Joe Biden considered pardoning Trump during 2023 pillow talk with Jill, GOP governor says

the sitting president, lying in bed with the First Lady, weighing whether to pardon the man he'd spent two campaigns calling a threat to democracy. That's the image this story leaves us with, and whatever you think of the source, it's a strange little window into how these decisions actually get made. Not in some solemn Oval Office deliberation with lawyers and binders. In bed, over pillow talk, like a decision about whether to sell the beach house.

We don't know if Biden ever seriously moved on it, and a secondhand account from a GOP governor deserves the usual grain of salt. But the detail rings true precisely because it's unglamorous. Presidents are people who talk to their spouses about hard calls, and pardoning a former president and political rival is about as hard as it gets. What's telling is that Biden apparently considered it at all. That doesn't fit the narrative his own White House and allies pushed for years, that Trump was an existential danger who had to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, no exceptions, no mercy.

If he really was mulling a pardon in private while his Justice Department kept the prosecutions running in public, that's worth sitting with. Either he thought the cases had merit and pardoning would have been a betrayal of that principle, or he had doubts about the whole enterprise and considered defusing it anyway. Both possibilities say something uncomfortable about how personal and improvisational these supposedly principled decisions really are.

At the very least, it's a reminder that the people running the country are just that: people, muddling through, talking it over in bed like the rest of us. The lofty rhetoric rarely survives contact with how the sausage actually gets made..