On September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon "to heal the nation." He healed nothing. He wrote an instruction manual, and its lesson has been absorbed by every aspiring authoritarian since: rise high enough and the law stops at your door.
I'll say outright, NO human being, not just American citizens within the confines of our borders, should be illegally harmed or even detained. I'll ignore for the moment all those who have been and will continue to be illegally harmed and/or confined by this President, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump read that manual cover to cover. If we fail to act now, the next one will have memorized it.
The Record
This isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of evidence, much of it in Trump's own voice.
He called Georgia's Secretary of State and pressed him to "find" 11,780 votes. He organized slates of fake electors in seven states. His own attorney general, Bill Barr, told him the fraud claims were baseless. His own vice president refused to overturn the count. Trump summoned a crowd to Washington, sent it to the Capitol, and for 187 minutes did nothing while it attacked the building and hunted Mike Pence.
He took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and obstructed their return. On tape, he admitted he wanted to "play down" a virus he knew was deadly. His own coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, later said most American COVID deaths after the first 100,000 could have been mitigated or substantially reduced.
A New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts. Federal grand juries indicted him twice. Much of the key testimony came from Republicans who served him.
The Escape
Then the system failed, one piece at a time.
The Supreme Court handed him immunity. The federal cases evaporated when he won back the White House. And on his first day back in office, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people charged over January 6, including leaders convicted by juries of seditious conspiracy.
Read that again. Men convicted of conspiring to overthrow the United States government walked free on one man's signature. That isn't a loophole. It's a recruitment pitch. Every future would-be autocrat now knows he can raise a loyal army with a single promise: do what I ask, and I will erase your crimes.
Severity Isn't the Problem. Impunity Is.
Many Americans, furious and exhausted, want the harshest punishment imaginable. History shows what actually fails. South Korea sentenced former dictator Chun Doo-hwan to death in 1996 for his coup and the Gwangju massacre. He was pardoned in 1997. The harshest sentence on earth meant nothing because it could be undone.
Now look at the democracies that got it right. Brazil convicted Jair Bolsonaro for plotting to overturn his election and sentenced him to 27 years. Peru imprisoned Alberto Fujimori. South Korea imprisoned two more former presidents. France sent Nicolas Sarkozy to a cell. Each proved what America has never once proved: a head of state can walk into a courtroom a powerful man and walk out a prisoner.
Criminologists have said it for decades. Certainty of punishment deters. Severity adds little. The autocrat's calculation is never "twenty years or worse?" It's "will anything happen to me at all?" In America the answer has always been no. That's what has to change.
Why This Moment Is Singular
Nixon resigned in disgrace, abandoned by his own party. Trump survived two impeachments, a felony conviction, and four indictments, and came back stronger. That has never happened before in American history. MaGA isn't a policy platform. It's a loyalty structure built on the belief that its leader stands above the law, and every escape confirms that belief.
The next version will be smarter. Deadlier.
He'll be disciplined where Trump was chaotic. Consider if it had been Steve Bannon, not Trump, elected.
Whoever it is, he'll arrive with AI tools that can produce propaganda at industrial scale, target every voter individually, and flood the information space faster than any fact-checker can respond. He'll have studied which guardrails bent and which broke. If the lesson he learns is that pardons and immunity will protect him, we won't get another chance to teach a different one.
The Court That Built the Shield
In July 2024, six justices did something no Congress and no founder ever did. They invented presidential immunity from criminal law. Trump v. United States grants absolute immunity for a president's "core" constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. It even bars prosecutors from using official acts as evidence of other crimes.
The word "immunity" appears nowhere in the Constitution. The framers debated shielding the executive and rejected it. They had just fought a war against a king who couldn't be prosecuted.
Justice Sotomayor's dissent spelled out the consequence. Under this ruling, a president who orders the military to assassinate a political rival may be immune. She closed with five words every American should know: "With fear for our democracy, I dissent."
The Court that issued this ruling isn't beyond the reach of the people. The Constitution gives us every tool we need.
Fix the Court, and the Reversal Follows
The Supreme Court is the only federal court with no binding code of ethics, and it shows. Justice Thomas accepted years of undisclosed luxury travel and gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow. He refused to recuse himself from January 6 cases even though his wife, Ginni Thomas, had pressed the White House chief of staff to fight the election results. Justice Alito's homes flew flags associated with the Stop the Steal movement.
