How Many People Has Donald Trump Pardoned? The List Keeps Growing

At the rate President Donald Trump is issuing pardons, the only person he might have left to pardon at the end of his second term is himself. The president has shown clemency to almost 2,000 people as of this writing. To put this into perspective, the controversial politician issued a meager 238 pardons during his first term. Only a small amount of almost 2,000 pardons and commutations issued by the president in 2025 are listed on the Office of the Pardon Attorney's website. This appears to be because the almost 1,600 pardons and commutations Trump granted to the January 6 insurrectionists shortly after his 2025 inauguration aren't listed.

In November 2025, Trump's pardons had his biggest criticism of former President Joe Biden on everyone's lips. The divisive politician has repeatedly rebuked Biden's use of an autopen to sign pardons, but he appeared to do so himself with the seven pardons that were issued on November 7, 2025. Among those pardons were former baseball player Darryl Strawberry, who found himself in hot water with the IRS in the '90s for tax evasion. He notably made an appearance on Trump's reality show, "The Celebrity Apprentice" in 2010. Another name that stands out on the ever-growing list of Trump-issued pardons is former attorney and former Associate Attorney General of the United States Rudy Giuliani, who, along with several other officials, reportedly attempted to overturn the 2020 election results.

The president also pardoned billionaire crypto founder Chanpeng Zhao, whose company, Binance, made a lucrative deal with the Trump family's crypto business, World Liberty Financial. When asked about this particular pardon on CBS' "60 Minutes" and why he decided to issue it, Trump replied, "I don't know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that, and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt."

Seeing as Donald Trump is so willing to issue pardons to lawbreakers, it should come as no surprise that some high-profile convicted felons are scrambling to approach the president to grant them clemency. One of them is Sean "Diddy" Combs, whose potential Trump pardon might not be a pipe dream after all, given that the president appears to be in a forgiving mood.

Trump has contradicted himself in commentary about a Combs pardon on multiple occasions, and in July 2025, an unnamed Trump administration source told Deadline that the president was considering issuing a pardon to Combs, who is serving a 50-month prison sentence for two counts of transportation for prostitution. The White House has since refuted the claims. But Combs isn't the only questionable character seeking clemency from the president. Convicted sex offender and Jeffrey Epstein's right-hand woman Ghislaine Maxwell's application for commutation will cross the Resolute desk at some point as well.

When asked by reporters on Air Force One in November 2025 whether he was considering pardoning Maxwell, Trump didn't provide a hard yes or no. "I haven't even thought about it. I haven't thought about it for months. Maybe I haven't thought about it at all," he told reporters (via Reuters). "I don't rule it in or out. I don't even think about it." They say you're known by the company you keep. If the president can be judged by the pardons he issues, Trump's character is questionable at best.