Elon Musk has brazenly dismantled government agencies because he can feel assured of his insulation from the law. By the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, he may well receive a pardon. That’s what many recent pardons (Paul Manafort, the Biden clan, the January 6 insurrectionists) suggest: Presidential loyalists and family members are, in effect, immune from prosecution. On the most disturbing scale, they have become like diplomats who can park wherever they want.

The dawn of this age of impunity can be dated to any number of administrations. In his new book, The Pardon, Jeffrey Toobin makes a compelling case that a primary culprit is the 38th president, Gerald Ford. Toobin’s thesis is brashly revisionist; Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon has gone down in history as a great act of beneficence. According to conventional wisdom, by immunizing Nixon from prosecution, Ford short-circuited years of polarizing legal proceedings against the former president that would have torn the nation asunder. But Toobin argues that this overpraised act of catharsis established a precedent of lawlessness. The road to Trump begins, in some moral sense, with the absolution of Nixon.

At a glance, the amiable Ford, a college football star and World War II veteran, seems impossible to villainize. Compared with Trump or Nixon, he was the picture of humble decency. On the day he became president, he lumbered out of his suburban-Virginia house in a bathrobe to pick up the paper. In the White House, he toasted his own English muffins. He told dad jokes, played in celebrity golf tournaments, and had a reputation for basically wanting to do the ethical thing.

Having stumbled into the Nixon presidency, as the replacement for the venal vice president Spiro Agnew, he stumbled into the presidency after Watergate. As Chevy Chase portrayed him on Saturday Night Live, dooming him in popular memory, he was always stumbling. The shtick drew on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous aperçu, “Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” (Johnson also declared, “There’s nothing wrong with Jerry Ford, except that he played football too long without his helmet.”)

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Ford made it his mission to learn as little about it as possible. He defended Nixon in the vaguest terms, and essentially ran in the other direction when Nixon asked him to examine evidence in the scandal. Ford stubbornly, and somewhat inexplicably, refused to prepare for the possibility that he might become president. He had initially accepted the vice presidency in the hope that it would be a capstone to his long political career. Indeed, that was the reason Nixon picked him: He knew that Ford had so little appetite for the big job, and so little political guile, that he was unlikely to conspire to oust him.

[Read: Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message]

In the days leading up to his ignominious departure, Nixon hatched a very Nixonian plot to exploit Ford’s goodwill and naivete. He wanted to pressure the future president into pardoning him without ever making a direct ask—a strategy he conceived with the White House counsel Fred Buzhardt, under the cover of attorney-client privilege.

On August 1, 1974, Nixon told Alexander Haig, his chief of staff, that he wanted him to begin preparing Ford to assume the job. “Tell him what’s coming,” he instructed. Nixon knew that Haig would check in with Buzhardt before sitting down with Ford. This was the twist in his scheme: Buzhardt had prepared a memo for Haig, listing six “endgame” scenarios for Ford to consider. In classic Washington style, he arrayed the possibilities so that every plan entailed a messy, prolonged handoff except for one: “Nixon could resign and then Ford could pardon him.” This was the elegant solution, but it had the whiff of corrupt horse-trading.

The pardon wasn’t something that Ford had ever considered, so he peppered Haig with questions about it. Although they didn’t agree to anything in the course of conversation, Ford’s interest had been ignited. He came to believe that a pardon genuinely served his own interests. When he finally assumed the job, he wanted to be more than a pleasant placeholder, and he could never be his own man without first disposing of the looming presence of Richard Nixon.

And so Ford talked himself into the pardon. He read a 1915 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that the acceptance of a presidential pardon is tantamount to admitting guilt, and convinced himself that the public would accept that legal logic. He would tell aides that he felt sorry for poor old Nixon, who he worried was in physical decline.

Ford pushed the process forward without really debating the merits of a pardon with his staff. His poorly argued, nervously delivered speech announcing the decision to the nation was so rushed that aides didn’t have time to prepare a teleprompter. Ford barely gave congressional leaders a heads-up, and none of them could quite grasp his reasons for haste. Tip O’Neill, the majority leader in the House, asked Ford, “Then why the hell are you doing it?” He posed that question minutes before Ford went on national television.

