It’s a no-brainer, says Anthony Scaramucci.

“I said from day one, he’s going to pardon himself,” President Donald Trump’s shortest-lived communications director told “The Choice” earlier this month. “Because he doesn’t see that as having any downside to him. What’s the worst that could happen? The pardon [is] not upheld for some reason.”

Legal experts are split on the potential maneuver, with even some conservatives arguing that the move — which is without precedent — is out of bounds. 

“The pardon clause’s language is broad indeed, unambiguously allowing the president to pardon seemingly any other person convicted for any federal criminal offense,” J. Michael Luttig, a former Fourth Circuit judge (and long a favorite of legal conservatives), wrote in The Washington Post earlier this month. “But its language does not unambiguously include the president himself. Had the Framers intended to give the president such broad power, we would expect them to have clearly said so.”

A source familiar with the current thinking in Trump’s circle makes the case against the move.

That is, even if figures like Luttig were wrong, and the pardon was upheld, it wouldn’t inoculate Trump from legal exposure at the state and local level, this person said. 

A self-pardon of federal crimes could be taken as an admission of guilt, as Trump and his family face inquiries from both the state of New York and the District of Columbia. Both New York Attorney General Letitia James and D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine have made the media rounds in recent weeks. They’ve made plain that they are licking their chops to get to the bottom of Trump’s business conduct— or criminal misconduct.

Scaramucci is, of course, estranged from Trump and his family, becoming in league with “NeverTrump” and its political fundraising house, the Lincoln Project. 

But Scaramucci, a self-made financier from New York, has swam in the same waters as Trump for years. For what it’s worth, he adds that Trump will likely rule out pardons for Donald Trump Jr., White House Senior Counselors Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and Eric Trump, because if they accept a pardon, it “will extinguish their political ambitions.” 

Scaramucci’s thinking could be criticized as stuck in an old paradigm, in which senior American politicians don’t run against the legitimacy of the legal system, as is more common in countries such as Israel and Brazil, where politicos, even presidents, are commonly indicted. 

For now, President Trump is still mostly fighting the last war. 

He is plotting a last stand early next year when Congress must certify the votes of the Electoral College, which named Joe Biden president-elect last week. This weekend, Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Trumpist stalwart, told a gathering in Palm Beach of the prominent conservative youth wing Turning Point USA that he had been successful in helping in the effort to recruit Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville to formally object to the College’s results. Both a House member and a senator are legally essential to lob any formal complaint. 

“I had a chance to speak with Coach Tuberville just moments ago,” Gaetz said of the former college ball coach. “He says we are done running plays from the establishment’s losing playbook. It is time to stand and fight. … It may be fourth and long, but we’re going for it on January 6.” As essentially conceded by Gaetz, outside a diehard contingent of Trump supporters, such efforts are seen as near-certain to wind up being vainglorious, and potentially setting the stage for the GOP to forfeit its Senate majority in upcoming elections in Georgia. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recognized Biden as president-elect last week, and is privately concerned about losing the majority that has been the work of his career. Further dangerous for McConnell: some on the right have even mused, without Trump as president, that it would be better to lose. 

So preoccupied is Trump with the possibility of clinging to power that he has met at the White House in recent days with a coterie urging him to fight to the bitter end. 

This set includes: former national security advisor Michael Flynn (who Trump recently pardoned), former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne (who alleges widespread voter fraud, and was ousted from his company after revelations of a sexual relationship with Maria Butina), the quite controversial attorney Sidney Powell (who was sacked by Trump’s campaign, and faces a potential bevy of lawsuits for her recent behavior), and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump’s personal counsel. The recent exchanges have reportedly spooked even Giuliani, who has emerged during the Trump era as the president’s perhaps most renegade defender. 

Giuliani is said to have conferred with the president about a pardon for himself, as first reported by The New York Times. It’s unclear what past actions are making Giuliani anxious, but he was at the center of the Ukraine scandal that resulted in Trump’s impeachment earlier this year, the third of a U.S. president in history. 

