Pardon Trump?

As a candidate, there was no other answer Biden could have given. Any suggestion of future magnanimity toward a president so intensely loathed by tens of millions of Democrats would have divided and demoralized his base. Millions of Americans avidly wished to see Trump "brought to justice for his alleged offenses, from campaign finance crimes to tax fraud to obstruction of justice," I wrote. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had said she wanted to see Trump "in prison."

On the other side of the aisle, meanwhile, countless Republicans cheered Trump's frequent calls for the arrest of his political foes, including Biden, Hillary Clinton, and even Barack Obama.

This clamor by each partisan camp to throw the other side's leaders in prison was an indication of just how vicious and dysfunctional America's public culture had grown, and a warning of how much more dangerous it could become if unchecked. So maybe, I proposed, as an act of statesmanship and courage Biden should "pull a Ford" — not because absolution was what Trump deserved but because halting this downward spiral into ever-more-bitter recrimination was what the nation needed. Just as, in the bruised aftermath of Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation, America half a century earlier had badly needed a way out of its long, national nightmare.

Of course, no pardon for Trump was ever forthcoming and I can't pretend I expected otherwise. But now once again the suggestion is being made that Biden grant clemency to his predecessor. The proposal this time comes from Stephen L. Carter, a longtime Yale law professor and a widely admired public-policy thinker on the center-left.

In a column for Bloomberg News last week, Carter proffered a recommendation for those searching for a way to keep Donald Trump from returning to the Oval Office. "I have a simple suggestion," he wrote. "Lobby President Joe Biden to pardon him . . . in exchange for a promise not to seek public office again."

As Carter explained, presidential pardons often come with conditions. There would be no legal obstacle to offering Trump the chance to avoid prosecution for any federal offense so long as he didn't run for president (or any other office) in the future. In Carter's words:

The legion of Never Trumpers has spent years hoping that an impeachment trial or a courtroom verdict might somehow keep the controversial former president from making another run. That tactic isn't likely to work. Statutes that disqualify offenders from public office are surely unconstitutional as applied to the presidency, because the qualifications are spelled out in the Constitution.

But a pardon is different.

Normally, the right to run for office is considered a basic aspect of American citizenship. But more than two centuries of precedent have established the legitimacy of conditioning a pardon on a voluntary relinquishing of a constitutional right. For example, Abraham Lincoln's grant of amnesty to vanquished Southern troops required that they take an oath of loyalty to the Union — a requirement that under most circumstances would be barred by the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. Law professor Harold Krent, in a survey of the subject for the California Law Review, noted that "presidents have offered clemency on the condition that offenders refrain from alcohol, provide support for family members, leave the country, join the Navy, drop claims against the United States, or restrict their travel or speech."

So pardoning Trump in exchange for his agreement not to seek elective office would, in legal terms, be doable. Should Trump accept a conditional pardon, he would be bound by its terms. Hence Carter's advice that those "who are most strongly anti-Trump should be pressing for a pardon."

To be sure, there is no guarantee Trump would accept such a deal. Doubtless his most passionate supporters would "urge him to reject the offer, take his chances in court, and run again in 2024," Carter writes. For now, it is admittedly hard to imagine the truculent and narcissistic Trump taking the offer, which would deny him the opportunity to recapture the Oval Office — or even to bluster about doing so.

But who knows? Might there not come a point at which the author of The Art of the Deal decided that the upside of not being pursued by federal prosecutors had come to outweigh the downside of no longer being in the spotlight of presidential politics? Quite a few former Trump associates, remember, have been prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to prison, including his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; his former campaign vice chairman, Rick Gates; his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen; and his former adviser Roger Stone. Just last week, Trump's longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty in a New York court to multiple counts of tax fraud. He will pay nearly $2 million in back taxes and penalties and serve five months in jail on Rikers Island. (Those were state charges, but Weisselberg has also been accused of defrauding the federal government.)

Meanwhile, the public has yet to find out exactly what was in the 20 cartons of documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago in its extraordinary search of the former president's home earlier this month. Trump and his loyalists have blasted the search as an outrageous and indefensible act of political sabotage. But what if the feds are engaged in a legitimate investigation of potentially serious wrongdoing? What if criminal investigations of Trump and his inner circle begin to seem less and less like a liberal Democratic fantasy and more and more like a genuine threat?

For now, Biden is no more likely to contemplate a pardon for the man he calls "the former guy" than TFG is to contemplate forswearing another run for the presidency. But if the last seven years have demonstrated anything, it is that when it comes to Trump, the inconceivable has an uncanny habit of becoming feasible. I'm not betting my savings on it, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."