PARDON PRESSURE — The conservative crusade to rehabilitate once-disgraced figures has landed on a new and even more contentious target this week: Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis Police Department officer convicted of killing George Floyd in 2020.
The latest pro-Chauvin campaign began on Tuesday, when the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro devoted a segment of his popular internet show to arguing that President Donald Trump should pardon Chauvin of all federal charges stemming from Floyd’s murder. “It would be incredibly controversial, but I think that it is absolutely necessary,” said Shapiro, who posted a clip of his monologue to social media alongside a link to a petition urging Trump to intervene in Chauvin’s case.
Shapiro’s segment quickly gained traction with influential conservative influencers and members of Trump’s circle, who elevated and endorsed his arguments. “I’ll say it again,” posted the conservative activist Jack Posobiec, who has been embraced by the Trump White House as the face of new pro-Trump media, and who recently traveled to Ukraine with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “Derek Chauvin didn’t kill George Floyd.”
“Something to think about,” added DOGE impresario Elon Musk in a post on X that also shared a clip of Shapiro’s monologue.
The online pressure campaign to pardon Chauvin represents the opening of a new front in the escalating conservative battle to roll back the perceived excesses of “wokeism” and “cancel culture,” principally by rehabilitating controversial right-coded figures. In recent weeks, conservative activists have successfully called for the return of the far-right influencer Andrew Tate and his brother to the United States — a move that Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell reportedly had a hand in facilitating — despite the fact that the brothers are facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania. In early February, meanwhile, Musk, conservative activist Christopher Rufo and Vice President JD Vance publicly intervened to reverse the firing of a DOGE employee who had posted racist comments to an anonymous social media account. Around the same time, conservatives including Vance publicly embraced Daniel Penny — the former Marine who was acquitted of strangling a man to death on the New York subway — as a MAGA icon.
Taken together, these moves illustrate the newfound sense of cultural confidence that anti-woke activists are feeling under the second Trump administration — as well as the real power they wield with a sympathetic administration in the White House. During Trump’s first term, the president was surrounded at least in part by more cautious conservative advisors who were intent on insulating him from the Republican Party’s rightward fringe. Now, many of the president’s closest advisors view the members of that same fringe as Trump’s most loyal allies, and those figures seem intent to leverage their influence — both to shape federal policy and, of course, to maximally troll the libs.
Nevertheless, the campaign to pardon Chauvin — which would require the president to overturn a clear and legitimately reached judicial verdict — marks a clear escalation of conservatives’ war on wokeness. In the months after Floyd’s death, Chauvin became a uniquely visible symbol of police violence in America, and his trial was widely seen as a referendum on the American legal system’s capacity to reckon with centuries of state-backed violence against African Americans. Moreover, Chauvin’s role in Floyd’s death was not broadly disputed: In April 2021, a jury found Chauvin guilty of unintentional second-degree murder and other charges stemming from Floyd’s death, and Chauvin pleaded guilty to two violations of federal civil rights law in December 2021. He was sentenced to 22 and a half years on the state charges and 21 years on the federal charges, which he is currently serving concurrently.
Yet a vocal group of conservative activists have sought to cast doubt on Chauvin’s conviction. In his recent monologue, for instance, Shapiro pointed to evidence — highlighted by Chauvin’s defense team during his trial — that Floyd had relatively high levels of fentanyl in his system at the time of his death, as well as a pre-existing heart condition. Others have sought to contest the finding of the county medical examiner, who testified at Chauvin’s trial that the cause of Floyd’s death was “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression,” and that the “manner of death” was homicide.
Meanwhile, some X users pointed to former President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, to suggest that a pardon of Chauvin by Trump would be appropriate.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will heed these activists’ calls. On Friday, Trump appeared to throw cold water on the idea, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he “hasn’t even heard about” it. Yet even if Trump were to change his mind, it’s not clear if a pardon would immediately affect Chauvin’s fate. As CNN reported this week, Trump only has the authority to pardon Chauvin of his federal charges, and because Chauvin is serving his state and federal sentences concurrently, a presidential pardon would not clear him of prison time, though it might affect where he serves the remainder of his sentence. At most, a federal pardon might increase Chavin’s chances of getting out of jail earlier, since federal prisoners are ineligible for parole.
Given this reality, it’s safe to assume that actually freeing Chauvin is ultimately secondary to Shapiro and others, whose primary goal is striking a blow against the legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement. As Shapiro said in his monologue, Chauvin’s conviction was the “inciting event” in the BLM protests that, according to Shapiro, “set American race relations on their worst footing in my lifetime.” A Trump-issued pardon of Chauvin would be a symbolic gesture that America had turned its back on the legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement — and that, for many conservative activists, would be enough.