In the most outrageous passage of the speech, Ford declared the fate of Richard Nixon “an American tragedy in which we all played a part.” The public, having been accused of complicity, took its revenge. In a single week, Ford’s popularity plummeted 21 percentage points. His party suffered catastrophic collapse in that year’s midterm election.

[Jeffrey Crouch: O]ur Founders didn’t intend for pardons to work like this

With the benefit of time, however, Washington revised its opinion of the decision. Bob Woodward, of all people, eventually concluded, “Ford was wise to act. What at first and for many years looked like a decision to protect Nixon was instead designed to protect the nation.” Ford slowly remerged with the reputation of a healer, a man of grace.

That revisionism is nostalgic gloss. Toobin makes a damning, nuanced case against Ford. Nixon had, at that point, committed the worst crimes in the history of the presidency, vividly and irrefutably captured on tape, and he escaped without any punishment. He received absolution without displaying remorse. “The pardon was just a free pass handed from one powerful man to another,” Toobin writes.

Despite his earnest desire to undo Nixon’s legacy, Ford’s pardon was itself an assertion of the imperial presidency. That’s because the pardon is an inherently Caesarean implement. In every other facet of the American system, carefully installed safeguards are designed to limit the authoritarian exercise of power. But there is no curb on the pardon other than the conscience of the executive issuing one. Presidents tend to tacitly admit that they are misusing this authority when they sheepishly hoard pardons for the final hours of their administration, waiting for the moment when there’s no political price to pay and hoping that their shabby behavior is drowned out by the inaugural hoopla.

By absolving his former patron, Ford helped create a new Washington ritual: the moment when presidents release their cronies, friends, and family from the bonds of justice. George H. W. Bush sprinkled his magic forgiveness dust over Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, and Elliot Abrams, among others, letting them off the hook for the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton bailed out the financier Marc Rich, whose alleged crimes included buying oil from Iran in defiance of an embargo. (Rich’s wife was a generous donor to Clinton.) And then Joe Biden had the temerity to pronounce himself a defender of the rule of law before he used his presidential powers to insulate his own family from potential prosecution.

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has exposed the flimsiness of American institutions. Pressure-tested by his audacious assault on the civil services, those institutions instantly folded. But when a bridge tumbles into a river, the rivets and bolts don’t suddenly fail. They erode over generations. This is what happened in Washington: The unfettered power of the president kept expanding, Congress entered a state of sclerosis, the parties became apologists for their leaders, and courts fell into the hands of ideologues. As Toobin depressingly shows, even upstanding nice guys like Gerald Ford played their part in the collapse.

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The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May, a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

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Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Trump told the countries attending the World Economic Forum that if they don’t make their products in America, they will face a tariff. The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as the new director of the CIA.

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America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content.

By Spencer Kornhaber

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

Read the full article.

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During his four years in office, Joe Biden notched significant legislative victories with the narrowest of majorities in the Senate. He presided over a virtuoso rollout of the COVID vaccines, the rapidity of which saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and he invested billions in the preservation of an independent Ukraine, which helped stymie the fulfillment of Russia’s revanchist dreams. America’s primary adversary, China, is measurably weaker than when he assumed the job. The U.S. economy is measurably stronger. The sum total of achievement is enough that it might someday tempt historians into declaring Biden an underrated president.

But such revisionism will never be convincing. As clearly as any recent president, Biden proposed the standard for judging his performance. From the time he began running for office, he presented himself as democracy’s defender at the republic’s moment of greatest peril. Battling autocracy was the stated rationale for his foreign policy—and the same spirit infused his domestic agenda. He said that he’d designed his legislative program as a demonstration project, to show that “our democracy can still do big things.”

