The ‘Pardon Trump’ Calls are Getting Increasingly Incoherent

Consider the following, from a Washington Post op-ed by Robert Shapiro, a professor of political science and international and public affairs at Columbia University, published on Monday morning and bearing the utterly nonsensical title of “Biden can hold Trump accountable — with a pardon”:

Another reason Trump should like this, if not be grateful for it, is that it would enable him to devote all of his administration’s attention to governing instead of seeking revenge and retribution against his enemies.

It has been 3,471 days since Trump first announced he was running for president in 2015. There are many, many criticisms out there right now about the various displays of pre-capitulation to a second Trump term, moves generally rooted in fear and sheer venality, but the one that bothers me the most is the often-apparent goldfish-like lack of memory. What country have you been watching for almost a full decade?

Trump spent his first term golfing and watching television, with occasional breaks to say and do some of the most ridiculous things any chief executive has ever done. He spent the following four years making “revenge and retribution” a central platform of his entire existence, let alone a potential second term in the Oval Office. Even inside the tepid, limp guardrails of a major media outlet’s op-ed pages, it is an insane take to say that simply telling Trump he is forgiven for trying to overthrow the government will lead him to take a deep breath and “govern.”

He has already proven himself almost entirely immune from the normal legal processes that the rest of us face. The Supreme Court is there to trampoline him back into power at the slightest hint of a fall. There is literally no reason to codify that immunity in a pardon; he is going to do whatever awful things he will do regardless of that piece of paper Biden could sign.

Op-eds like this one join calls from major Democratic figures to issue such a document for various of Trump’s crimes, from Jim Clyburn to John Fetterman. Shapiro’s argument, such as it is, states that a pardon will, somehow, “establish a record of facts” and “memorialize the truth.” He compares this to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which, he says, “has long been associated with his guilt” and has prevented (?) a rewriting of history.

First of all, the pardon of Nixon has been dissected for half a century now, but even right-leaning writers have called it a “historic mistake.” I’ll leave the details to the historians, but the idea that the pardon is what cemented his guilt in the public consciousness — and not, you know, the extremely well established guilt — seems absurd. And second: Trump’s crimes, including his role in attempting to violently overthrow the government and overturn an election, are among the most documented and “memorialized” crimes in the history of this country. There are hours and hours of video of the attack on the Capitol; there are tick-tocks and oral histories and courtroom histories and trials and so on, a veritable library of documentation on the crime at hand. What the absolute hell would a pardon add to all that?

We are getting a “revenge and retribution” presidency no matter what Biden does now. That’s who Trump is; there is an (probably specious, but still) argument out there that the only reason we have Trump in political life at all is revenge on Barack Obama for one tossed off joke at a party. He will remember slights from C-list celebrities in 1987 long beyond the time he remembers who he appointed to which cabinet positions. He will seek revenge for New York Daily News stories that supposedly undersold his net worth thirty years ago.

More Shapiro:

A “normal” president (which Trump was not in his first term, and which he now has a fresh start to become) would be looking ahead to his historical legacy and reputation, and perhaps strengthening the party that he has been sculpting successfully in his own image.

This “fresh start” idea, so rampant during the campaign, is a disease. He is closing in on 80 years old; he has proven, over and over, that he has less capacity for change than basically any human alive. He is not “looking ahead” to anything except the next round of golf, or the next humiliation of an opponent. A pardon would do none of the things these people claim it would. Make it stop.