The average voter understands that democracy requires the ability to support a candidate of their choosing and using “lawfare” as a means to bankrupt or jail a candidate is fundamentally undemocratic. There is, however, a way to square this political circle.
It’ll never happen for more reasons than I count, but President Joe Biden’s best single move to completely upend the presidential race and turn the tide irrevocably in his favor would be to preemptively pardon former President Donald Trump. To begin with, everyone knows President Biden is in trouble less than eight short months before the election. He currently trails in the polls against the former President, especially in the critical battleground states, and his approval rating on the biggest issues facing Americans is catastrophic for an incumbent, so far underwater it’s impossible to see daylight or how these numbers can change before voters cast their ballots. The only thing currently keeping him afloat is that his opponent is notoriously polarizing, and might not be able to capitalize with enough suburban and educated voters to turn dissatisfaction with President Biden into a win of his own. At the same time, many political prognosticators – myself included – believe Trump would prevail if the race was held today, leading some of those prognosticators who favor President Biden on a continual quest to find something that could change the state of the race. Hence, much of the last year was spent on fruitless efforts to rebrand the economy as the great under the name Bidenomics, irrevocably and unsuccessfully tying the President to our wallets and pocketbooks. When that failed given persistently high inflation and interest rates, the President suddenly began insisting he was strong on border security, blaming Republicans for a doubling of the number of illegal immigrants in the country on his watch, resulting in another failure when he was forced to apologize for calling an illegal immigrant murderer illegal in the first place. More recently, age and a general lack of energy has solidified in what passes for conventional wisdom as the main barrier to the President’s electoral success following a report from his own Department of Justice that claimed he could not be charged with a crime because no jury would convict a doddering old man. Thus, every Biden public appearance is now rated, or perhaps I should say highly overrated, based on whether he brings enough energy, leading to his propagandists claiming the newly reinvigorated Commander in Chief was “sonorant” and a “master” of the chamber after he screamed and whispered bizarrely at America for over an hour during the State of the Union last week.
Meanwhile, the President himself has made the early stages of his campaign about pretty much anything and everything except his own policies, call it the if you think I suck, get a load of this guy approach. For a man ranked 14th on the list of all time presidents according to academics, responsible for passing more substantial legislation in his first term than any recent memory, his so-called achievements seem to have rather mysteriously disappeared down the memory hole as if he hasn’t been in office for over three years and is running as the challenger, not the incumbent. Rarely, if ever, do President Biden or any of his supporters mention the coronavirus relief bill, the infrastructure program, or the inflation reduction act that didn’t reduce inflation. Instead, he has chosen to center the campaign around a defense of democracy, positioning himself and his fellow Democrats as the guardians of the American tradition, now under siege by former President Trump and his fellow Republicans. Earlier this year, he donned the mantle of George Washington himself at a speech delivered at Valley Forge of all places to describe the stakes as he saw them. “In the winter of 1777, it was harsh and cold as the Continental Army marched to Valley Forge. General George Washington knew he faced the most daunting of tasks: to fight and win a war against the most powerful empire that existed in the world at the time. His mission was clear. Liberty, not conquest. Freedom, not domination. National independence, not individual glory. America made a vow. Never again would we bow down to a king…Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? I mean it. This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.” The President went on to claim that former President Trump was “willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power” in contrast with him, of course who is running a campaign “about America. It’s about you. It’s about every age and background that occupy this country. It’s about the future we’re going to continue to build together. And our campaign is about preserving and strengthening our American democracy.”
