Dear Reader (Including Ben Sasse who is, sadly, transitioning to Florida Man),

Last week, I once again floated my admittedly flawed and extremely unlikely idea of Joe Biden pardoning Donald Trump in exchange for Trump never running for public office again. 

I got a lot of criticism for it, and that’s fine. Again, it won’t happen and it has a lot of drawbacks. But I didn’t fully explain why I think it would be preferable to a lot of other options. Don’t worry, I’m not going to dwell on this, I’m just trying to set up a different topic. So as Frankenstein said when he took a grizzly with him as his plus-one to a party, bear with me. 

I think having Trump be the Republican nominee would be terrible for—in no particular order—the country, conservatism, and the Republican Party. But as bad as all that would be, it pales in comparison to how bad it would be for the country if he became president again.