A 'brutal pattern' keeps following Trump’s worst pardons

A new arrest out of Texas continues to show a "brutal pattern" emerging out of the worst pardons that President Donald Trump has issued so far during his second term, per a new report from MS NOW.

Last week, a 36-year-old Texas man, Ryan Nichols, was arrested and charged after allegedly threatening another man with a gun in a church parking lot. Nichols, notably, was among the nearly 1,600 individuals pardoned by Trump for their participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a major pledge that he had made on the 2024 campaign trail. According to a report from Law & Crime, Nichols, who was also, until recently, planning to run for Congress, claimed that he was a "completely changed" man since his involvement in the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

"Ryan Nichols, 36, is accused of displaying and grabbing the weapon, a pistol, while threatening and confronting a man over a 'prior disagreement' in the parking lot of Oak Grove Baptist Church in Harleton, according to local police officials," the report detailed. "Nichols, who attempted to run for Congress before dropping out in 2025, allegedly continued confronting the victim as the man was putting his family in his vehicle and asking Nichols 'to leave him alone several times.'"

As has been reported on extensively, Trump's brazen and wide-ranging use of pardons to help his political allies and supporters has led to an outright "crime spree" from these pardoned individuals, with the worst offenders by far being the Jan. 6 participants. As Steve Benen, a longtime contributor and producer for MS NOW, explained in a Monday report, Nichols was just the latest in an increasingly long line of repeat offenders.

"Just days before Nichols was taken into custody, law enforcement officials in Florida announced a prostitution, human trafficking and child predator sting, which led to the arrest of two more Jan. 6 participants who had received pardons from the incumbent president," Benen explained. "Two weeks before that, a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter reached a plea agreement with prosecutors in North Carolina over charges of sexual exploitation of a minor and possessing sexually explicit images of children."

He continued: "Those developments come three weeks after a different Jan. 6 rioter who received a presidential pardon was sentenced to four years in prison on child pornography charges. Earlier in the month, a different Jan. 6 rioter, who was also rescued by Trump, was sentenced to life in prison for molesting two children. Around the same time, another pardoned Jan. 6 rioter was charged with threatening a police officer who served at the Capitol. This came roughly a month after the same man was arrested in Minneapolis after destroying an ice sculpture that was outside the state Capitol."

On the fifth anniversary of the attack in January, congressional Democrats released a report finding that at least 33 pardoned rioters had since been arrested for new charges. In March, a wide-ranging report from the New York Times found that 12 of these repeated offenders had been booked for "serious crimes," including "child molestation, assault, harassment, murder plots and charges related to a vicious dog attack."

As Benen concluded, there is considerable competition, so far, for the worst thing that Trump has done since returning to the White House, but as this crime spree continues to play out, his abuse of pardons, he argued, must at least be "near the top."

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