Trump and his enablers have been moving towards ‘absolute immunity’ all along | Opinion
MAGA has always granted Donald Trump the “absolute immunity” that his daddy gave him first.
Trump and his enablers — Fred Trump, who repeatedly saved his favorite boy from ruin, then the New York tabloids, who pretended to believe his lies, and for years now, those in the former law-and-order party who’ve been willing to defend his criminality — have all along claimed that whatever line he crossed somehow needed crossing.
So unless someone stopped him, and no one ever did, we were always going to wind up in a courtroom somewhere, with lawyers for a man who has never acknowledged doing anything wrong arguing that he never could.
Arguing, as Trump attorney and former Missouri solicitor general D. John Sauer did in D.C. on Tuesday, that not even a president who sent SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival could be prosecuted unless he had first been impeached and convicted. In which case, such a person could presumably then just resign, and problem solved.
This goes beyond Trump’s accurate claim that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any support. Now Team Trump is actually arguing that if he did so as president, he could not be held accountable in a court of law.
And as Stanley tells Blanche just before raping her in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” we’ve had this date with each other from the beginning.
Now, of course, it’s our democracy that’s being violated. Like Stanley’s wife Stella, many Americans are apparently still so into the brute who was our president that they prefer not to admit what they know he’s done.
Too much, you say? How so, when the Stanley in this scenario has at all moments done exactly as he pleased, grabbing p----, praising dictators, inviting the Vandals to sack our Rome, attempting to hold onto an office that he knew from his own people that he had lost, and promising to “terminate” the U.S. Constitution if he ever again gets the chance?
According to Trumpublicans, that document already somehow means what it doesn’t say about the right to privacy, but doesn’t mean what it does say on how engaging in insurrection or rebellion disqualifies would-be officeholders.
From Trump’s first campaign, when his crowds excited themselves by shouting “lock her up,” the much-bankrupted reality star made clear that he does believe in the rule of law, but only for other people.
He promised to prosecute his rival, Hillary Clinton, for threatening our national security by using a private email server while she was secretary of state. But now he claims that squirreling away some of our most sensitive secrets in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, where foreign spies have been arrested, was his perfect right.
His rationalizations kept changing, but his belief that if he did it, then it was beyond reproach, never has.
Eventually, we are going find out whether the Supreme Court is willing to go along with this thinking, and with Trump’s claim that he’s immune from being prosecuted for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. I’m still hoping they won’t do that, if only out of self-respect.
Still shameless as in his New York tabloid days
Whenever I write about Trump, I receive multiple over-punctuated letters accusing me of hating this unfairly persecuted conservative hero, who is not in any way that I can see conservative at all.
On the contrary, he’s the same shameless thug he was when, as a Democrat who believed in nothing beyond his own self-enrichment then either, I wrote about his first divorce for New York Newsday.
His sole goal in those days was to pay the mother of his children as little as possible. But just about every day after he and Ivana separated, he’d call the paper, trying to plant some BS item about his personal life. I’ll never forget the day I heard our gossip columnist tell him, “Donald, Madonna is not after you.”
Hating such a person, who wasn’t raised to understand hate’s opposite, would be pointless. After reading his niece Mary Trump’s book about their cruel family, I came to see the whole sad bunch of them as the Borgias without the art, and to almost feel sorry for him.
Hating what he’s encouraged in our country, though, I could never deny.
And why this hollow 77-year-old adolescent is the man for whom so many are prepared to let America die still astonishes me.
It was Judge Karen L. Henderson, the only Republican appointee on the three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who best answered Trump attorney Sauer’s Tuesday argument that American courts could not judge anything a president had done while in office as criminal because they never had before.
“I think it’s paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ allows him to violate criminal law,” she said. No kidding.
Even more than I blame Trump, who was raised to have no regard for others, I blame all of you who know better and yet are ready to let him get away with raping our republic. Why is that? I would really like to know.
This story was originally published January 10, 2024 at 7:36 AM with the headline "Trump and his enablers have been moving towards ‘absolute immunity’ all along | Opinion."
