Former President Donald Trump is set to hold a campaign rally Saturday in Waco, Texas -- returning to the trail amid his warnings of "death & destruction" resulting from investigations into his actions.

As former President Donald Trump heads to Texas on Saturday for his first major campaign rally, the handbrake remains on for most of his potential 2024 rivals.

After earlier and incorrectly predicting his own arrest this week, former President Donald Trump veered into the more sinister business of predicting violence and catastrophe if he's arrested.

No former president of the United States has ever been indicted at either the federal or state level. That more-than-two-centuries-old record, if you want to call it that, looks like it could soon be broken—something that should have happened a long time ago.

A few American presidents have certainly behaved questionably enough to meet the standard of probable cause needed for an indictment. Given this, the fact that no former president has ever been prosecuted implies some kind of political tradition—one the Founders never intended to establish. They made clear in the Constitution—specifically in Article I, Section 3, Clause 7, which says an impeached president can be tried after he leaves office—that indictments of former presidents aren’t supposed to be taboo.

Yet our system of government has had a hard time mustering the will to prosecute disgraced presidents. The closest the country has ever come to such a moment, until now, was in January 2001, when Independent Prosecutor Robert Ray decided not to seek an indictment of former President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Ray had wanted to indict Clinton. Sources later told the legal scholar Ken Gormley that Ray was “ready to pull the trigger” once Clinton left office. Ultimately (reportedly after being persuaded by his deputy, Julie Thomas), Ray decided that if Clinton agreed to a deal that included publicly admitting to having been misleading and evasive under oath, the country would get closure after the long Whitewater investigation and didn’t need to see him indicted.

[David A. Graham: If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone]

Twenty-five years earlier, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski had been far less enthusiastic than Ray about prosecuting a different former president—Richard Nixon. Jaworski’s posture may seem surprising given the crimes not only that Nixon was accused of but for which there was direct evidence on tape—it certainly surprised me when, in the 2000s, I immersed myself in the history of Watergate as the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. An overwhelming majority of Jaworski’s Watergate-trial team didn’t share his reluctance to indict Nixon. Jaworski’s deputy, Henry Ruth, described eloquently the weight of the decision Jaworski faced. Ruth wrote to the special prosecutor in the summer of 1974:

Indictment of an ex-President seems so easy to many of the commentators and politicians. But in a deep sense that involves tradition, travail and submerged disgust, somehow it seems that signing one’s name to the indictment of an ex-President is an act that one wishes devolved upon another but one’s self. This is true even where such an act, in institutional and justice terms, appears absolutely necessary.

“Yeah, well, I just don’t think it would be good for the country to have a former president dumped in the D.C. jail,” Nixon told the vice-presidential nominee Nelson Rockefeller in a telephone conversation on August 24, 1974. Nixon accepted that as a former president he could be indicted, but he had his lawyer argue against indictment on the basis that a fair trial would be impossible—effectively a violation of Nixon’s Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury—because of the highly publicized impeachment process. And Jaworski agreed. “I knew in my own mind that if an indictment were returned and the court asked me if I believed Nixon could receive a prompt, fair trial as guaranteed by the Constitution, I would have to answer … in the negative,” he wrote in his Watergate memoir, The Right and the Power.

Jaworski hoped Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, would take the decision out of his hands. After Ford revealed at his first press conference, on August 28, 1974, that he was considering pardoning Nixon, Jaworski told his top lieutenants, “I certainly would not ask the grand jury to indict Nixon if President Ford intended to pardon him.” Fortunately for Jaworski, Ford didn’t want to wait for an indictment. The day after his press conference, Ford instructed his closest advisers to review whether a president could pardon an individual before an indictment. When Jaworski met with Philip W. Buchen, Ford’s White House counsel, on September 4 to signal to the president that if he intended to pardon Nixon, it should be done before an indictment, Jaworski was pushing an already open door. Two days earlier, Ford’s team had told the president he didn’t have to wait for the special prosecutor to act.

