Megyn Kelly strongly “urged” Donald Trump not to pardon Sean “Diddy” Combs, telling her viewers, “I got to believe Trump’s smarter than this.”
“I am here to urge him not to even consider it, much less to do it,” Kelly said Wednesday on her YouTube show before addressing Trump directly. “Just to put it in terms Trump can understand—he can’t stand you, Mr. President. He was once nice to you. He’s turned on you, and he doesn’t deserve a favor from you, who he worked actively to stop in 2020.” Kelly went on to say that it would be a “miscarriage of justice,” for Trump to pardon Combs, because He “doesn’t deserve any of Trump’s mercy.”
In 2015, Combs told The Washington Post, “Donald Trump is a friend of mine, and he works very hard.” The following year, the fashion-inclined rapper praised Trump’s “style,” to The New York Post, telling the site “I do have a tie he gifted me. I wear it.” And yet even then he expressed apprehension about Trump in politics when he added, “As far as voting for him, that has yet to be seen.”
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By 2020, Combs no longer had a sweet spot for Trump. That year in an interview with Charlamagne Tha God, Combs said, “White men like Trump need to be banished,” as he endorsed Joe Biden for president.
Trump himself acknowledged Combs’ view on him had changed when he said in May that Combs “used to really like me a lot, but I think when I ran for politics, he sort of—that relationship busted up, from what I read, I don’t know. He didn’t tell me that, but I’d read some little bit nasty statements in the paper all of a sudden.”
Kelly pled her case to Trump Wednesday by playing a clip of Combs’ “white men” comment on her show before turning to her “most important” point: that “pardoning Diddy will create another Epstein” situation for Trump. “It’s the same thing. It’s telling all these young vulnerable women, they don’t count. They don’t matter, that even the top Republican president will cover up any wrongdoing when it comes to that type of a victim… It just cannot happen.”
Kelly’s latest rant is a response to a report from Deadline on Tuesday that said Trump was “strongly considering” pardoning the rapper, who escaped sex trafficking and RICO charges in June but was convicted on prostitution counts that could still land him in prison for 20 years. The high profile trial exposed a pattern of domestic abuse to the public that Combs could not and (finally) did not deny—the most blatant example of which was the now infamous 2016 hotel video that showed him savagely beating his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura.
Combs is behind bars awaiting his sentencing on October 3, although his lawyers have tried repeatedly to get him released.
“The GOP is already struggling with female voters,” Kelly said Wednesday, “And they’re not all lefties. There are young conservative women who aren’t in love with Trump or MAGA. And this will not help. It’s very clear. We all saw the videotape of him beating the hell out of Cassandra Ventura.”
Thus, Kelly said it makes no sense for Trump to get involved, especially considering he’s already in hot water with his base over Epstein.
“What’s Trump in trouble over when it comes to Epstein?” she asked Wednesday. “He’s in trouble because he is making it look, to the MAGA base, like he’s part of the elite cabal that covers for other members of the elite cabal. And they don’t like that. They elected Trump because he promised not to be one of them.”
Pardoning Combs “would not help. Not at all,” she added.
“There’s already people thinking that there’s a cover up here… How many other people were being provided access to young women and drugs at these parties of note, famous celebrities? Somehow that’s been kept out.”
The hypothetical disadvantages for Trump in wooing back his base aside, Kelly argued that Combs should “serve time” because he “admitted expressly” that he was a domestic abuser.
“He beat those women to a pulp and didn’t even deny it,” she said. “He got away with it. He was only found guilty on these two minor charges—let him at least serve the time on those.”
