Don't erode norms in response to Trump's latest authoritarian tirade

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Dec 12, 2024

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President-elect Donald Trump has spouted off about his various authoritarian fantasies so often and for so long that it’s easy to overlook it when he breaks dangerous new rhetorical ground. Such a moment came Sunday when, during his first formal televised interview since winning the Nov. 5 presidential election, Trump said he believes members of Congress should be jailed for investigating his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

As always, it’s important that responsible leaders resist the urge to counter Trump’s norm-shattering inclinations by shattering them further. That’s why President Joe Biden should reject calls to preemptively pardon members of Congress and others who might face persecution under the coming Trump administration. Instead, they must place their faith in the ability of the American justice system to block those and other unconstitutional Trumpian stunts that may lie ahead.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press“ Sunday, interviewer Kristen Welker asked Trump about past indications that he would seek retribution against critics like former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who was a member of a House select committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6.

Trump responded with a familiar litany of false and thoroughly debunked claims — that the committee destroyed evidence, that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down an offer of National Guard troops to quell the violence.

Then he added: “I think those people committed a major crime. … Cheney was behind it … and everybody on that committee … For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”

When Welker pressed him on whether he thinks “everyone on the committee … should go to jail,” Trump responded: “Anybody that voted in favor” — meaning, presumably, voted in a favor of the final committee report recommending that Trump be criminally charged for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

When pressed further, Trump said he wouldn’t order his Justice Department to criminally charge committee members, but that officials under him “will have to look at that. … They can do whatever they want.”

Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, has already made clear what he wants: criminal prosecutions of scores of Trump critics, many in connection with the Jan. 6 House committee’s actions. If Patel needed a greener light for that malignant route, Trump clearly provided it Sunday.

Spare us any whataboutisms regarding the unprecedented criminal prosecutions of Trump as an ex-president. Those prosecutions were the results of his unprecedented crimes — most atrociously, his calculated attempts to illegally overturn a valid election before Jan. 6, and his active role that day in fostering the violence.

Reasonable people can argue about the solidity of the now-abandoned criminal charges against Trump related to that day, but in no rational universe is there justification to even talk about jailing members of Congress for how they voted on a committee report. That’s beyond banana-republic stuff. That Trump would give voice to it is obscene if not especially surprising.

Yet preemptive pardons for Cheney or anyone else is exactly the wrong remedy for Trump’s cancerous brand of strong-man politics.

Pardons are meant to give presidents a way to counter miscarriages of justice — an instrument of mercy for when the justice system has in some way failed. Nothing in the constitutional construct of the pardon imagines using them preemptively on the expectation (however justified in this case) that an incoming president will abuse that system.

Trump, who egregiously abused the pardon process during his first term, reiterated in Sunday’s interview that he plans to pardon many if not most of the Jan. 6 rioters on the grotesque claim that they’re wrongly prosecuted patriots. Biden has already lent credence to those dark plans with his outrageous decision to pardon his own son.

At this rate, it’s not difficult to imagine the entire concept of the pardon becoming just another once-valid norm brought low by the relentlessly cynical politics of our era; just another partisan weapon to be misused and abused by whoever happens to be in power.

That Trump’s very ethos would embrace such a terrible development isn’t justification for Biden to go there first. Quite the opposite. When norms are under attack is when they must be most strenuously upheld. And they’re in for a lot of attacks over the next four years.