If you know one thing about Gerald Ford, it’s probably that he pardoned Richard Nixon. What you might not fully grasp is just how controversial this pardon was. A New York Times editorial called it “a profoundly unwise, divisive, and unjust act.” Congress was so incensed that Ford became the first president to testify before the House of Representatives since Abraham Lincoln, assuring the House Judiciary Committee that, no, Nixon did not resign and hand Ford the presidency on condition of his pardon. After narrowly losing reelection to Jimmy Carter in 1976, a loss that the pardon no doubt influenced, Ford would carry around a copy of a portion of Burdick v. United States, in which Justice Joseph McKenna suggests in dicta that accepting a pardon carries “an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it.” in an attempt to demonstrate that he was not retroactively approving of Nixon’s actions. Even I, nearly 50 years after the fact, argued on a podcast that if I could change one political event of the 1970s, it would be Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which I believe set an expectation that future presidents would and should never be held accountable for their actions in office. 

But it turns out that, in 2025, I may be in the minority. In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library gave Ford their Profile in Courage Award not despite, but because of, his decision to pardon Nixon, calling it a “controversial decision of conscience” that helped “end the national trauma of Watergate.” Senator Ted Kenendy, who presented the award to Ford, noted that while he, one of the most liberal members of the Senate, was critical of the pardon at the time, he came to believe that the pardon was “courageous” and that a “continuing effort to prosecute Nixon” would have prevented the nation from moving on. There’s some indication that the American public has come around to this view as well. A 2024 YouGov poll showed that only 40% of respondents “strongly or somewhat disapproved” of the Nixon pardon 50 years later – still good enough for a plurality (35% said that they “strongly or somewhat approved” of it, while 25% were “not sure”), but a far cry from the 59% of Americans who disapproved of it in 1974. 

While I may personally disagree with the pardon, it does seem that Ford got one thing right: when it comes to politics, the American people like to move on. That’s why, only six years after Nixon’s resignation, fellow Republican Ronald Reagan was able to win 44 states against an incumbent, and the party won 12 Senate seats. It’s also why, less than 20 years after a sex scandal rocked his administration, Bill Clinton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to little controversy. And it’s also why, even though he’s responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and the expansion of the surveillance state, George W. Bush is treated by the media like a charming rascal instead of one of the worst presidents of all time (and why his daughter Jenna has easily become a fixture on lightweight daytime TV). It’s also why Donald Trump becoming the first president to ever be convicted of a felony was not enough to doom his 2024 campaign, and why it wasn’t enough to revive the flagging fortunes of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 

To be clear, I’m not saying that Trump shouldn’t have been indicted, investigated, and eventually convicted of his crimes – it seems very clear to me that he did a multitude of illegal things before, during, and after his first term as president. But too often the Biden administration, and later the Biden and Harris campaigns, seemed to believe that evoking the specter of Donald Trump would be enough to keep him from another term in the White House. 

What they hadn’t realized was that the country had moved on from Trump’s scandals. They didn’t care if he had mishandled classified documents, or cooked his financial books, or even if he was ultimately responsible for January 6th – instead, they were more concerned about inflation, immigration, and the age of the current president. The Biden administration’s inability to articulate a coherent defense of their policies or to propose solutions to these problems is ultimately what allowed Trump to return to power with the largest Republican mandate in 20 years. 

No matter how blunt, crude, or foolish Trump’s proposed solutions were, they at least pointed towards a vision for the future with definitiveness. Biden and Harris, by contrast, labored on platitudes and constantly evoked the past to try and distract from the unsatisfying present. In a cruel twist, voters did in fact seem interested in what could be, unburdened by what had been. They just happened to believe that Trump was the one giving that to them.

But that’s not where the irony stops. Maybe it’s arrogance, or maybe it’s contempt for the old administration, but the second Trump White House does not seem to have learned this lesson with regard to Joe Biden. In fact, they seem doomed to repeat their old mistakes – hand waving away their ineffectiveness as the fault of the previous president, insisting that they have not fixed the things they insist are broken because of the alleged mess that they inherited, and that any seemingly non-Biden related problems they run into can actually be traced back to him anyway (a similar “blame Biden” strategy is being suggested among some corners of the left. I don’t think that’s a good idea either).

