Over the past several years, courageous Americans have risked their careers and perhaps even their liberty in an effort to stop Donald Trump’s return to power. Our collective failure to avoid that result now gives Trump an opportunity to exact revenge on them. President Joe Biden, in the remaining two months of his term in office, can and must prevent this by using one of the most powerful tools available to the president: the pardon power.

The risk of retribution is very real. One hallmark of Trump’s recently completed campaign was his regular calls for vengeance against his enemies. Over the past few months, he has said, for example, that Liz Cheney was a traitor. He’s also said that she is a “war hawk.” “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” he said. Likewise, Trump has floated the idea of executing General Mark Milley, calling him treasonous. Meanwhile, Trump has identified his political opponents and the press as “enemies of the people” and has threatened his perceived enemies with prosecution or punishment more than 100 times. There can be little doubt that Trump has an enemies list, and the people on it are in danger—most likely legal, though I shudder to think of other possibilities.

Biden has the unfettered power to issue pardons, and he should use it liberally. He should offer pardons, in addition to Cheney and Milley, to all of Trump’s most prominent opponents: Republican critics, such as Adam Kinzinger, who put country before party to tell the truth about January 6; their Democratic colleagues from the House special committee; military leaders such as Jim Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and William McRaven; witnesses to Trump’s conduct who worked for him and have since condemned him, including Miles Taylor, Olivia Troye, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Sarah Matthews; political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff; and others who have been vocal in their negative views, such as George Conway and Bill Kristol.  

[Mark Leibovich: In praise of clarity]

The power to pardon is grounded in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which gives a nearly unlimited power to the president. It says the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That’s it. A president’s authority to pardon is pretty much without limitation as to reason, subject, scope, or timing.  

Historically, for example, Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any offense that he “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” If Biden were willing, he could issue a set of pardons similar in scope and form to Trump’s critics, and they would be enforced by the courts as a protection against retaliation.

There are, naturally, reasons to be skeptical of this approach. First, one might argue that pardons are unnecessary. After all, the argument would go, none of the people whom Trump might target have actually done anything wrong. They are innocent of anything except opposing Trump, and the judicial system will protect them.

This argument is almost certainly correct; the likelihood of a jury convicting Liz Cheney of a criminal offense is laughably close to zero. But a verdict of innocence does not negate the harm that can be done. In a narrow, personal sense, Cheney would be exonerated. But along the way she would no doubt suffer—the reputational harm of indictment, the financial harm of having to defend herself, and the psychic harm of having to bear the pressure of an investigation and charges.

In the criminal-justice system, prosecutors and investigators have a cynical but accurate way of describing this: “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.” By this they mean that even the costs of ultimate victory tend to be very high. Biden owes it to Trump’s most prominent critics to save them from that burden.

More abstractly, the inevitable societal impact of politicized prosecutions will be to deter criticism. Not everyone has the strength of will to forge ahead in the face of potential criminal charges, and Trump’s threats have the implicit purpose of silencing his opposition. Preventing these prosecutions would blunt those threats. The benefit is real, but limited—a retrospective pardon cannot, after all, protect future dissent, but as a symbol it may still have significant value.

A second reason for skepticism involves whether a federal pardon is enough protection. Even a pardon cannot prevent state-based investigations. Nothing is going to stop Trump from pressuring his state-level supporters, such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to use their offices for his revenge. And they, quite surely, will be accommodating.

But finding state charges will be much more difficult, if only because most of the putative defendants may never have visited a particular state. More important, even if there is some doubt about the efficaciousness of federal pardons, that is no reason to eschew the step. Make Trump’s abuse of power more difficult in every way you can.

The third and final objection is, to my mind at least, the most substantial and meritorious—that a president pardoning his political allies is illegitimate and a transgression of American political norms.   

Although that is, formally, an accurate description of what Biden would be doing, to me any potential Biden pardons are distinct from what has come before. When Trump pardoned his own political allies, such as Steve Bannon, the move was widely (and rightly) regarded as a significant divergence from the rule of law, because it protected them from criminal prosecutions that involved genuine underlying criminality. By contrast, a Biden pardon would short-circuit bad-faith efforts by Trump to punish his opponents with frivolous claims of wrongdoing.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

Still, pardons from Biden would be another step down the unfortunate road of politicizing the rule of law. It is reasonable to argue that Democrats should forgo that step, that one cannot defend norms of behavior by breaking norms of behavior.

Perhaps that once was true, but no longer. For the past eight years, while Democrats have held their fire and acted responsibly, Trump has destroyed almost every vestige of behavioral limits on his exercises of power. It has become painfully self-evident that Democratic self-restraint is a form of unilateral disarmament that neither persuades Trump to refrain from bad behavior nor wins points among the undecided. It is time—well past time—for responsible Democrats to use every tool in their tool kit.

What cannot be debated is that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris owe a debt not just of gratitude but of loyalty to those who are now in Trump’s investigative sights. They have a moral and ethical obligation to do what they can to protect those who have taken a great risk trying to stop Trump. If that means a further diminution of legal norms, that is unfortunate, but it is not Biden’s fault; the cause is Trump’s odious plans and those who support them.

If this wasn’t the Podcast Election, it was certainly a podcast-y election. Millions of people watched the results come in on a handful of livestreams hosted by popular podcasters, including one hosted by Tucker Carlson from Mar-a-Lago, on which Donald Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump appeared as guests.

Trump also enjoyed a late-breaking endorsement from Joe Rogan, host of the world’s most popular podcast. For the past several months, much was made about the Trump campaign’s podcast strategy, reportedly masterminded by Trump’s son Barron, which included interviews with the tech-world whisperers Lex Fridman and the All-In Podcast. Trump took advantage of every opportunity to be interviewed at length and in casual conversation for huge audiences of young men; Harris did not, and immediately after her loss, this stood out to many people as a big problem. As New York Times editor Willy Staley put it in a wry (or grim) post on X, there is now palpable “soul-searching among Democrats about the podcast situation.”

