The pardon debate – individual, group, partisan, preemptive – is spinning out of control.

In his “Meet the Press” interview, Donald Trump mocked Joe Biden’s repeated assurances about Hunter: “‘I’m not going to give my son a pardon. I will not under any circumstances give him a pardon.’ I watch this and I always knew he was going to give him a pardon.”

In a portion of that interview that did not air but was posted online, the president-elect complained to Kristen Welker:

“The press was obviously unfair to me. The press, no president has ever gotten treated by the press like I was.”

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Why did he appear on “Meet the Press”? “You’re very hostile,” Trump said. Her response: “Well, hopefully, you thought it was a fair interview. We covered a lot of policy grounds.”

“It’s fair only in that you allowed me to say what I say. But you know, the answers to questions are, you know, pretty nasty. But look, because I’ve seen you interview other people like Biden.”

“I’ve never interviewed President Biden,” Welker responded. Trump said he was speaking “metaphorically.”

“I’ve seen George Stephanopoulos interview. And he’s a tough interviewer. It’s the softest interview I’ve seen. CNN interview. They give these soft, you know, what’s your favorite ice cream? It’s a whole different deal. I don’t understand why.”

The strength of Welker’s approach is that she asked as many as half a dozen follow-ups on major topics, making more news. When she asked, for instance, whether he would actually deport 11 million illegal immigrants, as he’d said constantly on the campaign trail, he answered yes – which for some reason lots of news outlets led with. But a subsequent question got Trump to say he didn’t think the Dreamers should be expelled and would work it out with the Democrats.

As for Trump, he reminded me of the candidate I interviewed twice this year. He was sharp and serious, connecting on each pitch, fouling a few off. This was not the candidate talking about sharks at rallies. 

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With one significant misstep, he made the case that he was not seeking retribution – even backing off a campaign pledge that he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden.

That misstep, when Trump couldn’t hold back, was in saying of the House Jan. 6 Committee members, including Liz Cheney: “For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”

He did add the caveat that he would let his attorney general and FBI chief make that decision, but it allowed media outlets to lead with Trump wanting his political opponents behind bars. For what it’s worth, there’s no crime in lawmakers holding hearings, and this business about them withholding information seems like a real stretch.

Now back to the pardons. This mushrooming debate was obviously triggered by the president breaking his repeated promise with a sweeping, decade-long pardon of his son, a 54-year-old convicted criminal.

But then, as first reported by Politico, we learned that the Biden White House is debating whether to issue a whole bunch of preemptive pardons to people perceived to be potential targets of Trumpian retaliation.

But the inconvenient truth is that anyone accepting such a pardon would essentially admit to the appearance of being guilty. That’s why Sen.-elect Adam Schiff says he doesn’t want a pardon and won’t accept one.

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But many of those potential recipients don’t even know they’re under consideration for sweeping pardons covering anything they may or may not have done.

It is a truly awful idea, and with Biden and Trump both agreeing that DOJ engages in unfair and selective prosecutions – which in the Republican’s case made his numbers go up – the stage is set for endless rounds of payback against each previous administration.

I remember first thinking about the unchecked power of presidential pardons when Bill Clinton delivered a last-minute one to ally and super-wealthy Marc Rich.

Former President Bill Clinton used his pardoning power to let off Marc Rich, an uber-wealthy ally of his. (Photo by Julia Beverly/Getty Images)

So it’s time to hear from Alexander Hamilton, who pushed it into the Constitution. Keep in mind that in that horse-and-buggy era, there were very few federal offenses because most law enforcement was done by the states.

In Federalist 74, published in 1788, Hamilton said a single person was better equipped than an unwieldy group, and such decisions should be broadly applied to help those in need.   

“In seasons of insurrection or rebellion,” the future Treasury secretary wrote, “there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”

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Otherwise, it might be too late.

But another founding father, George Mason, opposed him, saying a president “may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?”

An excellent argument, but Hamilton won out.

As Hamilton envisioned, George Washington, in 1794, granted clemency to leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion to calm a fraught situation.

Something tells me that Biden, Trump and their allies aren’t poring over the Federalist papers. But it’s still an awful lot of sweeping power to place in the hands of one chief executive, for which the only remedy is impeachment.

WASHINGTON —  In a normal presidential transition, the president-elect spends weeks carefully considering candidates for the most important jobs in his Cabinet. Potential nominees undergo rigorous private vetting by trusted aides and lawyers, then by the FBI. It’s a painstaking process that often consumes the entire three months between the election and the inauguration.

But when has Donald Trump ever recognized any value in traditional norms?

He refused to authorize the FBI to begin its customary background checks, because he hoped to do without them or because he didn’t trust the G-men, or both.

Instead of waiting for investigations, he announced most of his nominees in three weeks — apparently imagining that the tsunami would force the Senate to confirm them quickly.

He even proposed skipping the constitutionally required step of Senate confirmation entirely, pushing to fill his Cabinet through the back door of “recess appointments.” He was apparently surprised when otherwise loyal GOP senators quietly refused to roll over for that audacious power grab.

His nominations set a new record for speed, if not for quality.

The outcome was predictable. His most controversial nominees — picked apparently with little or no private vetting — were followed by a parade of skeletons streaming out of closets. (Some of the skeletons had been strutting in public for years.)

The ensuing media leaks were embarrassing. They made the second Trump administration look just as chaotic as the first. But there were substantive political effects as well.

Most presidents use their transition, and the honeymoon period that normally follows, to build public support for their policies and programs. But Trump must now spend most of his time jawboning GOP senators to back his nominees.

Opinion polls show that his support in the public hasn’t grown since election day; he’s still stuck at the 50-50 mark in favorability.

And it was all avoidable.