A number of considerations compelled Ford to act quickly (Nixon’s poor health, concerns over the protection of Nixon’s tapes and papers, which in that era a former president had the right to destroy), but the anticipated costs to the presidency and the nation of a drawn-out prosecution—and the difficulty of a fair trial—figured prominently among them. At his meeting with Jaworski, Buchen asked Jaworski how long he thought it would take for the Watergate scandal to die down enough to make a fair trial possible for Nixon. Jaworski’s answer was discouraging.  “A delay, before selection of a jury is begun, of a period from nine months to a year, and perhaps even longer,” Jaworski wrote in his formal reply to Buchen after the meeting. As for jury selection itself, Jaworski wouldn’t even hazard a guess about how long that could take. America could have been well into its bicentennial year—and a presidential-election year—before Nixon stood trial. Four days later, Ford pardoned Nixon.

[Tim Naftali: The worst president in history]

In the cases of both Clinton and Nixon, the behavior at issue occurred during their time in office. Until Donald Trump, you have to go back to the late 19th century to find even the whiff of possibility that a former president would be indicted for something done before or after his presidency. Following the collapse of his Wall Street brokerage firm, Grant & Ward, in 1884, former President Ulysses S. Grant came under some suspicion when his partner, Ferdinand Ward, was arrested for fraud. But Grant, who was dying of throat cancer and would spend his last painful months writing his memoirs in order to leave an inheritance and enable his widow to pay back the family’s debts, turned out to be as much a victim of Ward’s lies as his investors were.

There will be a lot of discussion in the coming days about the political utility (for Trump) and political price (perhaps for his detractors) of Trump’s indictment for a felonious scheme in New York City, but taking the long view, it is about time our country set this precedent. Good government requires a little fear among the powerful, including presidents. Presidents especially need to know that if they engage in criminal acts, their power cannot protect them forever.

Should a group of New York grand jurors soon decide that the indictment of Trump is “absolutely necessary,” they will finally confirm, as the Founders expected, that ordinary citizens have the power to treat former commanders in chief like anyone else. And that’s something that should always have been an American tradition.

Trump uses the possibility of an arrest to fundraise and rile up his base. Plus, the squeeze on Nicaragua's journalists.

The Justice Department said Friday that neither it nor the Biden White House would assert certain privileges in depositions of former President Donald Trump and FBI Director Christopher Wray that have been ordered in a lawsuit brought by an ex-FBI official whose termination Trump pushed for when he was president.

How will the former US President handle his courthouse entry if he has to turn himself in?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

My colleague Alan Taylor has published thousands of photo essays in his time at The Atlantic. I spoke with him about the art of telling a visual story and which photos have stuck with him over the years.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The most disturbing part of Donald Trump’s latest rant Life is worse for older people now. People aren’t falling for AI Trump photos (yet). Seeing Things

Since joining The Atlantic in 2011, my colleague Alan Taylor has published more than 2,700 photo articles. Multiply that by an average of 24 images per story, and you’ll get closer to approximating the amount of photos he’s looked at in his time here.

When he was working as a web developer in the ’90s, Alan first became fascinated by the images he saw on news agencies’ wires. At The Atlantic, he pores over those resources to publish photo essays about what’s going on in the world. But he also follows his curiosity wherever it takes him, curating collections of wacky, fun, and beautiful things worth seeing: the geometric carvings of salt mines, the world’s tallest statues, life viewed under a microscope. I talked with Alan about what he’s learned from more than a decade of creating photo essays.

Isabel Fattal: Looking back on the tens of thousands of images you’ve worked with, can you think of a few that stand out?

Alan Taylor: I was looking through some of my archives, and it’s often the ones with a really personal touch, something very human. For example, this famous image of Barack Obama.

Pete Souza / The White House

You don’t really need a caption for that. Being a human and seeing that image in front of you, you know what’s happening. And as soon as you move beyond the recognition of the feeling, you think about what this says in American history and society. You’ve got this little boy reaching up and touching the hair. His hair is just like mine. He’s just like me. I could be this. And I’ve just said far more than needs to be said about it. It’s just there.

There’s another one, from when the pandemic was near its height. This is a doctor in full protective gear, embracing a patient. At that stage of the crisis, people were moving out of a state of panic and trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and toward the sense that, Oh, wow, we should have some compassion for the caregivers too. This is deeply troubling and serious.

