At Brandon’s Two Cents, I try not to write too many posts about Donald Trump.  It’s not that I don’t have any opinions of him, its just that His Likeness is written, talked, and blogged about all over every news site imaginable, so I feel that there are many other topics that I can write about that haven’t been covered as extensively.  I wasn’t going write about anything having to do with Trump until the first Republican Presidential Debates in August.  However, the burgeoning talk of potentially pardoning Trump has made me have some opinions on the subject, particularly two columns written by Chip Muir on The Hill, and Rich Lowry on Politico (Lowry is also the editor of National Review, a conservative magazine).  When I first saw the titles of those columns, I was gearing up to write a sharp rebuke to such suggestions.  But after I read the opinion pieces, I simmered down. 

Both Muir and Rich Lowry cited President Ford pardoning Nixon after Watergate in their columns.  Muir also argued that Biden could offer a pardon to Trump, and when Trump refused, would boost Biden’s reputation.  I think that could be an out of the box idea, and potentially shrewd.  However, the idea of pardoning a high level public official such as a former President for political expediency is kind of tasteless. Lowry made clear that he favored a Trump pardon only after Biden (or someone else) defeated Trump electorally, and not as an effort to allow Trump to run for the White House again.

It should be noted that when Ford pardoned Nixon, Nixon had resigned from office, and he resigned because the Republican Party as an institution told him to resign.  Because of that, Nixon was held accountable (to a degree, if not as much as if he were prosecuted) for Watergate, and it smoothed the path for Ford to pardon him in the name of turning the page.  This point is not emphasized enough in the debates over the Nixon pardon, and the potential Trump pardon.  It is worth repeating again: In order to turn the page on a divisive national event, there MUST be accountability.

That has not happened yet with regards to Trump.  If enough Republican Senators had voted to convict Trump and bar him from holding public office again after January 6^th, that would have been the accountability necessary for a serious conversation to happen about a Trump pardon.  But that didn’t happen.  Maybe in 2025, if the Republican Party has made a clear effort to move on from Trump, and if there was some law passed that would bar him from running again, maybe that could be grounds for a pardon.  Maybe.  Until then, any talk of pardoning Trump is at best counterproductive and at worst, an insult to efforts to hold him accountable.

There was one other thing that Lowry wrote in his column that got my attention.  He wrote “…If the shoe were on the other foot, though, and if it were the Ron DeSantis Department of Justice prosecuting a Democrat with a significant chance of running against him, there’d be an outcry from the same people now dismissing any doubts about the Trump prosecution”.  I really doubt that would be the case.  Depending on what the potential Democratic candidate was being prosecuted for, I bet that the other candidates would attack their indicted rival hard, and there would be a significant portion of the Democratic Party calling on that candidate to drop out.  If the Democrat were indicted for what Trump has done, the entire Democratic Party would call on them to drop out immediately!

Comment below on any opinions on this subject.  I have another post about Trump that I am working on and will post soon, but after that, there will be no Trump posts for a while.