On Tuesday, President Trump announced he was posthumously pardoning Susan B. Anthony, the leader of the women’s suffrage movement who was found guilty of voting illegally in the 1872 presidential election.
What We Know:
- Trump’s official pardon is seen as an attempt to appeal to female voters as it came on the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The pardon comes during a particularly tumultuous time at the White House. Trump has continued to disparage mail-in voting as well as attempt to dismantle USPS funding ahead of the November Presidential election. The pardon announcement also appears to be a distraction from the Democratic National Convention which is also occurring this week.
- Trump teased the posthumous pardon announcement as he traveled on Air Force One the day before, telling reporters he was going to erase the conviction of someone “very, very important”. Anthony was tried for illegally voting, a crime because women could not vote at the time. She protested her $100 fine and refused to pay, an act aimed at bringing attention to the suffrage movement. Trump questioned why no one before him pardoned her, asking reporters why it had taken so long. “She was guilty for voting,” Trump said on Tuesday, “and we’re going to be signing a full and complete pardon.”
- Like most of the other pardons Trump has issued, this one also drew criticism from Democrats, including Kathy Hochul, the lieutenant governor of New York. On Twitter, Hochul demanded Trump rescind his pardon, saying that Anthony was proud of her arrest, never paying her fine to draw attention to the cause for women’s rights.
As highest ranking woman elected official in New York and on behalf of Susan B. Anthony’s legacy we demand Trump rescind his pardon.
She was proud of her arrest to draw attention to the cause for women’s rights, and never paid her fine. Let her Rest In Peace, @realDonaldTrump.
— Kathy Hochul (@LtGovHochulNY) August 18, 2020
- Others also critiqued Trump’s move, calling it a political move and nothing else as he has repeatedly been accused of sexual harassment or assault and has often made degrading comments about women. Trump is fighting a deep gender gap in his campaign against Democratic Presidental nominee Joe Biden. At the pardon announcement, Trump surrounded himself by female supporters and declared that “women dominate the United States,” later complaining that the coronavirus pandemic had darkened the economic picture for women.
- Advisors to Trump hope this pardon will help gain Trump the support from a key group of female supporters, suburban women, whose support has eroded throughout his presidency. During the event, however, Trump turned his attention from honoring women’s right to vote to criticizing former first lady Michelle Obama’s pre-recorded speech at the DNC the night before. “She was over her head, and frankly she should have made the speech live, which she didn’t do,” Trump said. “I thought it was a very divisive speech, extremely divisive.” He then went on to say if President Barak Obama had never been elected, he would be “building buildings someplace” and “having a good time”.
- Anthony has become an increasingly divisive figure in recent years as some have argued that she sidelined Black women in the suffrage movement as she embraced white supremacist ideas, virtually ignoring and at times excluding Black women who were also engaged in the battle for suffrage. Anthony’s biography shares that Anthony said she would “sooner cut off her right hand than ask the ballot for the black man and not for women”. Similarly, her figure has been adopted by anti-abortion forces like the conservative anti-abortion political group, Susan B. Anthony List, that raises money for anti-abortion political candidates.
Anthony is the 26th pardon during Trump’s presidency, and while he has previously granted clemency to people whom he personally knows like Roger J. Stone Jr., Anthony is the first whose work Trump has not spoken of during his campaign or his presidency.
