The WP is reporting that the White House is considering “preemptive pardons to figures who might face the hostility of the incoming Trump administration.” I’d have to think hard — very hard — to imagine anything more emblematic of the Biden admin’s abject failure to grasp the threat Trump poses than blanketing themselves and their supporters with a magical blizzard of private legal exceptions. Talk about privilege…
People like to say that “actions have consequences,” but inactions have consequences too. And the legal perils Biden and his allies face are a direct consequence of their inaction — specifically, their failure to hold Trump and his insurrectionist allies to account. I’m not quite ready to say they should personally face those consequences, but the alternative is that we all will have to face them for the rest of our days, and I’m even less ready to accept that.
The traditional way to prevent recidivist threats is to prosecute criminals. The Biden admin could and should have vacuumed up everyone remotely related to J6 and shipped them off to Guantanamo and made it crystal fucking clear: you will rot in an open-air cage until you rat on your buddies because that’s what the US does to terrorists. Instead, we got nearly two years of sloppy-seconds Merrick Garland dawdling while Trumpets laid the foundations for a fascist takeover. Garland failed, and they succeeded.
If Garland’s aim was to protect our precious institutions, he failed on a scale people should scoff at decades or even centuries from now. That is, if we even get those decades or centuries. Given the manifold threats that Trump poses — to our bedraggled democratic system, to the environment, to the international order, to rising generations with reasonable expectations of a decent life — whether we’ll get that time is very TBD.
Now, rather than the Biden admin frankly admitting that they failed — failed to bring these fascists to account, failed to insulate institutions and elections from rampant, systematic efforts to undermine them, failed to adequately explain even their real successes — the Biden admin is scrambling to protect their own and only their own in a way that demolish to any norms and controls surrounding pardons.
It’s at this point that the liberal peanut gallery rises up in outrage to object that Trump neither needs nor respects precedents, so Biden was perfectly justified or even principled to pardon his son. Yes. AND ALSO in the realms of politics, society, and culture seemingly contradictory propositions can be valid. So: yes and no. Welcome to dialectical thinking.
It was not a given that Trump would issue blanket pardons for everyone around him at the end of his first term, but now it’s inevitable that he’ll do in his second. But it gets worse: everyone around him knows he will, so they’ll be emboldened. Put plainly, they’ll be worse because they know there will be no legal repercussions.
But the stakes aren’t just individual crimes, they’re the entire legal order of the US. Trump and his people tried to overthrow that once but failed; I don’t think they’ll make that same mistake twice. Failing to recognize that and deal with it ruthlessly is the Biden admin’s single overarching failure. And that failure was deeply rooted in the liberal failure to come to grips with the clearest and most present danger the US has faced since the Civil War. It’s not just Biden’s failure, or Garland’s, it’s a systemic failure of the liberal imagination to think seriously about how we need to adapt.
The upside of hostel takeovers of entire nations is very high indeed. Musk is the richest guy in the world, and if he gets a fraction of what he wants from Trump, his current wealth will pale before the riches and power he and his cronies will see under Trump. We need deterrents and punishments that are commensurate. So — as I’ve been saying for years now — it’s time to throw your liberal pieties aside and ask a simple question: what would it take to stop these people? What threat would be enough to deter thugs whose dreams are measured in billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions? The answers aren’t pretty, but they’re better than the alternatives.
We got one answer yesterday morning. And if we don’t come up with better solutions, we’ll be seeing a lot more of that — and it won’t be limited to freak attacks on vampiric CEOs.