The debate over President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon of Donald Trump’s potential political targets has clearly entered a new phase. A Politico report this week got the ball rolling, highlighting a “vigorous internal debate” in the White House.

Clearly this conversation is intensifying. The Washington Post published a front-page cover report on the deliberations that said: “The effort is being led by White House chief of staff Jeff Zients and White House counsel Ed Siskel, the people said, hinting “That the problem should be solved” is taken seriously at the highest level of the administration.”

The Associated Press published a report, noting that the outgoing president had personally “discussed the issue with some senior advisers,” and the New York Times report on the developments said the same thing.

Not surprisingly, the conversation also has an increasingly public component, with some members of Congress and leading commentators — like the Times’ Michelle Goldberg — voicing support for the provocative idea.

The debate is new but straightforward: As regular readers know, the idea behind preemptive pardons is to protect innocent people from possible — in some ways likely — criminal abuses before they happen. In other words, people close to Biden believe that Trump and his revenge-seeking and retaliatory loyalists are likely to launch illegitimate investigations into perceived enemies – and the outgoing Democratic president can prevent that by is now issuing a comprehensive list of pardons before he leaves the White House.

It’s not an easy decision for a variety of reasons, but for many Republicans watching the debate, it’s all completely unnecessary.

Republican Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, for example, called possible preemptive pardons “nonsense” because “no one” plans to take action against people like former House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney. What the congressman may not remember, however, was an online message Trump amplified in June accusing the former Wyoming congresswoman of “treason” and raising the prospect of “televised military tribunals.”

Similarly, Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin asked online, “If Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney didn’t commit crimes, why are Democrats asking Joe Biden for a pardon?” The answer, of course, is that Trump and his sycophantic allies – including Kash Patel, who was appointed by the president-elect to head the FBI and who has already compiled a list of literal enemies — could well seek to prosecute Fauci and Cheney, among others. whether they did something wrong or not.

But the biggest opposition came from Republican Rep. Jim Jordan. HuffPost noted the Ohioan’s head-shaking on-air comments to Fox Business host Larry Kudlow:

The far-right chairman of the House Judiciary Committee began by calling the idea of ​​pre-emptive pardons “ridiculous” before telling the television audience with apparent seriousness: “Donald Trump has never been about retaliation.”

Maybe he was referring to another Donald Trump?

I understand why preemptive pardons are controversial, but to pretend that the president-elect has little interest in exacting revenge on his perceived enemies is to deny the simple truth.

More recently, Trump has been in the White House, where he spent an incredible amount of time and energy retaliating against perceived political enemies – both in the political and private sectors – and seeking baseless prosecutions of opponents. All of this has been thoroughly documented and confirmed by officials who worked closely with him during his administration.

In the run-up to Election Day 2024, Trump was a private citizen with no access to government power, yet he sought to use his political influence to exact revenge – including on members of his own party.

As for the near future, the president-elect was effectively on a retaliatory platform: Trump said he wanted to go after his perceived domestic enemies, and he didn’t seem particularly interested in hiding his intentions. On the contrary, he constantly spoke of his desire to abuse presidential powers.

Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of preemptive pardons, but the question of whether or not Trump harbors unprecedented vengeful ambitions has already been answered.

This post updates our relevant previous reporting.