President Joe Biden’s pardon of his family on his way out the White House door was a disappointing abuse of his presidential prerogative. His decision to issue preemptive pardons to members of the Jan. 6 committee, as well as Anthony Fauci and retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, was unfortunate but defensible.

But all of this - all the sordid history of presidential pardons, including President Bill Clinton’s corrupt pardon of financier Marc Rich - pales in comparison to President Donald Trump’s move to pardon some 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants and commute the sentences of 14 others.

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation,” Trump’s proclamation reads.

No, no, no. The injustice has been perpetrated upon the real victims of the Jan. 6 insurrection: the members of Congress who assembled to certify the results of the 2020 election and instead had to flee for their lives and the Capitol police officers killed and wounded in the line of duty.

It has been perpetrated upon the career prosecutors in the Justice Department who worked diligently to bring these cases, the judges who labored overtime to get them through the system, the juries that diligently considered the facts and found these defendants guilty.

And it has been perpetrated upon the rule of law itself. “There were 140 police officers injured by people who have now been pardoned, which is an outrage, and … to treat the people that assaulted them as if they were patriots or heroes when in fact they’re insurrectionists and acted violently toward law enforcement is frankly just wrong,” senior U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, who presided over 35 Jan. 6 cases, told me. “History will show that these were fair prosecutions.”

That we knew these pardons were coming should not diminish our outrage over their issuance. There is no doubt that Trump had the constitutional authority to grant these pardons. And there should be no doubt that Trump’s use of that authority is the single gravest misuse in the nation’s history of presidential pardons.

That does not mean the Biden pardons were laudable.

It was bad enough that Biden pardoned his son Hunter after repeatedly promising voters he would not do so. But there were reasons to believe that Hunter Biden had been targeted for prosecution when others with a different last name would not have been. I swallowed hard and wrote last month that, “given Trump’s announced zeal to go after political opponents - ‘I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family,’ he vowed in June 2023 - it is not unreasonable to extend a broad scope of protection to Hunter Biden.”

The other Biden relatives - his brother James and James’s wife; his sister, Valerie, and her husband; and his brother Frank - present a different case. “My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me - the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said just minutes before his presidency ended.

The other batch of Biden pardons - for the Jan. 6 committee members and for Fauci and Milley - presents a harder case. They were public officials with decades of distinguished service. Trump had already proclaimed that they should be jailed simply for doing their jobs.

These pardons are much less self-interested than those for Biden’s relatives - and that makes them a closer call. But put me down with Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California), a former member of the House Jan. 6 committee, who called them “unnecessary” and “unwise.”

But none of the Biden pardons, for all their problems, is comparable to what Trump did for those convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump could have limited the pardons to the subset of Jan. 6 defendants who pleaded guilty to misdemeanors (and who, according to the latest Justice Department figures, account for 682 of the 1,009 who entered guilty pleas). He didn’t.

He could have restricted the pardons to those not charged with violent crimes and let stand the charges against 608 defendants accused of assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers or the 174 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. He didn’t.

Trump himself once sang a different tune, at least when that suited his interests. “Whether you are on the right or on the left, a Democrat or a Republican, there is never a justification for violence; no excuses, no exceptions,” Trump said in January 2021, after he was impeached by the House and facing trial in the Senate. “America is a nation of laws. Those who engaged in the attacks last week will be brought to justice.”

They were, and then - thanks to Trump - they weren’t. It is a travesty of the justice the new president once promised.

Ruth Marcus is a Washington Post columnist.