this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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Not voting (in your election)
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To be fair, Trump has a subservient congress and courts. When Biden was in the White House he had a very precarious situation in congress and was subject to the whims of centrist democrats like Joe Manchin who were much more willing to play hardball than any Republican in today's congress.
We should have known that all of that was on the table way back in 2016. This is the price that we pay by ceding so much power to Trump and the Republicans over the last decade.
The greatest failure of the 46th presidency was a total unwillingness to prosecute the planners, organizers, and executors of the January 6th insurrectionist coup attempt. But then it's overall the same set of mechanisms that couldn't be brought to bear against confederate politicians, generals, and soldiers. A few people were barred from power here and there but there was no overall systemic introspection of the failure of the 1860s. We are living in the aftermath of that failure today, and are placing ourselves at major risk to repeat all of the worst mistakes from that period
I disagree. I think any prosecution of Trump and his high level minions was going to be ineffective - Trump is too rich, too powerful, and has too much political support. The fact that the DOJ was being pressured by Biden to find something to nail Trump on, and resented being used as a political weapon, and so half-assed the investigation, just made it even more ineffective. The prosecution of Trump was an enormous failure, but it was guaranteed to be one from the start.
(Biden's biggest failure was on the economy, of course, but that's another argument.)
I honestly think Biden should have given a full pardon to Trump and his minions on day one.
Because actually prosecuting Trump wasn't going to be successful, and Biden should have known it.
Trying to prosecute Trump just kept him in the news every day of Biden's presidency. Doing it ineffectively made Trump look like a martyr and a victim of persecution. And the obvious political pressure Biden was placing on the DOJ to find something to nail Trump on made defending him a litmus test for loyalty to the Republican Party.
If Biden had pardoned Trump, he would have deprived Trump of four years of free publicity and given the Republicans room to nominate a different candidate in 2024. All Biden did with four years of investigations was guarantee Trump the Republican nomination.
And I think Biden (or his advisors) knew it, and were happy to give Trump free publicity and make him look like a martyr, for the same reason Clinton paid for Trump campaign ads back in 2015 and worked behind the scenes to get Trump the 2016 nomination - because Biden wanted to run against Trump and not on his own record.
What a fucking embarrassment.
Biden being an absentee President didn't help widen those Democratic margins or to keep Democratic Senators in line. Maybe Biden could have done those things 20 years prior, but he provided no party or national leadership to force things through.