Trump Says He Would Pardon Pete Rose, Calling the Hits King 'Very Mistreated'

President Donald Trump said on Monday that he would give Pete Rose a pardon. Speaking to reporters at a surprise White House briefing alongside UFC chief Dana White, Trump called baseball’s all-time hits leader “very mistreated” and said Rose “went through 40 years of hell.” The pledge, reported by Reuters, is a renewal rather than a new promise: Trump said in March 2025 that he would sign a complete pardon, and on Monday he repeated it in person, with White asked first whether a pardon seemed fair.

What did Trump actually say?

The exchange started with White, not Trump. A reporter asked White about Rose first, noting Trump’s earlier consideration of a pardon, and White answered: “I don’t advise the president on anything ever, but yeah, I think it’s fair. I think it’s fair to pardon Pete Rose. Yes.” Trump then jumped in, Fox News reports, asking why Rose would even need one before the reporter clarified it was tax charges. “Oh, he did? I’d give Pete Rose a pardon,” Trump said. “I think Pete Rose was very mistreated. He had 4,200-and-some-odd hits, way ahead of anyone else. A record that can’t ever be broken. And he was caught gambling, and now it’s legal. But he was gambling on his own team, Dana. He wasn’t gambling against [his team], that’s different.”

He kept going. “He was gambling. He shouldn’t have done it, but he went through 40 years of hell and they should be giving him a pardon. They should be getting him into the [National] Baseball Hall of Fame a long time ago. I spoke to the commissioner about it. He agreed to do it, and then he waited though, and Pete Rose died. So, it didn’t help him too much, but I would give Pete Rose a pardon. I would do that.”

What would the pardon cover, and what would it not?

Only the tax case, and the distinction is the whole story. Rose pleaded guilty in April 1990 to two felony counts of filing false federal income tax returns, covering tax years 1985 and 1987, after admitting he underreported more than $300,000 in earnings from appearances, autograph sessions, memorabilia sales and gambling winnings. He served five months in prison. A presidential pardon would wipe out that conviction.

It would not put him in Cooperstown, because the Hall of Fame was never a federal matter. Rose’s ban from baseball came in 1989, when he agreed to a permanent place on the ineligible list after an investigation found he had bet on Reds games while playing for and managing the team. That ban kept the writers from ever voting on him. Commissioner Rob Manfred lifted Rose from the permanently ineligible list in May 2025, after his death, which opened the Hall path. Manfred admitted at an owners meeting in 2025 that Trump’s support was one of the many factors in that decision. But the vote itself belongs to the writers and the Hall’s committees, not to the president, and no vote has happened yet.

Why does this still matter 35 years after the ban?

Because the numbers have never been in doubt, and the punishment has never stopped being argued about. Rose finished with 4,256 hits, the most in major league history, across 24 seasons, with three World Series titles, 17 All-Star selections, the 1973 National League MVP award and three batting titles. His 44-game hitting streak in 1978 still stands as the National League record, and his place in the 3,000-hit club was never the question. The question was always whether the gambling should keep the hits out of Cooperstown, and baseball has never settled it. Rose applied for reinstatement repeatedly, in 2015, 2020 and 2022, and Manfred denied each request, pointing to the Veterans Committee for any Hall discussion.

That is why the pardon pledge lands differently from a routine political aside. It is the president weighing in on the most argued-over case in the sport’s history, and doing it with the one tool he actually has, a pardon for a tax conviction, while the decision that matters, the Hall vote, sits somewhere he cannot reach. Trump framed it as a wrong to right: “He had 4,200-and-some-odd hits, way ahead of anyone else.” The record is not in dispute. Whether the record is enough, after the gambling, is the argument that has outlived the player.

How did Dana White end up in the middle of it?

Through a joke that started on Truth Social. Over the weekend Trump posted that he had offered White the job of White House press secretary, then said he was only kidding. White flew to Washington anyway and stood beside Trump in the briefing room on Monday, fielding questions from reporters while Trump stood aside. The Associated Press reports White told reporters he did not want to be in politics, and that when the Rose question came, he answered it before Trump did. The pardon pledge arrived as an aside inside a 30-minute briefing that was mostly about something else, which is how the biggest baseball story of the day got made: a president, asked about a dead ballplayer during a joke appearance by a fight promoter, saying he would clear the man’s name.

Has Trump promised this before?

Yes, and the March 2025 post is the context that keeps Monday honest. On Truth Social in March 2025, Trump wrote that he would be “signing a complete pardon” of Rose, who had died the previous September, and argued that baseball should elect him to the Hall of Fame “even though far too late.” Nothing was signed after that post, and no formal pardon followed. Monday’s remark is the pledge restated, not fulfilled, and the Reuters report is careful on that point: it says Trump told reporters he would give Rose a pardon, not that one has been signed or that formal action has started. The difference matters, because the last promise sat for 20 months without paperwork.

What happens next?

Two separate clocks are now running. The White House clock is the pardon itself: if Trump signs one, it would be a posthumous clearing of the 1990 tax conviction, and the Rose family would finally have the document Trump has now promised twice. The baseball clock is the Hall of Fame vote, which Manfred’s May 2025 decision made possible but which no one has scheduled or taken. The writers and the Hall’s committees decide that one, and they have not said when Rose’s name will come up. Baseball’s offseason has already been full of off-field stories with no quick resolution, from a pitcher missing an elimination game for the birth of his first child to the Blue Jays’ rebuke of Anthony Santander over deleted posts, and the Rose case is the oldest of them all: a record that cannot be broken, a ban that has already been lifted, and a vote that still has not happened.