Despite this lofty rhetoric, the President’s allies have been actively thwarting the democratic process at every conceivable turn via a multipronged legal assault on President Trump, from trying to remove him from the ballot, to locking him up, to forcing him into bankruptcy, to suggesting they will not vote to certify the results should Trump prevail in November. So far, the Supreme Court has rejected the claim that President Trump can be removed from the ballot by fiat, but multiple cases and lawsuits at the federal and state level, all run by prosecutors that can generally be described as anti-Trump, are proceeding at their various paces and the potential penalties involved are staggering, nothing like we have seen before in the entire history of American democracy. After losing two civil cases in New York, the former President currently faces over $500 million in fines, both for crimes in which he was not actually convicted in any criminal court, and both of which bizarrely need to be paid before he can appeal to a higher court. The criminal cases are, if anything, even more draconian, a total of 91 counts that carry potentially hundreds of years in prison, far more than a murderer or a child rapist would receive. In at least two out of the three cases related to January 6, no one in the history of the country had ever been charged before in this manner, much less a former President or political candidate. In the classified documents case, no high ranking government official had ever been charged before to this extent – if at all – and President Biden himself recently received a pass from the same Department of Justice for (roughly) the same supposed crime. President Biden, meanwhile, has rarely commented on these matters save to make sure everyone knows he believes his likely opponent is an insurrectionist and to goad his Department of Justice to pursue charges. Perhaps even worse, it’s no secret that a key part of the Democrats electoral strategy is to convict President Trump before the election. Earlier this month, The New York Times opined on the various delays affecting these trials, and claimed outright they could well be “game over” for Biden’s chances in 2024. “Early on, I called the federal election subversion case potentially the most important case in this nation’s history,” explained Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A., on his Election Law Blog. “And now it may not happen because of timing, timing that is completely in the Supreme Court’s control. This could well be game over.” The Times’ Thomas Edsall took over from there, “Whether or not the trials are held before the election is crucial to the outcome, for at least two reasons. First, a surprisingly large segment of the electorate has either no idea or slight knowledge of the charges against Trump. Increased knowledge of these charges can only work to Biden’s advantage. Second, a key element of the Biden campaign’s strategy is to mobilize what political strategists are calling the ‘anti-MAGA majority.’ Many anti-MAGA voters cannot be relied upon to turn out unless the threat of a Trump-MAGA victory is put squarely before them — something the trials would help accomplish.”
The combination of the two strategies is irreconcilable, putting the President in the position of claiming to be a staunch defender of democracy while his allies and his own Department of Justice actively try to prevent democracy from happening at every possible turn. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the average voter, not ideologically bound to either candidate, is not so naive they fail to understand that democracy requires the (almost) unfettered ability to support a candidate of their choosing and therefore using “lawfare” as a means to either bankrupt or jail a candidate in the middle of an election, no less, is fundamentally undemocratic. In other words, outside of voters that are already committed, President Biden is undercutting his own argument, making it obvious to anyone who bothers to look that defending democracy is merely a convenient political position rather than a true mission or imperative. There is, however, a way to square this political circle: Preemptively pardon President Trump and urge various prosecutors at the state level to dismiss their own charges. This might sound counterintuitive considering the two men are engaged in the equivalent of a political deathmatch, but pardoning Trump would accomplish two things that no other event will. First, it would allow the President to claim to be a defender of democracy for real, even at the risk of being at odds with the progressive, Trump-hating wing of his own party. He need not even say that he believes the former President is innocent. He can in fact continue to say the opposite, but in the interests of democracy itself, the country needs to hold a free and fair election without interference from outside parties, and therefore it is better to let his opponent run an unfettered campaign than anything else. Only the voters can decide who will lead them, and if you believe President Trump is guilty, you can express your opinion by casting your ballot for me. This and nothing less is what democracy requires. Second, it will place President Trump in the awkward position of being beholden to his opponent, defusing one of his potent lines of attack because he would no longer be able to insist he is subject to political persecution. What could Trump possibly say in response? He would undoubtedly continue to conduct his campaign, but the sting would be completely out of the tail so to speak and the media would confront him with his opponent’s magnanimity at every possible turn. How can you call him “Crooked Joe” after he pardoned you and insisted on a fair race? Even independent voters who had believed the hype that President Biden could unite the country might finally have something to believe in, making his opposition both personally in President Trump and generally with his supporters seem suddenly shrunken in stature compared to a true statesman.
Ultimately, there is no downside – save anger among his far left supporters, who will vote for him anyway, but as I said at the very beginning: It will never happen. President Biden and the Democrats in general are far too wedded to the notion that Trump has no right to run, and rather than campaign on their ideas and their ability to unite the country, they are committed to scorched earth tactics – until they are turned back on them. We see this already when a recent poll found that 57% of Democrats believe President Trump should be disqualified even if he wins, and 52% rejected Trump being on the ballot in the first place. This, my friends, is the self proclaimed party of democracy in the 21st century.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 