If Trump’s hopes are finally, decisively dashed in early January, such conversations are likely to become frenetic, as Trump must clean out his desk by the twentieth of next month. 

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who rose to political prominence side-by-side with Trump before the duo had a nasty divorce, has been indicted on fraud charges in New York, in a trial set to begin next May. Bannon has been a vociferous champion of the president’s in recent years, despite their personal fissure, though his style has landed him in separate trouble with the large tech firms taking on increasingly outsized power in American life. 

And then there are the figures with whom Trump has no personal rapport, past or present. 

Wikileaks founders Julian Assange, who sits in prison in Britain, and whistleblower Edward Snowden, an exile living in Russia, came to prominence — and entered into a legal cyclone — before Trump stormed Washington. Congressman Gaetz and Sen. Rand Paul (who has also recently backed Trump on his voter fraud claims), among others, have called for the pardon of Snowden, who came to prominence in 2013 after revealing the previously unreported, vast capabilities of the National Security Agency. 

Assange’s case is generally considered hotter than Snowden’s. 

Foreign policy hawks allege the hacker-journalist deeply wounded American national security. Democrats and some Republicans have contended that Assange’s behavior during the 2016 presidential election was tantamount to the behavior of Russian agent, a charge of course also lobbed at the president. 

Unlike the more general election interference by Moscow in 2016, those claims against Assange never conclusively demonstrated; Assange has maintained his source for his notorious publications in 2016 was not a “state actor.” He came to international prominence in 2010 when he revealed footage of U.S. soldiers air-raiding Iraqi combatants in a gleeful manner. “The behavior of the pilots is like they’re playing a video game,” said Assange.  

Gaetz and Paul seem to have stopped short of picking up Assange’s case, but others have.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic presidential candidate, has called for a pardon. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie previously joined with Gabbard in calling for the U.S. to drop its case against the publisher, which could result in his extradition. “The ongoing attempts to prosecute Julian Assange threaten our First Amendment rights, and should be opposed by all who wish to safeguard our constitutional rights now and in the years to come.  I join my colleague… in calling for an immediate end to all charges against Mr. Assange,” Massie said in October.

If Trump were to make any such moves, it would heighten the now well-known contradictions in his own administration. His secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has consistently called for the executions of both Assange and Snowden.  

Trump is said to relish his pardon power. He has given reprieve to political figures from earlier eras, seemingly almost randomly. 

Though he is a trenchant of President George W. Bush, Trump pardoned former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, something Bush declined to do and permanently sundering the duo’s relationship. Trump said he heard Libby was “treated unfairly.” Trump also pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor and a Democrat, convicted of essentially trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama in 2008, after his election to the Senate. Blagojevich’s wife made repeated appeals on cable news for Trump’s mercy, and former Governor Blagojevich has since fundraised for Trump, at the Republican National Convention. Blagojevich now calls himself a “Trumpocrat.”  

Trump is, of course, keeping the option of seeking the White House again in 2024 wide open. 

He has cleaned house at the Pentagon in recent months, and is trying to shoehorn last-minute withdrawals of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Africa, long the aim of devotees of realism and restraint. But further, a pardon of Snowden or Assange — to say nothing of himself, his comrades and his family — could set the stage for a Trump encore, one as undaunted as the man himself. Those around Trump maintain the president remains as wily and unpredictable as ever, even more so after a surprise, strong showing in the popular vote, to say nothing of personally surviving COVID-19. The announcement of a vaccine in 2020, and the completion of a second stimulus package this week, add to the impression among the president’s loyalists that things could have easily been different. 

That Trump may attempt to define himself, however tendentiously, as the ultimate opponent of the establishment — its foreign policy, its “rigged” elections, and its courts said to be conspiring against him — is something that simply cannot be ruled out.