It’s not like nobody told the voters.

Whatever factors drove the Republican victories in the 2024 elections, it cannot be said that one of them was ignorance of Donald Trump’s many crimes—those both convicted and alleged—and the many civil actions against him.

Starting in 2019 with his first impeachment for strong-arming the president of Ukraine for dirt on Trump’s eventual challenger for reelection and the successful suit for battery and defamation by a woman who says Trump raped her in the mid-1990s, the issue of Trump’s personal misconduct and legal woes have been right at the very center of the political world.  

A successful state prosecution in New York for covering up hush money payments to a pornographic actress and a badly botched prosecution in Georgia for the more serious charges of trying to steal that state’s electoral votes in the 2020 election ran concurrently with federal charges. First, for stealing and mishandling classified documents from his first term and then the big one: charges for not only trying to steal the election but his efforts (and lack of effort) in support of disrupting the certification of the contest he had tried and failed to steal.  

Amid all that, the House of Representatives held blockbuster, prime-time hearings on Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol and his bungled coup attempt.

The Georgia case and the federal charges never made it to trial, but no one could say that Americans did not hear enough about them to make up their minds. Trump had committed the most serious offenses in plain sight and details on everything else had been litigated and relitigated for years before Election Day 2024. And still, he won.

But it wouldn’t be right to say that most voters didn’t care about Trump’s quagmire of ethical and criminal problems. 

Certainly for a considerable group, the charges against the former and future president were taken as a good thing; evidence of his messianic sacrifice for his people. But those are folks for whom $199 wouldn’t be too much to pay just to smell like Trump. What woman, after all, wouldn’t want a perfume called Fight, Fight, Fight? 

They mattered also to the people who don’t want to smell like Trump, but who sincerely believed that the criminal justice system was being abused in furtherance of political objectives. Democrats probably don’t want to admit it, but certainly there were Trump-skeptical voters who were driven to support him because they wanted to lodge a vote against what they perceived as abuses of the system, even if they didn’t condone the underlying offenses.

Trump’s transgressions also certainly mattered to the 75 million people who voted against him, too. The word “disqualifying” was at the heart of the highly unusual coalition of traditional Democrats and conservatives who fought Trump from the moment he left office until he won a return trip. 

Vice President Kamala Harris tried to shift her message away from those concerns to a painfully self-conscious middle-class, middle-of-the-road pitch to soothe voters hurting from inflation and worried about the excesses of the Democrats’ cultural backlash against Trump. But for her closing argument, Harris returned to the scene of Trump’s fateful January 6, 2021, rally and to the issue that has been at the heart of her party since before Trump won the first time: his unfitness for office.  

Pro-Trump and anti-Trump voters, then it can be said, definitely cared about his misdeeds (or the prosecution of them) in casting their votes. But it couldn’t even rightly be said that the rest of the electorate, that persuadable swath in the middle, didn’t care about Trump’s baggage.

In an election in which a Republican won the popular vote for only the second time in almost 40 years, majorities of voters of every age, status, ethnicity, and gender agreed—even groups that Trump won overwhelmingly—that he is not an honest and trustworthy person. According to AP VoteCast data, even 1 in 5 of the people who voted for Trump themselves said their preferred candidate couldn’t meet that standard. Just 5 percent of those who voted for Harris cast their ballots with similar misgivings. Seventy percent of independents said Trump wasn’t honest and trustworthy.

But Trump won on the two biggest issues in the minds of voters—the economy and immigration—and on the essential question of every presidential election, albeit just barely, on the matter of “looks out for people like you.” The unicorn voters—high-propensity, low-partisan-attachment Americans—broke in Trump’s favor in spite of knowing that he was a person of poor character. They believed he was a better bet: They heard all about it, and decided they would prioritize other issues.

They cared. They just didn’t care enough to outweigh their other considerations.

Which is all a long way of saying that President Joe Biden ought to pardon his predecessor and successor in order to, as South Carolina Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn put it, “clear the air in this country.”

The highest use of the executive’s pardon power is in remedy of unfair punishments as a check on the excesses of the judicial branch. Merciful use of the kingly right or pardons can be corrective in individual cases and generally serve to keep the branches in balance.

But alongside that is the other practical application envisioned by the framers: sewing up the national fabric. As Alexander Hamilton put it in The Federalist 74 ,“a well timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”

That’s what George Washington was doing when he pardoned ringleaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, and that’s what Abraham Lincoln intended when he granted amnesty to former Confederate leaders.

The many foes of Donald Trump who fell short in their yearslong quest to bring him to justice would not approve, arguing that Trump has never been convicted of the most serious offenses nor shown even an iota of remorse. True enough.

But grace, patriotic grace particularly, doesn’t rest on merit. It relies on the question of what is most likely to serve the higher aims. And in that way, President Biden could set a good example in saying that the pain and strife Trump caused in the 2020 election and its aftermath was laid to rest sufficiently by voters in the 2024 result.

Even if, maybe especially if, he doesn’t think Trump deserves it.