Go Nakamura / Getty

Isabel: Are there kinds of news events where you find images to be the most effective way to tell the story?

Alan: Typically broad-scale disasters, such as hurricanes and floods and fires. When they first hit, you can do a whole lot more with a handful of photographs than you can with a few paragraphs. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, and Donald Trump flew there to survey the damage, I really wanted to emphasize, This is what Puerto Rico looked like when Trump went to visit. So I put together a story. If you can sense there’s a question out there that you have that other people probably have, you can put it out there.

And then there are the stories that are about the images themselves. In 2013, North Korea issued photographs of a military drill they were doing, and it had some hovercrafts coming in to land on a beach. And I just saw it as I was going through the news feed, as I always do. And I noticed, Oh, wow, this looks weird. Wait a minute. This is Photoshop. This image has four or five hovercraft, but really, there’s probably only two there and one or more is cloned a couple different times. So I did this little exposé on it. I’m sitting up here in my home office in the attic in the suburbs and going, Oh my God, I’ve seen something that nobody else in the world has noticed here.

Isabel: The power of looking closely.

So where do you get your ideas for some of your more random and fun photo essays, such as salt mines or the pope versus the wind?

Alan: You’re missing probably the silliest one I’ve ever done, which is just cows. It’s pictures of cows, and it’s titled “Cows.” I love that. I put out a tweet promoting it, and the first response was, Is everybody okay over there?

Valerie Kuypers / AFP / Getty

“Pope vs. the Wind” was fun because I thought, I see these pictures all the time. Photographers are assigned to travel with the pope and go to these different places, and there’s only so many different photographs you can get of a scene. And when he’s wearing the skullcap (zucchetto) and a small cape, the wind is having a great time with those. I realized, Wait, there’s a body of images out there of this phenomenon. I can do something fun with this.

Filippo Monteforte / AFP / Getty

The main reason that I spend all day, every day, looking at all these photographs is that they can accidentally clump together and help me come up with story ideas. It’s always fun when you can find some sort of an underlying theme over years and years.

Related:

Photos of the week: Sky Bar, Kansas sunset, flooded fields Photos: National Napping Day Today’s News U.S. military officials said that a U.S. base in northeast Syria was targeted by a missile strike, just one day after a suspected Iranian drone struck a coalition base in the same region and killed an American worker, according to the Pentagon. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a deal between the U.S. and Canada that would allow both countries to turn away migrants at unofficial border crossings, effective tomorrow.   A federal judge reportedly ordered several former aides of Donald Trump to testify before a grand jury in the criminal inquiry of efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Dispatches Books Briefing: Kate Cray explains how ordinary photos and stories can connect you with your family’s roots. Work in Progress: The internet loves bad news. That’s bad, Derek Thompson argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read One of many AI-generated images circulating on Twitter that depict a fabricated scene of former President Donald Trump being arrested. (Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Elliot Higgins / Midjourney v5)

The Trump AI Deepfakes Had an Unintended Side Effect

By Megan Garber

The former president is fighting with the police. He’s yelling. He’s running. He’s resisting. Finally, he falls, that familiar sweep of hair the only thing rigid against the swirl of bodies that surround him.

When I first saw the images, I did a double take: The event they seem to depict—the arrest of Donald Trump—has been a matter of feverish anticipation this week, as a grand jury decides whether to indict the former president for hush-money payments allegedly made on his behalf to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. (Trump, that canny calibrator of public expectation, himself contributed to the fever.) Had the indictment finally come down, I wondered, and had the arrest ensued? Had Trump’s Teflon coating—so many alleged misdeeds, so few consequences—finally worn away? Pics or it didn’t happen, people say, and, well, here were the pics.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic Donald Trump is on the wrong side of the religious right. Don’t cut corners on indicting Trump. Blue check marks were always shameless. Culture Break Macall Polay / HBO

Read. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, a transportive collection of every short story by the late author (most of which were set in small-town Mississippi), or another of eight books that will take you somewhere new.

Watch. Catch up on Succession in anticipation of the fourth and final season of the acclaimed series, which premieres on HBO Sunday.

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Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.