There’s a phrase organizers use when a system shows you exactly what it values: the tell. On Tuesday night in Alaska, standing at a rally for Senator Dan Sullivan, President Trump gave us the tell in front of a cheering crowd. He pardoned Zachary Czuback and Patrick Fleming, co-owners of an Anchorage vehicle repair shop who pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Clean Air Act by tampering with the federally mandated devices that track diesel emissions.
Let’s be precise about what happened here, because the framing matters. These men didn’t get pardoned after years of wrongful-conviction litigation, after new evidence, after a court found prosecutorial misconduct. They pleaded guilty. To tampering with emissions monitoring equipment, the machinery that exists so the rest of us can know what’s actually in the air our communities breathe. And the pardon was delivered not through the Justice Department’s clemency process but as rally theater, a mid-campaign flourish for a senator in a tight race.
Trump called them “wrongly charged” by the Biden administration, per the Washington Examiner’s account, and said they’d run afoul of the Democrats’ “green new scam.” The Clean Air Act is not a scam. It is one of the most successful public health laws this country has ever passed, and it is under open assault by an administration that treats the right to breathe as negotiable. When the president of the United States uses the pardon power to declare that emissions cheating is no crime at all, he is not forgiving two men. He is sending a message to every shop owner, every fleet operator, every polluter in America: the rules are optional now, and loyalty is the only law that counts.
Rosemary Ketchum / PexelsThat’s the structural harm, and it’s bigger than two pardons. The pardon power was designed as a check on injustice, a remedy for mercy. Under Trump it has become a patronage instrument, dispensed at political events like confetti, calibrated to who showed up, who donated, whose story plays well on a stage. Meanwhile the people actually harmed by diesel tampering, the kids near freight corridors, the workers breathing exhaust on the job, the communities that already carry the heaviest pollution burden, get nothing. No rally. No pardon. Not even a mention.
And notice the setting. This wasn’t a somber act of constitutional authority. It was a campaign stop for Sullivan, three weeks before midterms, in a race Republicans badly need. The message to the base is unmistakable: environmental enforcement itself is the enemy, and this administration will side with the tamperers over the regulators every single time. That’s not a gaffe or a one-off. It’s the policy, said out loud, with a signature attached.
So what must be done? Congress should be hauling officials in to explain how clemency decisions are being made and whether any process exists at all, and every candidate on the ballot this November should be forced to answer a simple question: do you believe the Clean Air Act should be enforced, yes or no? Because the air doesn’t care about the rally. The harm accumulates whether or not anyone is watching. Our job is to watch anyway, name it, and hold every enabler of this accountable at the ballot box while we still can.