I spent Election Night watching a livestream hosted by The Free Press, the media company founded by the former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. The guest list was a strange assemblage of iconoclasts and establishment castoffs, and it was obvious from the comments that many viewers were just there to watch It Girls Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, hosts of the cultish podcast Red Scare, smirk and sip teensy glasses of champagne while barely saying anything. (One of Nekrasova’s longer sentences of the night was “He’s winning like crazy, right?”)

[Read: Bad news]

A little after 8 p.m., the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang called in from a parking lot in Philadelphia. “I gotta say, the vibe’s kind of Trumpy,” he told Weiss. He had voted for Kamala Harris, he told her, though he hadn’t been excited about it. He offered his critique of the campaign run by Harris and Tim Walz, which he felt was overly risk-averse and uncharismatic. Specifically, he called out the missed opportunity to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience, as both Trump and J. D. Vance had done. (Harris purportedly could have appeared on the show if she followed the host’s terms; in late October, Rogan wrote on X that, contrary to the campaign’s desires, he would not accept a one-hour time limit on the interview and that he wanted to record in his studio in Austin.) “It pisses me off,” Yang said.

“That was a gimme,” he went on. “The Rogan interview would have been almost entirely upside. It’s low-propensity male voters, people that are not inclined to vote for you, so you have nothing to lose.” On Carlson’s Election Night livestream, Elon Musk made a similar argument, alluding to the parasocial, possibly persuasive power of podcasts: “To a reasonable-minded, smart person who’s not hardcore one way or the other, they just listen to someone talk for a few hours, and that’s how they decide whether you’re a good person, whether they like you.”

As I watched, I felt annoyed. Rogan’s anti-vaccine rhetoric and anti-trans shtick—among many other bizarre statements, such as his claim that intelligence agencies provoked January 6—should make him radioactive for any politician, let alone a Democrat in 2024. And anyway, “more podcasts” sounds like a pretty desperate response to such a monumental loss. But these are stupid times.

According to exit polls, Harris did do poorly with young men. Yang was clearly correct that she had nothing to lose. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote on Thursday, Harris may have avoided Rogan’s three-plus-hour, formless interview format for fear of messing up, “but given who ended up winning the election, this … seems like an antiquated concern.” Was this the difference? Definitely not. But it was a difference. Next time, I would guess, Rogan and his ilk will not be snubbed; the oddball internet is mainstream enough to seriously court.

Obviously, political campaigns always prioritize making their candidates appear accessible, relatable, authentic, and so on. For a useful historical parallel, I looked to 1976—another election in which a key issue was inflation, a key concern was turning out disaffected young voters and restoring faith in American institutions, and a key problem with the Democratic presidential campaign was that many people said they had no idea what it was about.

Jimmy Carter, after seeing what an interview in Playboy had done for California Governor Jerry Brown’s polling numbers during the primaries, agreed to sit for his own. The interviewer, Robert Scheer, wrote in the introduction: “For me, the purpose of the questioning was not to get people to vote for or against the man but to push Carter on some of the vagueness he’s wrapped himself in.” But in September 1976, when the magazine published the 12,000-word Q&A, it was regarded almost immediately as a disaster. Carter infuriated Christians and gave satirists plenty to lampoon with his description of feeling “lust” and “adultery” in his heart at times. (Many also read parts of the interview as obliquely referring to his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, as a liar.)

Scheer later said that the idea was to use the length and intimacy of the interview to answer the questions of young voters who “wondered if he was this Southern square.” He also thought that the interview had done exactly what the campaign wanted it to, even if it had made them nervous in the process.

Voter turnout in 1976 was abysmal, as expected in the aftermath of Watergate. But, although the interview was regarded by the national media as a major gaffe, apparently many voters didn’t think about it that way. Some were asked about it in polling conducted the same week it was published—of 1,168 respondents, 289 said they hadn’t heard about the interview, while 790 said they had but it hadn’t changed their minds. Carter did lose some small number of voters, at least in the moment—28 respondents said that the interview had caused them to change their vote from Carter to Gerald Ford, while only four said it had caused them to change their vote from Ford to Carter.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

In the end, Carter won with a narrow margin in the popular vote and outperformed Ford with voters ages 22 to 44, while falling short with voters 45 or older as well as with those 18 to 21. Voters recorded their feelings about the Playboy interview again in exit polls. They were asked whether there was anything they disliked about Carter and given eight choices of response, “I didn’t like his Playboy interview" among them. Again, the respondents said that they cared little about it. (They cared more that he was too pro-union.)

If you read all the critiques of the Harris campaign being written right now, you could come to the conclusion that she was both too online and not online enough. She misunderstood her youth support by looking too much at the wrong parts of TikTok; she went on Call Her Daddy, a massively popular podcast that began as part of the Barstool Sports extended universe but was, I guess, the wrong part. She won the endorsement of the two most popular musicians in the world, whose fans wield a ton of online “power,” however you define it. The default political and cultural stance on the Girl Internet is liberal to leftist and was pro-Harris, so maybe she spent too much time there and not enough in unfriendly corners.

There’s a more compelling case this time around that online misogyny had something to do with the results than there was after Trump’s first victory, in 2016, when reporters were so quick to explain how young men were radicalized in spaces like 4chan—a website that was always fairly niche, even if it did influence broader internet culture in certain ways. Today, discontented men are among the most popular influencers on major platforms.

The next Democratic candidate will surely sit for Rogan wherever he asks them to sit. They won’t have a choice. They’ll have to take the risk and act like they have nothing to lose—right now, that’s certainly the truth.