For the good of the country, President Biden should pardon Donald Trump | Opinion

First, of course he did it. All of it. The clarity of the details in the charging documents, his prior notorious and similar misconduct, his stunning admissions and the mountain of corroborating evidence, point to no other conclusion.

Former President Donald J. Trump, I’m sure, is guilty of every single charge leveled against him, and most Americans know this to be true in their bones.

The charges are not unserious. Showing classified invasion plans as a parlor trick, fomenting a riot to prevent the orderly passage of power. Not exactly minor technical violations to be cavalierly overlooked.

But President Biden should still pardon Donald Trump because the impact an extended trial and sentencing might have on our democracy is just too terrifying.

In mature democracies, a decision of the party in power to prosecute and jail the leader of the opposition, is fraught with peril, no matter the obviousness of guilt. No matter how much we think Trump deserves it. And in a nation whose greatest challenge is the depth and intensity of its divisions, such a spectacle might be something from which we cannot recover.

Yes, it is true that no man or woman is above the law. But the constitutional powers to pardon and commute are also laws granted to the current president, I believe, for moments precisely like these.

Donald Trump is for all effective purposes the opposition leader. He is wildly popular in the Republican Party, its former nominee and, absent an intervening health crisis or unforeseen act, will be its nominee again. As hard as my own governor, Ron DeSantis, will try to channel George Wallace to present another revolting option, we know Trump is their man.

So, game this out with me. For the next year and longer, federal judges and prosecutors will do what they are trained to do. Having spent nearly a decade prosecuting federal public corruption cases, I know the apparatus of justice will move slowly, but methodically, leaving no stone unturned. And every hearing, every motion, every utterance in court will be reported.

Partisans will interpret or misinterpret every syllable. If you think congressional hearings inspire partisan response, imagine actual trials focused on whether Donald Trump is put in handcuffs and forcibly taken away to prison.

If Trump is convicted, as the evidence suggests he should be, how will his devotees navigate his sentencing and imprisonment? Will our nation find in the intensity of this conflict a moment of catharsis and reconciliation that brings us together? No, there will be no kumbayas. This is not a pendulum swinging back to rationality. It is more a black hole, a vortex that a Trump prosecution will only expand massively.

In Watergate, President Ford proactively pardoned Nixon even before he was charged citing concerns that the nation would be too “polarized.” And that was in an era before algorithms fed you a diet of only information you wanted to hear, when nearly everyone shared a common trust in what Walter Cronkite reported as true. A time when people generally trusted mainstream medicine and found Mickey Mouse noncontroversial.

Today, in a world where everything only seems to inspire division, imagine what years of Trump prosecutions will do. If Ford sought to avoid a “national nightmare” over Watergate, certainly Biden could see that a Trump prosecution will bring to our nation whatever hellish state exists far beyond nightmares.

Pardoning Donald Trump likely won’t mend the divisions that, regrettably, define us. But allowing these prosecutions to go forward, will most certainly only make them much worse.

Pardon Trump.

Dan Gelber is the mayor of Miami Beach and a former federal corruption prosecutor.