The celebrity presidency produces some good in Alice Johnson’s commutation

So why are some people mad about the pardon? A sampling of Twitter shows some Trump haters to be unsatisfied by this turn of events. No one need feel particularly obsequiously grateful to Trump for this move, or even to Kardashian West. But to pretend it’s not a small, lovely victory against the war on drugs’ insanity and inflated prison sentences is to try to put a chunk back into the Berlin Wall simply because the whole thing hasn’t been knocked down.

Despair over the scope of the problem is one thing. But a woman who hasn’t done much substantial except become a baffling savvy marketer of her own life has helped save someone else. That’s wonderful and should be a point of pride for her, and it should be applauded for its own sake, and in the hopes that more such pardons will follow.

Unless of course your real problem with Trump is not practical, but aesthetic. Unless, perhaps, you were one of those people’s whose problem with the White House Press Correspondents Dinner was that it was undignified to invite all those celebrities, not that it was a hacky, suck-up to power event that made presidential excess a cute dinnertime skit. Somehow a celebrity supporting something is unseemly, but say, lobbyists are just how it’s done.