When Biden issued his public warnings about the system’s fragility, he tended to deliberately avoid mentioning Donald Trump by name, but the implication was clear enough. The inability to stave off a second Trump term, and the stress on democracy that it would inevitably bring, would be the gravest catastrophe of them all. By stubbornly setting off on his reelection campaign, by strapping his party to his shuffling frame, he doomed the nation to realizing the nightmare scenario that he’d promised to prevent. He created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return, and for his own spectacular failure.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s obituary will be stalked by the counterfactual: What if he hadn’t made the selfish decision to run for reelection? What if he had passed the torch a year or even six months earlier? That makes for a grim parlor game.

The way that events unfolded—his catastrophic debate performance, the stark clarity with which the nation came to understand his geriatric state–-beggars belief. Why didn’t Democrats stage an intervention earlier? Why didn’t his aides stop him from running? The absurd premise of the Biden reelection campaign, that it made sense for the nation to trust itself to a president who would finish his term at the age of 86, invites conspiratorial explanations.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

And in the age of conspiracies, these theories will gain wide purchase. They posit a broad cover-up hatched by aides bent on preserving their own power. In this imagined scenario, as Biden aimlessly wandered around the White House in a state of near-dementia, unable to perform the essential functions of the presidency, his inner circle suppressed the evidence of his decay, and a cabal of Democratic pols and corrupt journalists abetted them.

But turning this into a story about nefarious elites both oversells and underplays the scandal. It oversells it by baselessly suggesting that Biden’s age prevented him from carrying out his constitutional duties. And it underplays the scandal because his advisers and protectors are guilty of one of the greatest lapses of common sense in political history. A cabal intent on preserving its own power would never have blundered in such tragically self-defeating fashion.

When Biden came into office, I chronicled his first two years for a book about his White House. You didn’t have to be Bob Woodward to see that the president was an old man. I heard stories about him failing to conjure names; he confused the current Virginia Senator Mark Warner with the late Virginia Senator John Warner. In conversations, his anecdotes would meander excruciatingly into cul-de-sacs. His schedule didn’t begin until late in the morning, which suggested a deficit of stamina.

I also interviewed hundreds of aides and politicians who spent extended time with Biden. As I learned about his management style, I didn’t encounter evidence of a president who was catatonic. I heard stories about his temper, how he snapped at aides who failed to bring him the information he wanted, how he raged against pundits who disparaged him. As his advisers told it, he would micromanage them, sometimes unproductively, and overprepare for meetings—a product of his deep insecurities.

Aides and lawmakers almost always noted his age. Oftentimes, they did so with admiration. One of the virtues of an old president is experience, and the wisdom that comes with it. During the most impressive stretch of his administration, he leveraged his long history of working in the Senate and traveling to foreign capitals. He didn’t need on-the-job training. His closest political confidantes, most of whom have worked with him for decades, regarded Biden as a father figure, which meant that they suffered from a very human problem: the difficulty of judging the decline of an aging parent.

[Read: Why “late regime” presidents fail]

Decline is a matter of perception, and those perceptions are sometimes tainted by wishful thinking, by the hope that a parent still has a few hurrahs left in them. (Now that Biden is a political loser, insiders will rush to publicly say that they saw evidence of his decline before the rest of us did.)

Perceptions are also tainted by a lifetime of memories. Every human has their foibles, which tend to grow exaggerated with age but remain consistent with familiar patterns. So when Biden would get lost in stories, it was possible to say: That’s just Uncle Joe, always reminiscing about the good old days, always a bit verbose. When he fumbled for words, well, that was his childhood stutter rearing its head.

What’s undoubtedly true is that, over the past four years, Biden’s aging accelerated, because that’s what happens in the White House. When members of an administration leave the West Wing, it’s as if they have been subjected to a biological experiment that wrinkles their skin and whitens their hair, compressing 20 years of biological deterioration into four. Biden would have been a supernatural being if his body had resisted these changes. He absorbed the stresses of managing multiple wars and the toll of a presidential campaign (albeit a sclerotic one).

