In September, two former executive-branch lawyers, Bob Bauer (who served under Obama) and Jack Goldsmith (who served under George W. Bush) published an entire book, “After Trump,” addressing the subject of how to reform the presidency. They identified the many open doors that Trump had charged through and offered some 50 suggestions on how to close them, whether that meant rewriting existing laws or passing new ones. Among other things, they proposed requiring campaigns to report any contact with foreign governments and clarifying the obstruction statute to eliminate ambiguity about when the president has violated it. The one subject on which Bauer and Goldsmith couldn’t agree was what to do with Trump; they divided that chapter in half, with Bauer advocating for a full investigation and Goldsmith urging caution.

Even as I write this, Trump’s subversion of democratic norms continues. He still has not conceded, and Barr has overruled the head of the Justice Department’s Election Crimes department to approve investigations into “vote tabulation irregularities.” These legal maneuvers may be less about Trump trying to overturn the results of the election than they are about him trying to gain leverage to limit his liability when he leaves office. Even though Biden pledged during the campaign not to pardon him, Trump could still try to trade his concession for the promise of leniency. He could also try to pardon himself, though this has never been done before and may not hold up in court. (Another, probably more far-fetched scenario has Trump resigning so President Pence can pardon him.)

The nation may desire healing. But there is also the matter of justice, and there is no guarantee that what feels right now will look right through the longer lens of history. Ford was widely assailed for pardoning Nixon. But one of his most outspoken critics at the time, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, later honored Ford with a Profile in Courage award, explaining that he’d been moved to rethink his views after witnessing the sprawling and protracted investigation into President Clinton by the independent counsel Ken Starr. It may be time to rethink Ford’s decision once more; it’s hard not to wonder if a Trump presidency would have been possible if Nixon had been criminally prosecuted rather than pardoned.

In that sense, the problem that Trump poses for Biden may also present an opportunity, a chance to repair more than just the damage of the last four years. To begin with, this may require recognizing that when a president brazenly flouts the law, electoral defeat might not be enough of a punishment. “There’s a mind-set that we need to reset,” Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, told me. “Breaking the law is not a political difference.” It might also require recognizing that to really move on from Trump, “healing” may have to mean something fundamentally different from what it has in the past — and that without accountability, it may in fact be impossible.

Parler is a "free speech" platform, and its surging popularity appears to be an intended consequence of Facebook and Twitter cracking down on hate speech, violent rhetoric and misinformation.
According to ABC News, the Parler app saw over 3.5 million active users last week and has nearly 8 million users total.
Hashtags that often trend on the platform include #freemarket, #voterfraud, and #Tucker (as in Carlson); the same ones that can often be found on President Trump's Twitter feed.
Posts — known on the platform as "Parleys" — from far-right pundits like Sean Hannity easily and frequently get over one million views. If a right-wing figure's tweet is flagged by Twitter, you can likely find it on Parler.

Parler was founded in 2018 by two computer programmers named John Matze and Jared Thomson, and is financially backed by Rebekah Mercer, whose father is Robert Mercer. Robert Mercer is the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica and a hedge fund manager. He's also a major funder of Breitbart. According to the Wall Street Journal, sources said Parler was "a Mercer family investment."

Recently, Rebekah Mercer emphasized that Parler is a platform for "free speech."

"John and I started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech, as our founders intended, and also to create a social media environment that would protect data privacy," Mercer said in a Parler post. "The ever-increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords demands that someone lead the fight against data mining, and for the protection of free speech online. That someone is Parler, a beacon to all who value their liberty, free speech and personal privacy."

Parler has become a far-right echo chamber, giving people who are living in Trump's alternate reality a place to organize. And that's dangerous, as Ciarán O'Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told VICE News.

"The risk in a mass migration to smaller, fringe platforms is that they do not enforce the same guidelines as older, more established platforms, meaning there is potential for not only echo chambers to form, but for extremist groups to make use of these spaces to organize offline activity or to promote more extreme material and beliefs than they might on larger platforms," O'Connor said.