For a Presidential Candidate to Work with a Thug to Ally a Hostile Government to Illegally Support the Candidate's Campaign's Not Normal

I want to contrast the president with other presidential candidates who have spent substantial amounts of their lives, just being business people without having a short-term focus on running for office. Neither of the Clintons apply-- lawyers, officeholders, or professors nearly their whole careers. Johnson's business interests grew out of his political power, as did generally, Humphrey's, Nixon's, Wallace's, McGovern's, Carter's, Mondale's, Anderson's, Dole's, McCain's, Obama's and Dukakis's. Reagan is an unusual case; he made his money not so much as a businessperson as that term is normally understood but as an actor.
Perot is an unusual case, too, in that huge business success and the military adventurism that made him more well known, were, I suggest, grand speculations, and at least in the employee rescue operations, his team members were not people of probity.
For conventional business people, we have left, the Bushes and Mitt Romney. I shall tell the story of one business person's venture, but I will use the name of another business person.

A business associate of Mitt Romney's, a former F.B.I. informant who is famous for having once smashed a martini glass stem into another man’s face, promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Romney win the presidency. Emails related to this show that, from the earliest months of Romney’s campaign, some of his associates viewed close ties with Moscow as a political advantage.

Now, of course, it wasn't Romney, it was the current president. but when you read the story with Romney's name-- isn't it clear that neither Romney (nor the Bushes) would associate with a business person like the current president's, and that if they got such an offer they would report everything to the F.B.I. right then?

Romney or the Bushes should be the norm, not our current president. Who continues to lie, as you see below.

The President Keeps a Court from Protecting Minorities, Weakens All Federal Courts, and Corruptly Signals Witnesses against Him.

At first, I thought that the President's pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio was bad, but wasn't unusually bad. This is not true. The closest I could find was George W. Bush's commutation of the sentences of former Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who shot a Mexican drug dealer and tried to cover it up, but that offence had its roots in the challenge of peace officers' having to make split-second decisions-- I don't agree with W.'s choice, but I understand that that is a matter about which reasonable people might disagree.

Joe Arpaio had been fighting a racial-profiling case that has been going against his Maricopa County Sheriff's Office on for years. Before the case went to trial, U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow, a George W. Bush appointee, ordered the agency in 2011 to stop detaining people solely on suspicion they were in the country illegally. They were either to arrest individuals for a state crime or let them be on their way. In 2013, Snow found deputies had used race as a factor in their policing, and ordered sweeping reforms of the office’s policies. But Arpaio’s deputies continued business as usual for at least 17 more months. According to trial testimony, 171 people were illegally detained by MCSO deputies and turned over to federal immigration authorities. Snow found Arpaio in civil contempt for violating his order, and forwarded the case for criminal contempt. Prosecutors from the U.S Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Unit prosecuted the case in a bench trial this summer before U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton, a senior district judge appointed by Bill Clinton. Arpaio’s attorneys argued the violations were unintentional, and that Arpaio delegated the court’s order to subordinates. Bolton flatly rejected that argument. In her ruling, she said evidence showed Arpaio’s “flagrant disregard” for Snow’s order. Arpaio was scheduled to be sentenced for the contempt-of-court charge on October 5th, and he could have served up to six months in prison.

The President disagreed with Judge Bolton's ruling. There is no reason to think that he thought her ruling inaccurate.

First, it appears that the President doesn't think that violating racial discrimination laws is harmful, notwithstanding his oath of office. The President used his pardon power to remove legal sanctions for a person who violated the rights of a racial minority.

Second, pardoning contempt of court is particularly sensitive; the contempt power is a vital tool for keeping order in courts, and the President's action encourages other popular bad actors not to obey federal judges, magistrates, and marshals e.g. Roy Moore. The executive branch disempowers the judicial branch.

Third, the President is being investigated. By this action, he signals the other targets of investigation that he can use the pardon power to offer better deals to them than Robert Mueller, among other people, can. 

Texas has faced similar problems in the past, and we have changed our laws such that the governor doesn't have pardon powers. They have been delegated to a Board of Pardons and Paroles-- now the Board is chosen by the Governor with the advice and consent of the Senate, but it means that if there is an abuse of the clemency powers it would need to be authorized by a majority of the Board and the Governor, which can either be sanctioned by criminal laws, or, in the Governor's case, by impeachment.

It may be easy to impeach a president for corrupt use of the pardon power or hard, but the president's pardon of Arpaio is a dereliction of duty, an attack on the separation of powers, and a corrupt signal to criminal suspects that they need not obey the law.