Pardon Donald Trump.
I never thought I’d take that up as a rallying cry, but the more I think about it, the more sense I think it makes.
It comes up because just last week, I wrote a piece asking, “If he has committed crimes, should Donald Trump go to trial?” What I concluded was, “There is no easy answer, there is no right answer, because there are risks to the nation, even to the point of civil war, if Donald Trump is taken to trial. But there are risks to the very survival of our democracy if he isn’t.”
So as outlandish as it might sound, maybe a preemptive pardon from President Biden is the third rail we ought to consider.
Politico, Bloomberg News, and The Washington Post all have run pieces about the idea in the past week. But out of all the potential byproducts of prosecuting Trump, what convinced me that a pardon might be the best of a bad lot was an email after my column from an old friend— and my former boss at HDNet Television— who wrote this: “Biden can wait to do it until Trump's guilt is more clearly established, but before a trial. A pardon would effectively recognize Trump's guilt, but avoid the civil disobedience, at best, and a civil war, at worst, that a successful prosecution would cause… let alone incarceration of the former President.”
Shades of Gerald Ford? A month after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, the president who succeeded him issued Nixon a “full, free and absolute” pardon for any crimes he committed while in office. Ford had declared on the day he took office that “our long national nightmare is over,” and while his Nixon pardon has been widely condemned for a long time, in retrospect it helped put that nightmare to rest.
In a Supreme Court case more than a century ago called “Burdick v. United States,” the high court said that a pardon carries “an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.” If that “imputation of guilt” were to hit home with even a small percentage of Americans still (inexplicably) on the fence about Trump, it might be enough to ensure his defeat even if he does run for the White House again in 2024.
Not that the Trump nightmare would disappear with a pardon. He has spawned too many copycats and wannabes, at home and abroad, for the world to return to normal. I fear that Trump’s tactics are the new normal.
When a Senate candidate in Missouri puts out an ad showing himself with a shotgun, surrounded by others with assault rifles, saying they’re searching for disloyal Republicans, Trump’s influence has not died.
When a member of the January 6th mob writes (on Trump’s own social media website) “Kill the F.B.I. on sight,” Trump’s influence has not died.
When the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Arizona fires up the base, calling the federal government “rotten to the core” and declaring “If we accept it, America is dead,” Trump’s influence has not died.
When the scaremongering chairwoman of the Republican National Committee feeds off the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and writes, “Trump Targeted by Biden Administration, and They Can Do It to You, Too,” Trump’s influence has not died.
When a pro-Trump internet site calls out the judge who issued the search warrant saying, “I see a rope around his neck,” Trump’s influence has not died.
Trump even retweeted a post himself that propounded civil war as a remedy for our “failing” nation.
I offer these examples because they fall into a frightening pattern, articulated by Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “If political aggression is set in the context of a war, ordinary people with no prior history of violence are more likely to accept it. Political violence can also be made more palatable by couching it as defensive action against a belligerent enemy.”
University of Chicago professor Robert Pape, who studies political violence, has overseen six nationwide polls that show that up to 20 million Americans believe violence would be justified to return Trump to the White House. Pape compares this to a dry forest with lots of combustible material on the ground. “All it takes is a spark,” he says, “to ignite the tinder.”
A prosecution of the ex-president could be that spark. Maybe a full-blown firestorm.
If Donald Trump has committed crimes, I want him held accountable and punished as much as anyone does. As I wrote last week, either we treat every citizen equally, or we don’t. Either we respect the rule of law, or we don’t. But a preemptive pardon would take us part of the way toward sustaining those sacred standards while possibly dodging the most calamitous consequences of a prosecution.
Whether stated subtly or blatantly, a pardon would send a message to future Trump wannabes about attacking our democracy and flouting our laws. It would be the next best thing to prison orange. In the words of Aziz Huq, author of The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, such a pardon “can reflect the fact that someone broke the law while endorsing powerful reasons for not punishing them.”
Those powerful reasons are plain.
What’s more, if it had its intended effect, a pardon would preempt a dangerous potential precedent. As Damon Linker, who writes Eyes on The Right,” says, “Imagine, each time the presidency is handed from one party to the other, an investigation by the new administration’s Justice Department leads toward the investigation and possible indictment of its predecessor.”
If that happens, he argues, it is “the ringing of a bell that cannot be unrung.”
Mind you, the whole issue of a pardon might be moot. The same Supreme Court decision that said a pardon carries “an imputation of guilt” also said that a person pardoned by a president can reject it. If history with Donald Trump is any guide, that is precisely what he would do.
But still, after beating two impeachments, it would put a permanent stain on a man who, in both business and politics, has always shown disdain for the law.
No matter how this all turns out, no one will be satisfied. Not the Left, not the Right. There will be serious consequences whether Trump is prosecuted or not.
Over decades of reporting, I covered countless crises where there could be no happy ending. This might be one of them. Author Haziz Huq wrote, “There are no options on the table that don’t come with profound costs: The question is which is least bad.”
Maybe the answer is, however unpalatable, a pardon for Donald Trump. Or as my ex-boss put it, “The high road for democracy.”
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Although I agree with the sentiment behind this I feel like he should be held accountable like anyone else. The reason is quite simple. He, or his supporters will try to subvert the law again. And again. Until they are actually held accountable for their lawlessness. If a common thief was caught and allowed to commit crimes without any form of accountability do you think they would ever stop? Unless we want to live in a world where there are two interpretations of the law, one for everybody and one for the MAGA crowd accountability is the only path forward. Will it cause the mAGA crowd to lose their collective shit? Absolutely. However, I argue doing nothing will only lead to more and more overt criminal activity.
Here is another take that some may not have read yet:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/opinion/trump-mar-a-lago-indictment.html?