The president has the absolute right to grant pardons. But Donald Trump’s spree of pardons for loyalists and business allies has raised not only political eyebrows but also legal questions about the abuse of power. 

Trump has started to “expand the pardon power both in nature and in scale,” said Benjamin Wallace-Wells at The New Yorker. During his second term, he has issued nearly 2,000 presidential pardons and commutations, compared with 238 in his first term. In his latest act of clemency, Trump last week freed private equity executive David Gentile, who had just begun a seven-year sentence for a $1.6 billion fraud scheme.

‘Grotesque abuses’ 
“More than any previous president,” Trump has “systematically deployed” pardons to “reward loyalists” and reassure “associates that they can violate the law with impunity,” said Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times. Over the past decade, the presidential pardon power has been subject to “grotesque abuses,” said Jonah Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times. 

In his first term, Trump pardoned “lackeys and war criminals,” and now he has “outdone” himself, pardoning a “rogue’s gallery of donors, partisan allies, and people with business ties to him or his family,” said the outlet. Trump is using his pardon power as “part of his effort to put the country on an authoritarian path,” said Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University, to The New York Times. 

Allowed under the Constitution 
It might seem “quaint” to reference America’s founding fathers, said The Wall Street Journal, but when they granted unlimited pardon power, they “anticipated at least a modicum of presidential restraint.” As such, there are no provisions in the Constitution to rein in a president who embarks on a pardoning spree. 

Congress can’t remove the presidential power of pardon without changing the Constitution, but it could seek to “circumscribe” it around a “few basic principles,” said Bloomberg. These could include barring self-pardons and pardons given “in exchange for anything of value.” Seeking to impose these principles will “surely invite legal challenges.” But it would be difficult to “oppose them on the merits. More to the point, doing nothing would be unpardonable.”

As the U.S. and China jockey for global influence and power, American farmers and Republican lawmakers are growing increasingly anxious over one of the less-obvious fronts in the Trump administration’s trade war with Beijing: commercial drones.

National security or corporate protectionism?
At the center of this growing fight is Shenzhen Da-Jiang Innovations Sciences and Technologies Company Limited, commonly known as DJI, which sells “more than half” of the U.S.’s commercial drones, said Fox News. Lawmakers have “repeatedly raised concerns” that the company’s drones “pose data transmission, surveillance and national security risks” and have raised allegations that DJI is controlled by the Chinese military.

But DJI drones are a “key agricultural tool to treat more than 300 types of crops in fields and orchards,” said Michigan Farm News. “Over 90% of the spray drones our industry uses come from China,” said the American Spray Drone Coalition. A “drastic” cutoff like the one being debated in Congress will “devastate our industry.”

House Republicans, led by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, have succeeded in passing harsh restrictions on domestic DJI sales in their version of a must-pass defense funding bill, but they are “facing pushback in the Senate,” said Politico. Banning Chinese drones would have “real cost ramifications for commercial enterprises, not just farming,” said North Dakota Republican Sen. John Hoeven to Politico.

Members of the U.S.’s nascent commercial drone industry are ”eagerly awaiting“ DJI’s exit from the domestic field, said The New York Times. The push to ban DJI technology in the U.S. is about “forcing the biggest manufacturer of drones out of the market” so domestic manufacturers “don’t have to compete with them,” said DJI Global Policy head Adam Welsh to Mashable. 

Christmas Eve-eve deadline
For now, all eyes are on Dec. 23, after which DJI would be automatically added to the FCC’s “covered list” of banned items that would block new drone shipments, as well as potentially disrupt future upgrades for existing devices, unless a national security agency were to audit the company to determine whether it poses a threat. But with no agency set to perform the check, said Mashable, “DJI can’t clear its name.”

Fans gather to watch car-drifting in the Umm Al Quwain desert north of Dubai. The UAE’s Emirates Drift Championship revs off Dec. 27, with drivers judged on speed, agility, control and style as they perform controlled slides around a racetrack.
Fadel Senna / AFP / Getty Images

The 2025 podcast season is wrapping up, and listeners have plenty to choose from. This includes the return of popular podcasts that fans have been anticipating. 

Heavyweight (Pushkin Industries)
After a brief hiatus, host Jonathan Goldstein and his team return with “Heavyweight,” a show “devoted to a form of podcasting that has drifted precariously out of the spotlight,” said Vulture. The award-winning narrative podcast features episodes in which Goldstein helps people confront and resolve lifelong regrets and lingering questions, playing the role of a “kind of time-traveling therapy unit.” (Pushkin Industries, Spotify, Apple Podcasts)

Inklings Book Club (Independent)
Jack Edwards’ book club podcast stands out among the genre. BookTok connoisseurs may be familiar with Edwards’ “chipper, honest and nuanced reviews of contemporary and classic literature,” said Podcast Review. Inklings “goes beyond a traditional book club format,” offering its audience “weekly author interviews and a spotlight monthly book club chat” in which Edwards asks authors about their “writing process, inspiration and future projects.” (Spotify, Apple Podcasts)

In the Dark: Blood Relatives (The New Yorker)
For the sixth season of the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast “In the Dark,” New Yorker journalist Heidi Blake investigates the 1985 Whitehouse Farm murders in England, one of the most infamous mass murders in recent British history. The series expands on her article from last year, “exploring various angles that seem to have been overlooked,” said Podcast Review. Finding the case details questionable, Blake discovers new evidence that casts doubt on the conviction of the accused, Jeremy Bamber. (The New Yorker, Spotify, Apple Podcasts)