Originally published at: USA Today writer begs Biden to pardon Trump for the good of the country | Boing Boing
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I get where the author is going here, but at the same time, Nixon upon receiving the pardon wrote a contrite (if not absolutely forced) letter stating he did wrong. It also ended his political career and the political career of numerous others involved. Those were, basically, the conditions for that pardon to be given.
Trump would never honor such conditions. So there’s no real comparison here.
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And then he said…
So, he didn’t mean it, in other words, and we should instead listen to the words he said later as far more truthful about his own actions.
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Well, a pardon would help unite the country. Under a fascist dictatorship.
tl;dr: HELL NO!!
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Yes, we all saw exactly where comprising and prioritising unity and saving face for insurrectionists gets you. Any compromise here will be just as “effective” as it was in 1877.
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The other difference is historical context. At the time, we thought Watergate was done and solved, and that this horrible thing was that nutter Nixon and all the safeguards in place meant it wouldn’t happen again. We didn’t realize that the fact of him getting pardoned actually emboldened people to do the same shit and worse.
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I’m trying to imagine what would happen if Biden pardoned Trump - assuming he gets prosecuted on federal charges. Trump’s followers would see it as total vindication, as an admission that the federal government (and even, ironically, Biden himself) were unfairly persecuting him, it would fully normalize what Trump did, and unlike Nixon, Trump wouldn’t slink off and retire, but double down on further corrupt shenanigans. It would absolutely encourage similar behavior from those who see Trump as a model for their own political careers - it would make it clear that the way to avoid accountability for one’s crimes is to get into high office. No goodwill would come from it. Republicans would still be calling for Democrats to be locked up for imaginary crimes (and would probably double down, as it worked for Trump…). All it would do is reinforce the behavior of conservatives, which is the thing that’s divisive - it would just make everything worse, not more unified.
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Right, just like Trump would pardon Joe, Barak, Hillary, Hunter, and the dozens (hundreds?) of others he has publicly accused of crimes without any evidence…
Right…
No, what we have here is a man who has done everything he can to destroy our democracy. Why on earth would Joe Biden do anything to allow him to hold office again??
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Has anyone made the case that pardoning Nixon was actually a good idea; much less that we should make a tradition out of it?
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Trump will just commit more crimes. You may as well be pardoning him for stuff he hasn’t even done yet cause it would have the same effect.
Being “presidential” means respecting the rule of law, including letting the courts decide cases they’re already trying.
There’s nothing Biden can do that will make Trump change, every act of goodwill will be turned into propaganda by him.
I have yet to hear a good way to heal the country, but I doubt there’s some magic bullet like he thinks this is.
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I’ll say this, the tacit “he’s guilty” that comes with a pardon DID end Nixon’s career for the most part , and up until that point, he was basically the right wing version of Barack Obama. Young, limitless potential, going to be harkened back to for the rest of his life as a paragon of the party, someone every politician in the party wanted to be , etc.
But again, even with his later waffling back and forth on it, that pardon ended his career and that’s a good thing. One of the reasons the right has hated Hillary so much is that she was involved with bringing Nixon down. And they’ve gone after her viciously ever since. That’s the legacy of what ending his career did. And that was a GOOD THING. Yes, we got Reagan, but imagine Nixon finishing out his second term, then his hand picked successor being President for two terms, then Reagan.
A pardon of Trump won’t end shit, in fact, it’d encourage him. If he gets elected again, he’ll pardon everyone that does anything against his enemies. And on his way out the door, he’d pardon himself this time. It’s absolutely the worst case scenario, ever.
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… resigning the presidency, after the Republican Party turned on him, ended his career
He may have been technically eligible to run again after that, having served less than six years in the White House, but back then serious parties didn’t re-nominate losers or quitters
The pardon didn’t end anything except possibility of criminal charges against him afterwards—his career was already over
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Sure.
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≤40% of USA Today newspaper
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What benefit did the country get from pardoning Nixon?
Distrust of national leadership
Developing a culture of unaccountabity
Allow people to gloss over Nixon’s policies
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And
An object lesson in how to get away with it next time.
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I think those are more obvious in hindsight, since the right wing of the GOP leaned into that stuff to gain power. I don’t think that was obvious at the time. I think probably lots of people making that argument have in mind that it was the right decision at the time, because that’s what the historical evidence produced at the time tell them.
I guess one thing to remember about historical events like this, is to remember that people acting at the time did not have the ability to know how people later on would act. There wasn’t quite the same widespread distrust of government, and it’s hard to predict that kind of an outcome. It was not an automatic outcome of the pardon, more like a byproduct of the rhetoric of the Reagan revolution that weaponized distrust and spread it in order to carry out their paleo-conservative agenda.
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