Congress must pass a binding, enforceable ethics code for the justices. Where the documented conduct warrants it, the House must use its impeachment power. Impeachment exists precisely for judges who place themselves above the rules every other federal judge obeys.
Congress must also restructure the Court. The Constitution doesn't fix it at nine seats. Congress set that number by statute in 1869, and it has ranged from six to ten. Staggered 18-year term limits would give every president two appointments per term and end the lottery of lifetime seats. Expansion remains on the table. A Court reformed and accountable to ethics law is a Court that will revisit Trump v. United States, and a ruling this indefensible won't survive honest review.
The People Have the Final Word
We don't have to wait for the Court. When the Supreme Court gets the Constitution wrong, the people can correct it, and we've done it before. The Eleventh Amendment reversed Chisholm v. Georgia. The Fourteenth buried Dred Scott. The Sixteenth overturned a ruling that struck down the income tax. The Twenty-Sixth passed in about three months after the Court divided over the voting age.
Trump v. United States belongs on that list.
What Accountability Must Mean
- Prosecution without exceptions. When legal barriers fall, every provable crime committed by Trump and those who conspired with him must be charged and tried in open court, with the full evidentiary record placed before the public.
- Maximum lawful sentences, served in full. No plea deals trading prison for a quiet exit. No "healing the nation." We tried healing in 1974, and it brought us 2021.
- Capital Punishment - While it won't stop the next Trump, it will forewarn and help to wake up the body politic about what they are doing, who they are liking, and for a change where this has previously led.
- A constitutional amendment that closes every escape hatch:
- No president is immune from criminal prosecution for violating federal law.
- No president may pardon himself, his family, or anyone for offenses connected to an election, the transfer of power, or crimes committed at his direction.
- The statute of limitations for federal crimes is suspended while the offender holds office.
- Anyone convicted of insurrection, seditious conspiracy, or election subversion is permanently barred from federal office.
- A reformed Court: binding ethics, term limits, impeachment where conduct demands it.
- A permanent public record. Germany didn't reject Nazism because of a few verdicts in 1946. Most Germans at first dismissed Nuremberg as victors' justice. What changed the nation was decades of confronting the documented record in courts, classrooms, and law. America needs its own permanent record of what happened, taught and preserved, so no future generation can be told it was a hoax.
What They'll Say, and the Answer
"It's a witch hunt." The evidence came from grand juries, Republican-appointed judges, a New York jury, and Trump's own attorney general, vice president, and White House staff. A witch hunt doesn't produce sworn testimony from the accused's own people.
"Prosecuting presidents will start a cycle of revenge." The cycle has already started, and it was started from the Oval Office. In 2025 Trump's Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, officials whose offense was investigating him. Meanwhile Brazil, South Korea, Peru, and France prosecuted former leaders through courts, and their democracies are still standing. The threat to democracy isn't prosecution under law. It's a president who can't be prosecuted at all.
"Presidents need immunity to do the job." For 235 years, no president had criminal immunity, and every president but one managed to govern without trying to overturn an election. Ford's pardon of Nixon only made sense because everyone, Nixon included, understood a former president could be prosecuted.
"He won the election. The people have spoken." Nixon won 49 states in 1972. Winning an election has never erased a crime. Votes grant power. They don't grant pardons for what was done to seize it.
"A constitutional amendment is a fantasy." The Twenty-Sixth Amendment went from Congress to ratification in about three months. Amendments seem impossible right up until the public demands them. Our job is to make the demand undeniable.
"Court reform is court-packing." Congress has changed the Court's size seven times. Term limits are supported by majorities across party lines. The only thing radical here is a Court that invented a king's immunity and answers to no ethics code at all.
The Hard Choice
Extreme times demand extreme resolve, and this is a singular moment.
The most extreme thing America could do is also the one thing it has never done: make a former president answer to the law, and make that answer permanent.
Not a verdict someone can pardon away in a year.
Not a sentence that evaporates with an election.
A judgment the Constitution itself guarantees will stand.
Nixon was the warning. Trump is the proof.
The next one will be the ending, unless we write a different one--NOW.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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