Jonathan Chait, NY Magazine: “A criminal prosecution of a former president, especially one who is still functioning as his party’s leader, would be an unsettling and potentially traumatic development. I wrote last year about the dilemma it would present: The upside of imposing accountability for his decades of operating outside the law without consequence would be offset by the dangerous perception that he was just facing political retaliation. As president, Trump constantly threatened to lock up his political enemies, reflecting his belief that the legal system was merely a tool that he could use to punish them. (One reason he believes this is that he is, himself, a crook, who, like many criminals, assumes that everybody else is either a fellow criminal or a sucker.)”

“The worst thing prosecutors could do would be to spring charges on Trump before a public completely unprepared for the news. The more surprised the public is to learn of charges against Trump (should they be filed), the easier it will be for Trump to depict them as political. Trump’s criminal defense will be the legal equivalent of his familiar political message: corroding confidence in public institutions and spreading his belief that corruption is the norm. The biggest risk of charging Trump with crimes is that the news will come as a shock to Americans. They need to understand that he isn’t facing criminal accountability because he lost, but because it should have happened years ago.”