The SA ...

 Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

The SA, AKA Brown Shirts, was the goon squad for the Nazis until the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 whereby they were replaced by the SS, a far more efficient tool used to enforce Nazi rule along with its involvement with implementing the Final Solution, now has an updated version when Trump pardoned more then 1500 rioters who participated in the January 6 fiasco to upend the Constitution in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election won by Joe Biden with a majority of over 7 million votes. 

Members of the Sturmabteilung arrest communists in Berlin.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, a former Republican district leader in Queens, jumped through a broken window at the U.S. Capitol with a megaphone. He pushed his way past a line of Capitol Police officers and opened the exterior doors of the Rotunda to allow other rioters to enter the building and trash it. “We stormed the Capitol!” he exulted on video, and was seen smoking marijuana and high-fiving other Donald Trump supporters who were fighting the police. “We shut it down! We did it!”

Nearly three years later, a federal jury convicted Mr. Grillo of multiple offenses. But he did not lose heart: Last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison, he had a special taunt for the federal district judge who sentenced him, Royce Lamberth.

“Trump’s going to pardon me anyways,” he yelled at the judge, just before he was handcuffed and led away.

He was right. On Monday evening, several hours after President Trump was inaugurated, he fulfilled a promise he had repeatedly made to pardon nearly all the rioters who attacked and desecrated the Capitol in 2021 to prevent Joe Biden’s victory from being certified. Mr. Grillo and about 1,500 other rioters received full pardons from Mr. Trump, while 14 others received commuted sentences.

But what Mr. Trump did Monday is of an entirely different scope. He used a mass pardon at the beginning of his term to write a false chapter of American history, to try to erase a crime committed against the foundations of American democracy.

It's worse than that, what Trump did created a private army, ready to keep this guy in power when 2028 rolls around as the 1500 is but a morsel of the numbers of virulent MAGAs ready to support their guy if he makes the call for him to remain in power to keep America great again no matter the cost. 

The SA insignia