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— A $400 million punishment for Columbia University from the Trump administration: Columbia University faces the immediate loss of grants and contracts totaling about $400 million for failing to address antisemitism, a Trump administration task force said Friday. The Justice Department task force to combat antisemitism, led by Leo Terrell, has been probing 10 institutions because of their responses to antisemitic incidents on campuses since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. But Columbia, which faced intense scrutiny for its students’ high-profile antiwar encampment and building occupations last spring, is the first institution to have its grants and contracts frozen.
— Trump administration declares TSA screener union contract void: The Department of Homeland Security on Friday announced that it plans to terminate the collective bargaining agreement that covers frontline workers at the Transportation Security Administration — a move likely to spark a court battle. In a statement, DHS said its decision to invalidate a 2024 collective bargaining agreement that covers about 45,000 people — including its baggage screeners — “removes bureaucratic hurdles that will strengthen workforce agility, enhance productivity and resiliency, while also jumpstarting innovation.” The agency claimed that TSA employees are exploiting the current system by abusing sick leave policies, in turn overburdening other screeners who have to pick up extra shifts, among other tasks.
— Trump seeks to restart nuclear talks with Iran: President Donald Trump said Friday that he is seeking a new agreement with Iran to curb the country’s nuclear program, warning ominously of a conflict if a deal can’t be reached. The president earlier told Fox News that he sent a letter to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, calling for an agreement to replace the one that the Trump administration canceled in May 2018 in favor of what they called a “maximum pressure” campaign. He suggested, without specifics, that the issue could quickly lead to conflict with Iran, which has accelerated its production of weapons-grade uranium since 2018. “We’re at final moments,” Trump said. “We can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
— DOJ opens investigation into egg companies for price-fixing: The Justice Department is investigating whether the nation’s largest egg producers are conspiring to keep prices high as the bird flu outbreak worsens and grocery stores start setting rations for customers, two people familiar with the matter told POLITICO. The price-fixing investigation is in very early stages and targets large egg producers such as Cal-Maine Foods and Rose Acre Farms, the people said.
— Kamala Harris sets a deadline for her next move: Former Vice President Kamala Harris is seriously considering a run for governor of California — and has given herself a deadline to decide. At a pre-Oscars party last weekend, Harris was asked by another partygoer when she would make a decision about jumping into the California governor’s race. She gave a definitive answer, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation: the end of the summer. And in calls to supporters, allies and trusted aides in recent weeks, Harris has made clear that she plans to make a decision in a few months. Harris’ timeline, reported here first, is the clearest indication to date that she may enter the race to succeed the termed-out Gavin Newsom in the Golden State.
POLAND BUILDS UP — Poland will look at gaining access to nuclear weapons and also ensure that every man undergoes military training as part of an effort to build a 500,000-strong army to face off the threat from Russia, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the parliament on Friday.
Poland’s dramatic military expansion comes as fears grow across Europe that President Donald Trump is aligning with the Kremlin and turning his back on America’s traditional Western alliances — a geopolitical shift that Warsaw regards as a potentially existential threat.
Tusk said that Poland “is talking seriously” with France about being protected by the French nuclear umbrella. President Emmanuel Macron has opened the possibility of other countries discussing how France’s nuclear deterrent can protect Europe.
BIG SPENDER — Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz is promising a constitutional revolution to allow Germany to become Europe’s unlikely big spender — on arms and infrastructure — to contend with a new world order in which America is no longer a dependable ally.
To pull off such a sensational U-turn in the way the world’s third-biggest economy traditionally operates, however, he must secure a political consensus by an ultra-tight deadline: March 25, when a new configuration in the Bundestag will make reform difficult.
It’s hard to exaggerate the scale of the change Berlin is targeting after U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of military support to Ukraine and his demand that Europe should step in and provide Kyiv with security guarantees against Russia.
Merz is not only suggesting loosening Germany’s own fiscal straight-jacket — the notorious debt brake — but is also pushing the EU at large to relax spending rules so the whole continent can dramatically up its defense programs, rather than just relying on America.
THE HOLDOUTS — Most of the world’s residents found themselves confined to their homes in March 2020 as Covid-19 spread at an alarming pace. But some countries didn’t impose any lockdown restrictions. Sweden, Taiwan, Uruguay, Iceland and a few others never enacted a lockdown that involved severe restrictions on the movement of people. They instead chose other measures, such as restrictions on large gatherings of people, extensive testing and quarantining infected people or travel restrictions. Five years later, Chris Baraniuk writes for the BBC, scientific studies and data have piled up, offering a detailed, long-term assessment of whether these countries were right to reject the most drastic of public health interventions.
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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this newsletter misstated the comment in Elon Musk’s tweet. He did not comment directly on Derek Chauvin’s guilt or innocence. The newsletter also incorrectly stated that Musk’s tweet included a page from George Floyd’s autopsy report.