Thiessen: Biden should pardon Trump

During his inaugural address, President Joe Biden promised to put his “whole soul” into ending what he called our nation’s “uncivil war” and “bringing America together.” He failed to deliver on that pledge, instead accusing Republicans of supporting “Jim Crow 2.0,” comparing them to George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, and declaring right before the election that “the only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.” (He later said, implausibly and without apologizing, that he was referring to the rhetoric displayed at Trump’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden.)

But Biden has one final chance to make good on his inaugural promise before he leaves office, and he can do it with a simple act: Pardon Donald Trump.

Let’s be clear: From a legal standpoint, Trump does not need a presidential pardon. Special counsel Jack Smith is in the process of shutting down his federal investigations. If Smith does not close his cases, Trump can simply fire him the second he takes office. At the state level, Biden has no pardon power, but the cases against Trump appear to be falling apart. The New York hush money case is on fumes in the wake of the Supreme Court immunity decision, and Judge Juan Merchan will decide in the coming weeks whether to freeze sentencing in the case during Trump’s presidency or to dismiss it outright. In Georgia, a state appeals court just canceled arguments, leaving the election-interference case there in limbo.

But while Trump might not need Biden’s pardon, America does.

More than a year ago in this space, we suggested that Biden should pardon Trump before the 2024 election. The threshold for the sitting president’s administration to indict the leading candidate of the opposing party should be extraordinarily high, we argued, and polls then showed that most Americans believed the charges were politically motivated. Continuing Trump’s prosecution would not only be divisive, it would erode public confidence in our judicial system and the principle of equal justice under law.

Unfortunately, Biden didn’t take our advice. Americans watched the unfolding legal spectacle, and in November they delivered their verdict, electing Trump decisively. In retrospect, Biden’s failure to shut down the Trump prosecutions helped make the former president’s improbable comeback possible, causing Republican primary voters – many of whom had been open to supporting another nominee – to rally around Trump, helping him to secure his party’s nomination and eventually the White House.

Trump has now endured an investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (which concluded that he had not engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia), two impeachments, and 91 felony charges at the federal, state and local level – and has so far survived them all. As University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo put it recently during an interview for our podcast: “Trump has defeated lawfare.”

But while Trump has survived, the collateral damage to our democracy might only be beginning. Absent decisive action, we could find ourselves at the start of a vicious cycle, in which Republicans now argue they are justified in weaponizing the justice system to go after Democrats, and Democrats then feel free to retaliate when they regain power — sending the country spiraling into a miasma of partisan litigation.

Democrats might insist that Trump earned his indictments, but the spurious Mueller investigation undercut those claims in the eyes of the broader voting public. If we do not want to go through an endless cycle of what goes around comes around, a bold act of statesmanship is required: Biden should announce that he is issuing a blanket pardon for Trump, allowing him to start his presidency with a legal tabula rasa. In announcing his decision, he should recommend that state officials in New York and Georgia drop their cases, as well. “The American people have chosen Donald Trump to lead our country,” Biden should declare. “He deserves a chance to be successful — and America deserves a chance to heal.”

Biden is in a strong position to do this. He is 82 years old, entering the sunset of his presidency and public life. Because he is never running for office again, he can endure the blowback from the left wing of his party, rise to the moment and clean up this mess for both our parties and for the country.

He can also burnish his own legacy in the process. History will not be kind of Biden’s presidency. He presided over one of the worst foreign policy disasters in U.S. history in Afghanistan, the spread of war on two continents, the worst inflation in 40 years, and the worst peacetime border crisis in the country’s history. And his failure to step aside earlier in his tenure set his party up for failure at the ballot box this month. As a result, he will leave the White House as one of the most unpopular presidents since World War II.

But if he pardons Trump, he will be remembered by history for a final act of statesmanship that brought a divided America together.

As he put it in his 2020 victory speech: “To everything there is a season – a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.” If he acts, history can still record that, in the waning days of his presidency, Joe Biden finally delivered on that promise.

Marc A. Thiessen is a columnist for The Post and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow at AEI. They co-host a podcast, “What the Hell Is Going On?”