Hell no: Biden pardoning Trump (opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune)

Politics & Elections
1

A sorely misguided argument from a respectable commentator.

If you think the country is divided now, what would happen were Trump hauled into court?

If members of his base were motivated to violently storm the Capitol to keep him in office, to what lengths would they be willing to go to keep their martyred hero out of jail? Would it lead to a civil war fought in the streets?

Indeed, in a New York Times op-ed, Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, predicts that prosecution of Trump “would be a cataclysmic event from which the nation would not soon recover.”

Instead, Biden can prevent the worst from happening.

(Apologies if the article’s paywalled.)

In other words, let’s let the idiots scare us into not doing the right thing.

Not to mention, failure to hold Trump and his cronies accountable will have far worse, longer-ranging consequences than a few flare-ups of violence.

Maybe I should have started this in the Pit, but I’m curious if anyone here actually agrees with this, and why.

2

No one I know agrees with this, nor do I. However, it may be a useful gauge for those who are paying attention to get a finger in the wind about how much opposition continues in this country to charges being laid against a former president.

That’s the only reason I can think of for publishing such an opinion.

3

A pardon with the caveat he could never run for public office again.

Maybe.

4

How would you ensure he keeps that promise, though?

5

Biden ought to slap on a lot more charges.

6

Anybody else think that we wouldn’t be in this situation if Nixon had been prosecuted to the full extent of the law?

7

I having flashback to two Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) scenes in Schindler’s List.
The I pardon you scene and the other you can fill in yourself.

8

This seems spot on to me.

Anyway, maybe this will be the first platform item for the Forward Party. Seems right up their alley.

9

Pardoning Trump of course . . . 'cause “prosecuted to the full extent of the law” ain’t on the same planet let alone the table.

10

Saint Helena is beautiful this time of year. They even have a golf course!

11

No. Different situation. Nixon had very few supporters left in his own party when he resigned. You didn’t have a significant portion of the country saying “This was a partisan witch hunt!” Actually, depending on how long the proceedings dragged on, let’s say 5 years, I could see a significant portion of the population going “This has only dragged on because it’s a partisan witch hunt!”

12

La Palma, a nice cliff top villa overlooking the ocean.

13

I was going to comment on that, one should never forget that the Nixon pardon also kept a lot from the congressional and the people’s view, the actions that people like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and others did to support a crook.

They would had then a very hard time integrating again later to do more damage in future republican administrations.

14

We need to prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law, so we can put this unpleasantness behind us and move forward. A pardon would just let the gaping wound continue to fester.

We’ve been trying this “be merciful to the evildoers and let them continue their evil” nonsense at least since Reconstruction, and it’s never worked since then.

15

I admit I don’t know how that would work, only that it strikes me as least violence inducing.

16

My opinion is that it’s going to come to violence no matter what we do. May as well get it over with.

17

Plus, Nixon himself resigned when he saw the writing on the wall, and didn’t spend the next few years continuously stirring up shit. The only aspects of these cases that are at all similar is that they were both President, and that’s not enough.

Trump’s already made it abundantly clear: if he gets away with this, he’s going to do it again. A pardon helps no one but Trump.

18

Talking to the text of the article itself:

But for all the national disgust at Ford’s placing Nixon above the law, today’s historians give five stars to the decision because it brought an end to the agonizingly long Watergate saga, helped heal and unify the country after the Vietnam War, and enabled us as a nation to move on.

Readers, by now, suspect my reason for citing this historical precedent: Namely, that the time for Joe Biden to pardon Donald Trump is now, in the powerfully reverberating aftermath of the Jan. 6 hearings.

Followed a bit later by

But at what cost? If you think the country is divided now, what would happen were Trump hauled into court?

If members of his base were motivated to violently storm the Capitol to keep him in office, to what lengths would they be willing to go to keep their martyred hero out of jail? Would it lead to a civil war fought in the streets?

Speaks to a profoundly optimistic view of Trump, Trump’s supporters, and those who seek to take up Trump’s model.

Point blank - for all our earlier hopes and wishes, this is likely a semi-perpetual rift, at least for a generation. If Trump isn’t prosecuted, he will have proven that violence, threats of violence, and ‘the big lie’ are unabashedly winning hands. There will be more reason to continue it - threaten the masses with violence, and you are above the law. It won’t be about 2020, it’ll be about every single election year.

And with the damage done by the SCOTUS to voting protections, the abandonment of established precedent, and the ongoing perpetual gerrymandering, it will just seal the deal on one-party minority rule until the system collapses into one or more flavors of Civil War.

The author of the article is making an unjustifiably optimistic POV from a perspective of history, based on Nixon just fading away. The rest of us are looking at what happens when an egomaniac is appeased, and looking to WW2 era Germany. Guess which one looks like the better comparison?

19

IIRC the correct response to this is “FIX BAYONETS”.

20

Exactly. He seems to assume that Trump’s supporters sort of know that he crossed the line, but they think he meant well, and that a pardon will settle the issue and help defuse the time bomb of Trumpism.

But a pardon wouldn’t defuse anything. It would actually shorten the fuse and add megatonnage to the bomb.