“When the Senate confirmation process works properly, it’s in the best interest of the president — even though presidents are usually annoyed by it,” said Gregg Nunziata, a former Senate Republican aide who handled dozens of nominations. “There’s an existing protocol to handle allegations confidently and discreetly. If that protocol isn’t followed, the interest [in a nominee’s background] is going to spill out into other channels” — mainly the news media.

That’s what’s happening now. The vetting of Trump’s Cabinet is being done after the fact, mostly by the news media. The results have not been pretty.

Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman Trump proposed for attorney general, somehow thought he could skate past the House Ethics Committee’s evidence that he had paid a 17-year-old for sex. (The New York Times reported that Trump chose Gaetz impulsively after a meeting with Gaetz and Tesla founder Elon Musk aboard the president-elect’s private jet.)

Eight days after the nomination was announced, CNN reported that Gaetz had a second illicit encounter with the girl. His nomination was finished by nightfall.

Next up was Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host known for his opposition to women in combat roles and his war on “woke” generals. Trump proposed Hegseth for secretary of Defense, a job that entails managing almost 3 million people and an $849-billion budget, even though he had never run anything remotely comparable.

At first, the National Guard veteran looked headed for confirmation, as GOP senators fell into line. Then a whistleblower told Trump aides that a woman had accused Hegseth of raping her in a Monterey hotel in 2017, and the story promptly leaked. (Hegseth said the encounter was consensual.) Two days later, it emerged that Hegseth had paid the accuser in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement.

Skeletons continued their march. The New York Times reported that Hegseth’s mother had sent him an email scolding him for abusing women. (She disavowed the message and denounced the newspaper for revealing it.) The New Yorker reported that Hegseth’s former employees at a veterans’ organization said he had been intoxicated and disorderly at company events. NBC quoted his former Fox News colleagues saying he drank there, too. (“I never had a drinking problem,” said Hegseth, who promised to stop drinking.)

Hegseth’s support among Republican senators began to erode, with many saying he needed to undergo a full FBI investigation.

Last week, Trump mused to aides that he might replace Hegseth with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. But by Friday, the president-elect turned defiant on social media: “Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!”

So the Hegseth battle will continue — at a potential further political cost.

“His confirmation hearings are going to be completely brutal,” a Republican strategist warned. “There will be weeks of coverage on cable TV, which is a medium Trump cares about. How much stomach does he have for that when he’s about to take office?”

Hegseth isn’t the only nominee who faces a struggle. Some GOP senators have expressed concern about Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democrat designated for director of national intelligence. Kash Patel, his nominee for FBI director, will have to defend his goal of using the law enforcement agency as a weapon of retribution against political opponents. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will need to explain his long-proclaimed belief that no vaccine is safe.

The scrutiny of those nominees has barely begun.

Now Trump faces an unpalatable choice: long, bruising and public fights to put controversial nominees into office, or quick decisions to cut failing candidates loose as he did with Gaetz.

It isn’t unusual for incoming presidents to lose a Cabinet nominee or two.

If they fail quickly, the damage is rarely great. Who remembers that President Biden couldn’t win confirmation for his first nominee as budget director, Neera Tanden, or that Trump couldn’t get his first-term nominee as Labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, confirmed?

But Trump has made a potentially irreparable mistake.

By proposing so many nominees with flagrantly weak qualifications beyond political loyalty, he has turned their confirmations into zero-sum tests of his ability to compel obedience from prideful senators. With only a 53-47 majority in the chamber, the loss of any four could mean defeat.

Even before his inauguration, the president-elect has already failed in two respects. His abortive proposal to finagle nominees into office without Senate confirmation alienated legislators whose help he will need over the next four years.

And he may have thought he could get the jump on his opponents by announcing his nominees early — yet another miscalculation. He merely gave the news media enough time to subject them to the scrutiny they deserved from the beginning.

President-elect Trump on Sunday nominated Harmeet K. Dhillon as the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department.

Trump said Dhillon has consistently protected civil liberties throughout her career, including taking on Big Tech for censoring free speech, representing Christians who were not allowed to pray together during the COVID-19 pandemic, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their employees.

“Harmeet is one of the top election lawyers in the country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia Law School and clerked in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

“Harmeet is a respected member of the Sikh religious community,” he added. “In her new role at the DOJ, Harmeet will be a tireless defender of our Constitutional Rights and will enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY.”

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Trump also wrote in a separate post that Mark Paoletta will return as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget.

In the role, Trump said, Paoletta will work closely with the Department of Government Efficiency to cut the size of “our bloated government bureaucracy and root out wasteful and anti-American spending.”

Trump called Paoletta a brilliant and tenacious lawyer, crediting him with working to advance his agenda in the first term, while leading the charge to find funding to build a wall at the southern border.

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Mark Paoletta (Mark Paoletta)

Mark is a partner at the law firm Shaerr Jaffe LLP and a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.

“Mark has served as a Chief Counsel for Oversight and Investigations in Congress for a decade and was a key lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office to confirm Justice Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991,” Trump wrote. “Mark is a conservative warrior who knows the ‘ins and outs’ of Government – He will help us, Make America Great Again!”

And finally, Trump announced that KC Crosbie is running to become the next co-chair of the Republican National Committee to replace Lara Trump.

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Lara Trump (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images/File)

“Lara, together with Chairman Michael Whatley, transformed the RNC into a lean, focused, and powerful machine that is empowering the MAGA Movement for many years to come,” the president-elect said. “Thank you for your hard work, Lara, in MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The incoming president also said Crosbie has helped “real” Republicans get elected across the U.S. and would make a tremendous co-chair.

“KC will work on continuing to ensure a highly functioning, fiscally responsible, and effective RNC that makes Election Integrity a highest priority,” Trump said. “KC Crosbie has my Complete and Total Endorsement to be the next Co-Chair of the RNC!”