(DailyVantage.com) – It’s quite unusual for former President Donald Trump to become flustered under questioning, and particularly so when he is confronted by an apparent contradiction in terms of what he might have said in the past concerning a particular policy, and what he is saying at the present time. However, there is little dispute that during an interview with Fox News, he was asked by the interviewer, Bret Baier, about a convicted drug dealer, Alice Marie Johnson of Tennessee, to whom he had granted a presidential pardon in 2020.
The exact circumstances under which the pardon was granted, and the reasons behind it are not entirely clear, but a presidential pardon is normally granted only under exceptional circumstances, and as Alice Johnson was a 65-year-old dealer in cocaine, there is little to suggest that she was so very different from the thousands of other cocaine dealers in the United States, apart from the fact that she had once publicly and fulsomely praised Donald Trump at a convention.
However, Donald Trump’s policies on drug dealing since he was in presidential office have evidently hardened, as his avowed goal now is to seek the death penalty for convicted drug dealers. It’s arguable that he might have done better not to refer to his presidential pardon when he was being interviewed by Bret Baier on Fox News, because perhaps scenting blood in the water, Bret Baier jumped straight in with the accusation that if Trump’s policy today had been applied back then, Alice Johnson would no longer have been around to receive the benefit of the presidential pardon.
Left-wing commentators are crowing about the fact that Trump was caught off-guard, and to be fair, they do have a point. But the contrast with the outright lies and misleading information routinely handed out by President Biden and his hapless Vice-President, Kamala Harris, could not be greater. It would be wonderful if the same objective standards could be applied equally to both sides.
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