Biden’s dilemma: should he pardon Trump?

“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.” So declared President Biden in his 2020 victory speech, said Marc A. Thiessen and Danielle Pletka in The Washington Post.

It’s time for him to honour those words – by pardoning Donald Trump. That the former president mishandled classified documents, and obstructed the FBI’s efforts to recover them from his possession, seems incontrovertible. But putting him on trial would be dangerously divisive.

Many Americans do not accept the legitimacy of the indictment. About 80% of Republicans view the charges as politically motivated. They see a “troubling pattern”: Hillary Clinton wasn’t charged for mishandling classified material; Trump is being hounded by various prosecutors. For the sake of the nation, the president should pardon him.

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A trial “will not bring closure but rather more angst”, agreed Margaret Carlson in Washington Monthly. Already, there have been threats of violence. Kari Lake, hailed as a rising Republican star when she ran for Arizona governor last year, said that to get Trump, prosecutors were “going to have to go through me and 75 million Americans just like me... And most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.”

There’s no guarantee in any case that a trial would lead to a conviction. The case is being tried in South Florida, where the chances of a “few MAGA loyalists” sneaking through the jury selection process are higher than in Washington DC. The randomly selected presiding judge is Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who has been overturned twice in the past for showing bias in his favour.

Trump doesn’t appear to be expecting a pardon from the president, said Jeff Mordock in The Washington Times – and Biden would struggle to get away with such a move today. It would prompt “intense, scathing criticism from within his party” and undercut a key message of his re-election campaign, which is that Trump is “an extremist who poses a threat to democracy”.

Other leaders who have issued controversial pardons have paid a price. President Ford, for instance, saw his poll ratings plummet after he pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974. Biden’s ratings are already low, stuck at roughly 40%. The reality is that he may be in too weak a position to show clemency to Trump, even if he wanted to.