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.

A presidential pardon for Mr. Grillo not only makes a mockery of his jury’s verdict and of Judge Lamberth’s sentence. Mr. Trump’s mass pardon effectively makes a mockery of a justice system that has labored for four years to charge nearly 1,600 people who tried to stop the Constitution in its tracks, a system that convicted 1,100 of them and that sentenced more than 600 of them to prison.

Most important, the mass pardon sends a message to the country and the world that violating the law in support of Mr. Trump and his movement will be rewarded, especially when considered alongside his previous pardons of his advisers. It loudly proclaims, from the nation’s highest office, that the rioters did nothing wrong, that violence is a perfectly legitimate form of political expression and that no price need be paid by those who seek to disrupt a sacred constitutional transfer of power.

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