Hey, it's Ilya Maritz. This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. By now you've heard

about the first indictment of a former US president in the history of our country.

The charges against former President Donald Trump were revealed in his

arraignment on Tuesday, April 4th, and that's the day I'm recording this.

I'm right outside the court house, in fact, to cover the event for NPR.

There's a lot of talk about how this indictment and how a trial could affect Trump's presidential

run in 2024. Is it good for Democrats? Is it good for Trump? On that last point,

it's been reported that Trump has already raised $7 million just in the time since the

indictment was announced. So yeah, to me, the entire case leads to larger

questions about how democracies where everyone is supposed to be equal under the law, do

or don't hold their leaders to account. Which is why we're re-airing an interview I did,

about six months ago, with Rick Pearlstein. He's a journalist in historian who has

chronicled the post-1960s American conservative movement. We spoke about perhaps the most

famous case of a former US president eluding punishment. On September 8th, 1974,

President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who resigned from office

one month earlier. Pearlstein says Ford's decision to pardon Nixon still reverberates today.

After he resigned for Watergate, as many of his top deputies were facing trial for which they

be convicted, including the Attorney General John Mitchell. The statement that the kind of

establishment put out there was Nixon's resignation shows the system works. We had brought a

president to judgment and it was clanking along towards what was likely to be an indictment.

But then Gerald Ford, a month into his presidency, went on TV on a Sunday morning. He probably thought

the American people were in the mood for mercy after coming back from church. And he granted Nixon a

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