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Trump's motivations are irrelevant when assessing the rightness of the act itself. The right thing for the wrong reason is still the right thing, even if Trump himself gets not moral credit. As to that, if the choice were all or nothing I would very much prefer the outcome we have just had. And I do think the choice was much more all or nothing than it wasn't. As soon as you start picking and choosing, it opens an avenue of attack. "Why this particular person and not this particular person? Why clemency for this but not that?" And this attack will be leveraged to the hilt as many times as it can be since, after all, the attackers are absolutely politically motivated. They were willing to put people in jail for decades for low-level hooliganism or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why wouldn't they make hay?
There is also his own base to consider. Political capital is not an unlimited resource. Even Elon had to walk back his H1B stance on his own website. A significant part of Trump's base would see anything that wasn't a blanket pardon as a betrayal.
A blanket pardon is far harder to nitpick.
I also think that the protests were legitimate and the worst excesses (which still hit nowhere near the level of a typical Floyd demonstration) were intentionally allowed or even encouraged, both in the police/NG response or lack thereof and in some cases with literal plants acting as agent provocateurs. In any event, it infuriated me to know I lived in a country where sitting in someone's chair and smoking a joint got the full force of the federal government on you finding every possible way to charge you for as much as possible, while literally burning down entire city blocks killing dozens and causing billions of damage and possibly decades of urban blight was met with a, "I mean what are we gonna do, send in the National Guard (lol how ridic can you imagine that would be like totally fascism. fascism is when you shoot people burning down your cities don't you know?)."
Now we are slightly less living in that country. Hopefully the trend continues.
Forgive me for the facebook link, but my view is basically this https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1120248821680811 I don't think anyone should be able to break the law just because they are protesting. But I also think that a law that is applied unevenly, and wielded as a political bludgeon, is not only no longer serving its rightful purpose but serving an incredibly destructive one instead. It would be better for it to go unenforced entirely than for it to be used in such a way.
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