All that said, I have never seen evidence that he made bad decisions because of his age. I’ve never seen evidence that his aides were actually dictating policy without his consent. At worst, his flagging energy undermined his credibility as a leader and projected weakness to his adversaries, at home and abroad, although those cautious tendencies arguably predated his decline.

There’s no need to go searching for hidden scandals, however, because the visible one is sufficiently terrible. Democrats ignored a cascade of warning signs. The evidence that Biden wasn’t fit for a second term was abundantly clear in his public appearances—and in the public appearances that he studiously avoided. Advisers knew that Biden’s instinct was always to invest faith in his own capacities, but they never made a concerted effort to talk him back from his decision to run, until it was far too late. Donald Trump is their legacy too.

Early this morning, the Department of Justice released the report of Special Counsel Jack Smith on his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election—closing the saga of the U.S. criminal-justice system’s effort to hold the coup instigator accountable. No prosecution will now take place. Compared with the present outcome, it would have been better if President Joe Biden had pardoned Trump for the January 6 coup attempt.

A pardon would at least have upheld the theory that violent election overthrows are wrong and illegal. A pardon would have said: The U.S. government can hold violent actors to account. It just chooses not to do so in this case.

Instead, the special counsel’s report delivers a confession of the helplessness of the U.S. government. Smith asserts that the evidence was sufficient to convict Trump of serious crimes—and then declares the constitutional system powerless to act: The criminal is now the president-elect, therefore his crime cannot be punished.

The report suggests that if the law had moved faster, then Trump today would be a convict, not a president. But the law did not move fast. Why not? Whose fault was that? Fingers will point, but the finger-pointing does not matter. What matters is the outcome and the message.

Trump swore to uphold the Constitution in January 2017. He violated that oath in January 2021. Now, in January 2025, he will swear it again. The ritual survives. Its meaning has been lost.

In 2022, a prominent conservative intellectual proclaimed that the United States had entered a “post-constitutional moment”:

Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement—a new regime if you will—that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.

That conservative was Russell Vought, one of the co-authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy plan, and now President-Elect Trump’s choice to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, which controls and coordinates all actions by the executive branch. The post-constitutional moment that Trump supporters once condemned has now become their opportunity. They have transgressed the most fundamental taboo of a constitutional regime, the prohibition against political violence, and instead of suffering consequences, they have survived, profited, and returned to power.

If anything, the transgression has made them more powerful than they otherwise would have been. Bob Woodward gives an account in his 2018 book, Fear, that Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief White House economic adviser, thwarted his intent to withdraw from NAFTA and the U.S.–South Korea trade agreement by snatching the notification letters off the president’s desk. The story suggests something important about the difficulty Trump had imposing his will during his first term. But for his upcoming second term, Trump has made defending his actions in 2021 a test of loyalty. In December, The New York Times interviewed people involved in recruiting for senior roles in the Trump Defense Department or intelligence agencies; several of them had been quizzed about whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election and whether Trump did anything wrong in his challenge to the election on January 6. The clear implication was that to answer anything but No and No would have been disqualifying. There will be no more Gary Cohns, only J. D. Vances who will deny the last election and defend Trump’s actions to overturn it.

That is what a post-constitutional moment looks like.

Before Trump, American law was quite hazy on the legal immunity of the president. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be sued for his official acts. In 1997, the Court ruled that a president could be sued for personal acts unrelated to his office. Both of these rulings applied only to civil cases, not to criminal ones.

For nearly 250 years after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the question of the president’s rights under criminal law did not arise. Trump’s proclivity for wrongdoing forced the question on the country: Was a president of the United States subject to criminal law or not? Last year, the Supreme Court delivered a complex mess of an answer, whose main holding seemed to be: Here’s a complex, multipart, and highly subjective set of questions to answer first. Please relitigate each and every one of them, while we wait to see whether Trump wins or loses the 2024 election.

Now comes the Smith report with its simpler answer: If a president wins reelection, he has immunity for even the worst possible crimes committed during his first term in office.

The incentives contained in this outcome are clear, if perverse. And they are deeply sinister to the future of democracy in the United States.