To give a reelected President Donald Trump that get-out-of-jail free card is like giving a teenage meth head a Glock and a Corvette.
Supporters arrive before former President Donald Trump makes a campaign appearance at Racine Festival Park on June 18, 2024, in Wisconsin. For a Supreme Court that places great importance on history and tradition, its decision granting Donald Trump broad immunity is conspicuously indifferent to either factor. Presidents have never enjoyed a presumption that they are permanently exempt from prosecution.
For a sitting president to go on trial, the department concluded, could be such a time-consuming distraction that he or she would be unable to perform the essential tasks of the office. As the department said in 2000, “The constitutional structure permits a sitting president to be subject to criminal process only after he leaves office.”
Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson ordered the FBI to place electronic bugs on the campaign plane of his 1964 opponent, Barry Goldwater. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,Richard Nixon engaged in all sorts of lawless conduct in what we know as the Watergate affair. He obviously didn’t expect to be immune from prosecution, which is why he was more than willing to accept a pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford.
The Supreme Court’s indifference to historical reality would be bad enough if it were merely an exercise in abstract theorizing. But the Trump example, and the threat of his return to the presidency, makes it grossly irresponsible. Were Joe Biden as power-mad as Trump, he could take care of him without the bother of an election. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor listed some of the consequence-free options available to a president. Among them: “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.”
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