The Rhetoric of Executive Clemency by Zachary Baker BA, Weber State
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The king’s justice: The rhetoric of executive clemency by Zachary Baker B.A., Weber State University, 2019 A THESIS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS Department of Communication Studies College of Arts and Sciences KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY Manhattan, Kansas 2021 Approved by: Major Professor James Alexander McVey Copyright © Zachary Baker 2021. Abstract Towards the end of his term, President Donald Trump issued a series of pardons to political allies that strained democratic norms of executive accountability. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of rhetoric, this thesis takes the position that Trump’s use of rhetoric in defense of his pardons constitutes a compensatory effort to obscure the contradictions between justice and Trump’s self-serving distortions. Trump’s pardons are rhetorical rituals that use tropes and metaphors to persuade audiences to support clemency in ways that are complicit with structural violence and detrimental to democracy. Three rhetorical strategies are identified: first, manipulation of the spheres of argument to alter audience expectations and evaluative criteria, second, counter-allegation to perform a ritual of masculine victimhood that coopts the voice and position of marginalized social groups, and third, subject construction under the trope of whiteness in the service of narratives of racial insecurity. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... vi Dedication ................................................................................................................................ vii Chapter 1 - Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Preface ....................................................................................................................................1 Literature Review ....................................................................................................................7 Overview .............................................................................................................................7 Origins of Executive Clemency ...........................................................................................7 Clemency, Law, and the Constitutional Order ......................................................................9 The State of Exception....................................................................................................... 10 Clemency Arguments ........................................................................................................ 12 Theory and Method ............................................................................................................... 16 Overview ........................................................................................................................... 16 Towards a Psychoanalytic Rhetoric ................................................................................... 16 The Rhetorical Presidency ................................................................................................. 22 Method .............................................................................................................................. 24 Procedure .......................................................................................................................... 27 Chapter Map ...................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 2 - Political Insiders ..................................................................................................... 30 Overview .............................................................................................................................. 30 Conrad Black ........................................................................................................................ 33 Elliott Broidy ........................................................................................................................ 36 Chris Collins ......................................................................................................................... 38 Duncan Hunter ...................................................................................................................... 40 Stephen Bannon .................................................................................................................... 42 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 45 Chapter 3 - Mueller Pardons ...................................................................................................... 47 Overview .............................................................................................................................. 47 Michael Flynn ....................................................................................................................... 48 Paul Manafort ....................................................................................................................... 54 iv Roger Stone .......................................................................................................................... 58 George Papadopoulos ............................................................................................................ 60 Alex van der Zwaan .............................................................................................................. 64 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 66 Chapter 4 - Political Issues ........................................................................................................ 68 Overview .............................................................................................................................. 68 Blackwater ............................................................................................................................ 68 Border Patrol ......................................................................................................................... 77 Philip Lyman ........................................................................................................................ 84 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 87 Chapter 5 - Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 88 References ................................................................................................................................ 95 v Acknowledgements This project is indebted to the gracious assistance of Dr. Alex Mcvey who showed patience, care, and a genuine concern for the project at all stages of its development. This thesis would never have been possible without the incredible devotion of the Kansas State graduate faculty to teaching and mentorship of their students. vi Dedication This thesis is dedicated to Sunset Shimmer, best pony. vii Chapter 1 - Introduction Preface In January of 1999, Pope John Paul II visited St. Louis, Missouri. While there, he made a personal appeal to Southern Baptist governor Mel Carnahan to spare the life of Darrell Mease, who was scheduled to be executed for murder. Governor Carnahan was moved by the Pope’s concern for Mease and commuted his death sentence, one of the few instances of successful religious intervention in capital punishment cases in the United States. A New York Times article published shortly afterwards cites Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, who said that such instances were unusual, considering that only one or two clemencies were being granted per year in that period of time (Niebuhr, 1999). One can alternatively be impressed or discouraged by the seeming randomness of Carnahan’s commutation. The particular facts of a state governor’s psychology may elude clear explanation, but they are indicative of a much larger tension in the criminal justice system. There sits atop our mass of rules, regulations, and institutions a peculiar release valve which, if triggered, serves to revise or even invalidate the actions of a system we depend upon to maintain order and the rule of law. The scope and exercise of the power of executive pardon strikes directly at the heart of our understanding of criminal justice. And this is not merely an exercise in arcane legal disambiguation. The daily operation of the judicial determination of guilt and the execution of punishment puts the abstract logics of social organization into direct contact with the messy and complicated facts of social existence, inevitably producing holes and tensions as varying principles compete and clash. Those tensions constitute the scene of, and the force behind, the use of rhetoric by agents in the criminal justice system. 1 The tensions of executive clemency were clearly on display in the final days of the Trump administration. Whereas we might provisionally assume the Pope’s benevolent intentions, the case for President Trump is significantly more mixed. President Trump displayed a marked tendency to use the pardon power to rescue political allies from legal