https://nypost.com/2022/07/22/trumps-jan-6-silence-renders-him-unworthy-for-2024-reelection/
I just now saw this New York Post editorial from Friday. It’s brutal. It’s honest. And it is indeed damning.
I write this as someone who voted for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020, without apology and without regret. I think the country would be better off today if Trump had been re-elected. But he wasn’t. He lost to Biden in 2020. His subsequent behavior, on Jan. 6, 2021 was reprehensible and unforgivable. Even so, I sincerely doubt that charging him with criminal behavior and trying him in a court of law is in the best interests of the country. A better course of action, in my view, would be for Republicans to shun Trump and to rally around others to lead the GOP now and into the next presidential election.
as far as I recall, no former President of the United States has ever been prosecuted for crimes he was accused of committing while occupying the White House. Ford pardoned Nixon for his role in "the Watergate break-in and its cover-up," and he did so before any criminal charges were ever brought against Nixon.
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-nixon-pardon-in-retrospect
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote a couple days ago that “Prosecuting Trump is not a simple matter of determining whether the evidence is there. It is a question embedded in the larger issue of how to restore and defend American democracy.”
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/07/22/should-donald-trump-be-prosecuted/
I think that any criminal prosecution of Trump would be viewed by millions of those who voted for him as a political move by Democrats to weaken the GOP in the next round of elections or to prevent Trump from running again. And, frankly, I believe those would be major reasons -- though not the only reasons -- for the Democrats to push for prosecution. If Trump is tried and convicted, that might further polarize an already highly polarized electorate. If he is tried and acquitted, which is also a possibility, that would enormously anger many Democrats and very possibly embolden Trump to run again for president or otherwise cause a lot more political mischief.
The point of prosecutorial discretion, or at least one of the points, is that there may be important judicial or extra-judicial reasons NOT to prosecute: "the Justice Department has discretion not to charge a case even if the evidence is sufficient to prove the defendant guilty, and there are those who believe that the risks and consequences of an acquittal of Trump – or even a hung jury – would be so grave that DOJ will not indict a circumstantial case (or any case) against him.
https://www.justsecurity.org/81597/prosecuting-trump-for-the-insurrection-the-well-founded-case-for-optimism