing people peacefully protesting police brutality and specifically the cruel killing of Floyd.
Trump officials wanted the park cleared after he declared himself the “president of law and order,” and decided to march across the park to St. John’s Church to hold up a Bible. A day earlier, he had scolded “weak” governors for not sending in National Guard troops to halt nationwide demonstrations, even though the vast majority had been peaceful.
Pardoning Chauvin is the next step in this playbook of racially divisive politics.
Trump used similarly racially loaded tactics during the 2024 presidential campaign, viciously attacking Black prosecutors and judges overseeing his criminal cases — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — calling them “animals” and accusing them of engaging in politically motivated “lawfare.”
Chauvin being held responsible for murdering Floyd is a central part of the story of today’s rise of a second civil rights movement. BLM’s public profile declined in 2024 as Trump won a second term. But the ideals at the heart of the movement have remained widely supported.
Chauvin’s jailing is key to the fragile assurance of racial peace at this moment — the understanding that when a white police officer like Chauvin uses excessive force and kills a Black person, he can and will be held accountable by the justice system.
A federal pardon of Chauvin, although it would not vitiate his state murder conviction, risks shattering what little faith remains in the justice system among Black Americans.
Mr. President — please don’t do it.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for these Eyes: the Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”
