Early in November, as President Trump challenged the integrity of the election with baseless lawsuits, Joe Biden delivered his first speech as president-elect, declaring it a “time to heal.” It was a phrase that many Americans were surely longing to hear, given the precarious state of the nation’s political culture. But it was also one that carried significant historical weight and possible implications for the future. When President Gerald R. Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal, he, too, spoke about the need for “healing.” (Ford titled his subsequent memoir “A Time to Heal.”) When President Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address during the waning days of the Civil War, he spoke in similar terms about the imperative to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Whether Biden intended to do so, his words provided an early signal about one of the first questions he is going to confront as president: What to do about Donald Trump? Biden faces many daunting challenges — mitigating the ongoing damage from the pandemic, repairing institutions, restoring faith in government — but how to deal with his predecessor’s flagrant and relentless subversion of the rule of law is in many ways the most vexing.

Last year, one of Trump’s lawyers, William Consovoy, memorably argued in open court that a sitting president could shoot a man in public and not be prosecuted. The legal validity of this claim notwithstanding, there is nothing to protect a former president from prosecution. No ex-president has ever been indicted before, but no president has ever left office with so much potential criminal liability.

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