Trump’s national security team got caught using a Signal chat to discuss bombing Yemen? Well, if Biden had bombed Yemen when he was in office, they wouldn’t have had to have that conversation in the first place (never mind, of course, that the bombing campaign itself was ineffective). Trump’s tariffs caused the stock market to plunge and businesses to panic? Well, that’s actually just part of the “Biden overhang” (never mind, of course, that Trump has had to walk back his tariff plans dramatically and has struck underwhelming “deals” with China and the United Kingdom since). The Trump administration is deporting people to foreign prisons without due process? Well, if Biden had never let these immigrants in the country in the first place, Trump wouldn’t have to resort to such measures (never mind, of course, that a majority of Americans polled think Kilmar Abergo Garcia should be returned to the United States). 

Perhaps no Trump official is more guilty of this rhetorical malpractice than Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. When a commercial jet and military helicopter collided near Reagan National Airport less than a month into Trump’s term, the president, Vice President JD Vance, and Duffy quickly blamed the deadly crash on “DEI” policies, arguing that under the Biden administration, the federal government was more focused on fostering a diverse workforce than one that would keep the skies safe. Although a report from The New York Times seems to indicate that Duffy knows that these claims about DEI are, at the very least, lacking in details, he revived the “blame Biden” strategy earlier this month amid the unfolding chaos at Newark Liberty International Airport, where technical outages have affected over 1,000 flights. Shortly after the first reported technical outage, Duffy pointed to a September 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) that warned that air traffic control was using outdated systems. Putting aside the fact that any president would find it difficult to completely overhaul the air traffic control system with five months left in their term, Duffy’s logic ignores that this is a problem that the government has been wrestling with for decades across multiple Democratic and Republican presidential administration’s including Trump’s. By contrast, Biden had a more valid complaint that the slower than expected end of COVID restrictions could at least partially be attributed to Trump’s chaotic and contradictory management of the crisis. But in both cases, it’s clear that Americans don’t care about how or why either problem started – they just want them fixed by the person who’s currently in charge. 

This isn’t a problem relegated to politicians in the United States or even those on the right. Last year, the UK’s Labour Party formed a government for the first time in 15 years. Less than a month after taking office, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves announced a politically toxic combination of tax increases and spending cuts, claiming that they were necessitated by a £22 billion budget shortfall that was “covered up” by the Conservatives who had just left power. Labour has tried a similar tack when it comes to immigration, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer accusing the Conservatives of having deliberately pursued an “open borders” policy that “distorted the labor market.” But this new focus on restricting immigration seems to have merely raised its salience and increased the fortunes of Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s hard right anti-immigration party. Only a few weeks ago, Reform took over ten local councils, two mayoralties, and one Labour-held parliament seat; since mid-2025, Reform have led in the majority of Westminster preference polls. Keep in mind, this is a party that hadn’t even held a single seat in parliament before last year. 

The nature of America’s two party system makes it unlikely that a Reform-esque party would be able to find success. But there are some early indications that Trump is beginning to lose some of the fringier members of his base. Trump ran as an outsider, somebody who would bring the Washington elites to heal and restore power to the common man. But even his purges of the Justice Department and gutting of federal agencies isn’t enough for some MAGA devotees. Attorney General Pam Bondi became a laughing stock when she made a big show of finally releasing the “Epstein Files” to a cadre of right wing influencers, only for it to be revealed that the documents she provided them with were heavily redacted and contained little new information. A few days ago, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino were forced to admit to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that, in all likelihood, Jeffrey Epstein was the victim of suicide, not a Clinton-funded hitman, and that Trump’s would-be assassins were deranged loners, not patsies in a deep state conspiracy. These suggestions have not been taken kindly to by some on the online right, with outlets like WND and Gateway Pundit relishing in Alex Jones’ claims that Patel and Bongino were pedaling “bullshit.” Others, like PJ Media accepted the official narrative, but still managed to spin off slightly less implausible theories of their own. 

Less than six months in, the second Trump administration is leading itself into a rhetorical trap. Their knee jerk reaction to blame the country’s woes on Biden without being able to articulate a coherent solution will disappoint independents who just want inflation to go down and air travel to be safe. Their inability to deliver on the conspiracy theories they’ve indulged in for the past nine years will alienate a portion of their base. And Biden’s reappearance in the news amid recent revelations regarding the last few years of his term and his cancer diagnosis will probably make it difficult for many in Trumpworld to avoid taking the bait, focusing more on litigating the past then charting out a path for the future. Hypothetically, they have enough time to change course. But if history is any guide, the administration will likely double down. And if they do, they’ll have squandered their implausible electoral victories, and risk becoming more like the Biden administration than they care to admit.