Here’s a story the mainstream crowd will bury on a Friday night, so let me hand it to you straight. Tuesday, at a rally in Alaska for Senator Dan Sullivan, President Trump pardoned Zachary Czuback and Patrick Fleming, two guys who run a vehicle repair shop in Anchorage. Their crime? They pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Clean Air Act for tampering with the federally mandated gadgets that snoop on diesel emissions. That’s it. That’s the whole rap sheet. Two working men in grease-stained shirts, hauled into federal court over engine parts.
Trump called them “wrongly charged” and said they’d run afoul of the Democrats’ green new scam, and for once I didn’t have to squint to see the truth in a politician’s line. Ask yourself a simple question, the kind the experts never want you asking: who benefits when a mechanic goes to prison for fixing an engine? Not you. Not the guy whose truck needs to run so he can eat. The beneficiary is a bureaucracy that needs a steady supply of villains to justify its budget, and a climate religion that treats a diesel truck like a crime scene.
Notice how the press is framing it, too. One outlet’s headline called them “vehicle repair shop owners,” which is technically true and spiritually a lie by omission. These are truckers, mechanics, the exact people the coastal commentariat flies over. The same papers that spent years telling you the experts and the mandates were all on the level now want you to believe a pardon for an emissions tampering case is some scandal. Meanwhile the same rally brought news that Taiwan agreed to buy 30 percent of the gas from the Alaska pipeline, a $4.4 billion commitment on top of $50 billion from South Korea. Real energy, real jobs, real money headed to American soil. Funny how that part gets one paragraph and the pardon gets the pearl-clutching.
And the timing tells you everything. Midterms are weeks away, Trump is barnstorming red states while his approval sags, and Speaker Mike Johnson is stumping in 40 districts trying to hold the House. The Democrats’ whole closing argument is that Republicans are a threat to something or other. Then Trump walks into Wasilla and hands two forgotten Alaskans their lives back in front of a cheering crowd, and you can feel the consultants in Washington reaching for the antacids. That’s not a campaign stop. That’s a message: the little guy finally has a friend with a pen.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you every pardon in history was pure as the driven snow, because I’ve read enough history to know better, and I’ve connected enough dots to know the swamp pardons its friends first and asks questions later. But this one? Two shop owners, a green mandate, a guilty plea nobody in Anchorage thought served justice? Pardoning them isn’t abuse of power. It’s power finally pointed the right direction for once in my lifetime.
The lesson the establishment should take away, and won’t, is that every time they criminalize ordinary work, they’re building the case for the next Trump rally. Keep charging mechanics. Keep mandating the snooping devices. Keep telling the man under the truck that he’s the problem. And then act shocked in November when the country sides with the man under the truck.