Donald Trump is in prosecutors’ crosshairs from Georgia to Washington, DC, to New York City. If Trump clearly violated the law then he should be prosecuted. But prosecutors shouldn’t overreach and go after Trump absent an unambiguous offense. The dangers of criminalizing politics are immense.

For starters, criminalizing politics violates the basic principle that the rule of law applies equally to all people. Entangling the passions of politics with the criminal law leads to treating people differently based on their political affiliation — instead of on their guilt or innocence.

In modern-day American politics the messenger matters more than the message, the actor matters more than the act. Republicans wanted to lock up Hillary Clinton for her email practices and now Democrats want Trump indicted for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Few are applying the same standard to both people. This is antithetical to the basic premise of the rule of law — that all people must be treated equally and only their specific alleged misdeeds matter.

Criminalizing politics, moreover, accelerates the pernicious trend towards ever more political polarization. It transforms the stakes from treating opponents like political rivals to treating them like sworn enemies.

True, bare-knuckled domestic politics is hardly novel. It is woven into the fabric of American democracy. But ultimately we are one nation in a dangerous world. Our domestic political disputes should not consume too much national bandwidth and therefore undercut our capacity to address numerous foreign threats. If looked at from a global perspective, Americans’ interests overlap far more than they diverge. Americans should focus their political energy on winning elections and formulating policy, not sending officials they don’t like to jail.

Finally, criminalizing politics deters talented people from serving the country. The United States government already has a personnel problem. We have, for example, seen the presidency transfer from a constitutionally illiterate reality-television star (Donald Trump) to a seasoned politician way past his prime (Joe Biden).

houldn’t the most powerful person in the country also be one of its most competent?

Americans shouldn’t further dissuade quality people from entering government because ambiguities in their past might be shoehorned into politically motivated criminal investigations. The downside for winning office should be losing the next election, not going to jail.

These three concerns about criminalizing politics must be looked at in context. It is of course true that entering government should neither absolve someone from past crimes nor be a license to commit new ones. and prosecutors must prosecute not just the weak and anonymous but also the powerful and well known.

Striking the right balance is hard. But there should be a strong presumption in favor of leaving politics — and its destructive prejudices — at the courthouse door. Like everyone else, Donald Trump should only be prosecuted if he clearly violated each element of a criminal law on the books at the time of the alleged offense. Ignoring this bedrock principle of the criminal law would set a dangerous precedent.

Many people, however, believe that aggressively prosecuting Trump is worth creating bad precedent because he’s an existential threat to American democracy. But this assumes that a jury would convict Trump, that the appellate courts would uphold the conviction, and that the collateral damage could be contained.

Maybe all those things would happen. Maybe not. A third of the country steadfastly supports Trump, so obtaining a unanimous jury verdict (in any courtroom) would be difficult. An unfair prosecution, moreover, would galvanize Trump’s supporters and could easily help him and Republicans at the ballot box. and the long-term damage to the American body politic of unfairly trying to lock up a former president — and the current champion of the Republican Party — would be enormous.

Far better to play by the rules: If Trump committed a clear crime then prosecute him; if he didn’t, then don’t. Our republic is not going to be saved by an overzealous band of prosecutors taking matters into their own hands. It will, instead, be preserved by faithfully applying the basic principles of the rule of law — including equal application of criminal statutes to all people — that have strengthened American democracy for more than two centuries.